Today, anti-adrenal, anti-religious ideas are epidemic.  Of these, first prize belongs to a cult of egotism fathered by the Napoleonic Idea, consciously assertive and self-conscious in Max Stirner’s “The Ego and His Own,” which engendered a swarm of imitators and plagiarists.  Human beings are all incorrigible egoists more or less, furtive or frank.  But social and religious codes curbed the most narcissistic of kings and conquerors.  Before Napoleon, all of them vowed allegiance and expressed submission to some sort of deity, confessed some fear of the Lord in their hearts.  But the ideas of Napoleon flouted all that.  The unscrupulous predatory who put effectual scheming for the self plainly above every other consideration and rode rough shod over all his fellows appealed powerfully to the latent animality of the adrenal types.  Then came the dawning awareness of capital and labor of themselves as classes fiercely opposed forever in the policy of cut-throat versus cut-throat.  The labor organizations and the commercial companies and corporations pitted themselves against each other consciously.  Doctrines like “Property is but Robbery,” “Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost,” the “Iron Law of Wages” and the “Facts is Facts” of the Gradgrinds were the phrases of the nineteenth century that assisted.  Finally came the Darwinian revelation of man as the ape-parvenu, which completed the disintegration of the old restraints.

Man seemed to see himself now for the first time stark and naked.  But Man consists of many varieties, and all reacted differently to the image in the clouded mirror.  There was universal attempt at suppression.  But slowly the anti-adrenal forces infiltrated every activity and every soul.  Like a hidden focus of infection in the body, it germinated and poisoned.  A slow fever crept into life.  A febrile quality tinged the acquisition of wealth, the concentration upon sex, and the desperate pursuit of the novel stimulus.

Then, like the hand that appeared at Belshazzar’s Feast, came the War, only it was a hand that stayed with a long flashing lightning sword in its grip, sweeping pitilessly among the erstwhile dancing multitudes to mutilate and destroy.  A good many people, with that sturdy animality George Santayana speaks somewhere of as a trait of mankind, set out to enjoy the War.  It was a new sort of good time upon an incredibly large scale.  It was an undreamed-of opportunity.  The mechanisms of suppression of the mind render it incapable of appreciating horror until encountered.  And so thousands with dangerously unstable adrenals were plunged into the most trying conditions possible.  Hundreds of them, already shaken, on the borderland of instability, reacted with the phenomena of breakdown of control, lumped with a host of other phenomena, under the general rubric of “shell shock.”