Here, then, we are being given a glimpse of one version of reality. According to this version heroism is an illusion. … The qualities of the patricia… - R. W. K. Paterson

The plebeian asks himself, ‘What type of person am I?’, and he seeks the answer by comparing the self he believes he is with the norms enshrined in the manufactured packages on public offer.

The less familiar and more complex something is, the less we can rely on our immediate feelings, and the greater the risk of error in our ultimate moral judgements. … But equally the more remote or unusual some physical event, the less we can rely on our unaided senses. … The arguments which supposedly show that values are in some vitiating sense ‘subjective’ would also show that the physical world itself is essentially subjective.

The works of Sartre and Heidegger abound in description of the multifarious ways in which men seek to lose themselves in the protective illusions of their society and their age. 'Man', says Heidegger, 'can lose himself to what he meets in the world and be taken over by it'. (Being and Time, 1.1.3.16) As men-in-community, cherishing common institutions, revering the time-honoured procedures of society, and reassured by the approved forms and rituals of our collective being, we manage to deceive ourselves into believing that this retreat into comforting anonymity is a positive assent to hallowed and objective realities. We refuse to accept the mysterious and dreadful fact of our own contingency, and instead pretend that our lives are governed by impersonal and autonomous power, human or divine, deriving their incontestable authority from history or from nature. According to Sartre, the whole human pretence that values exist ‘as transcendent givens independent of human subjectivity’ is what constitutes ‘the spirit of seriousness’, which ‘it must be the principal result of existential psychoanalysis to make us repudiate’. (Being and Nothingness, 1.2.3)