We are all descendants of parents who never conquered their own vanity, who have instead worn themselves to a frazzle trying to improve their ego status. Actually we are the products of one of those intriguing games in which mother “used” father.

Marriage is like a craps game—the loser tries to get even, but loses again. Every “man” comes to the female with an unconscious need to make good a secret loss.

His first loss was to his mother, and the vicious cycle is completed with a tempting female. Children are born into a vampirish climate of intrigue. The longer man and woman live together the more they lose to each other, and their only hope of new life and glory is drawn from their children’s lives—and the rites and sacrifices begin anew.

So every helpless, vulnerable infant is sacrificed to the vanity of the parents who vie for the child’s affection to make good a sense of failing. The parent who receives this affection must spoil the child rotten, while the mate who is denied that homage tries to run him into the ground to get benefits from the child’s other response—hatred.

This could even make the child over into the likeness of the contemptible loser—even compatible with him. When most parents do manage to live “lovingly” and “in harmony” it is usually only because they have succeeded in keeping up the deception that began with “love at first sight.”

"Marriage is like a craps game—the loser tries to get even, but loses again"

Each puts the other on a pedestal of glory and makes them so secure that they never know they are being used. But when the awful truth dawns, loving becomes loathing, and life is derived by putting each other down instead of putting each other on.

Whenever couples exist, degenerating into hypocritical dialogue (drivel) in a rosy world of make believe, they don’t need the child and may even feel threatened by the attention he needs. Each parent is afraid that their mate’s loving attention will be drawn away from them to the child—to anyone else for that matter.

For, the moment this attention is lost, the ego of that other parent feels the accumulated insecurity and guilt that was previously buffered by the flattery of the other sycophant.

So, parental acceptance or rejection becomes the temptation that every child’s ego learns to need—in order to himself become a supreme ego condoning or condemning his parents. In stages, the child enters into the same trap his parents are lost in.

Our first temptation is at the hands of our parents, who never see how wrong they are because they have managed to appropriate our innocence through our reaction, and they force us to express or serve their sickness. A child who is tempted to hate his parents will grow up with the sick vanity of the parents seeded in him—while the parent receives a sense of innocence in exchange.

The child’s judgment upon his parents causes him to grow up with a need to judge, to find a substitute to use, to make him feel secure as the egotist (judge) he has come to be.