Doctors tell us that the neuroses of yesteryear, which were due to faulty education, hardly exist today; that the principal cause of neuroses in our day is that interior and exterior loss of orientation that is the result of a widespread permissiveness. As a matter of fact, it is also quite clear that a person becomes sick when he does not know who he is or how he should order his life.
Another discovery of the medical profession is also important in this context: permissiveness and dislike of children, they tell us, are the outward expression of the same inward attitude to life. Both of them give expression to a disposition that is not ready to make sacrifices for others; both of them are manifestations of a deadly narcissism, a love of self that becomes more and more confining and leaves the individual that much poorer the more he tries desperately to defend his own narrow way of life, the more he wants everything it has to offer, for he is no longer willing to do without anything.
Permissiveness is not an expression of magnanimity, but of an egoism that wants to deprive the other of what is most important: oneself – the gift of a love that alone can reveal what life is. That is why I feel obliged to warn young people: Do not believe the prophets of permissiveness! Do not believe those who sell man day after day and make his body apiece od merchandise! Do not believe those who depict faith as a graden of prohibitions and obedience as scrupulosity! Do not believe those who represent indolence as freedom, lack of orientation as happiness! Man has a right to greatness! God has a right to our greatness. Do not believe those who debase man – in the end man will be naked and ashamed; he will have no choice but to hide himself and to condemn his empty existence.
From: Zeitfragen und christlicher Glaube, pp. 54-55
