The serious man’s devotion to an external idol breeds perpetual fear and disappointment.

Evidence

It is in a state of fear that the serious man feels this dependence upon the object; and the first of virtues, in his eyes, is prudence. He escapes the anguish of freedom only to fall into a state of preoccupation, of worry. Everything is a threat to him, since the thing which he has set up as an idol is an externality and is thus in relationship with the whole universe and consequently threatened by the whole universe; and since, despite all precautions, he will never be the master of this exterior world to which he has consented to submit, he will be constantly upset by the uncontrollable course of events. He will always be saying that he is disappointed, for his wish to have the world harden into a thing is belied by the very movement of life. The future will contest his present successes; his children will disobey him, his will will be opposed by those of strangers; he will be a prey to illhumor and bitterness. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 49

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Explains the inner psychology of the serious type: dependence on an idol produces anxiety and bitterness because the idol is a contingent externality.
• XREF: Connects to Ernest Becker’s denial-of-death economics of character, and to the reader’s goal of sorting real people — a perfectionist/rigid type (e.g., Type-A overachievers) fits this profile.