The strategy of skeptical self-distancing from the world has impelled and shaped the modern self—differentiating it, empowering it, but eventually so isolating it that it has come to dwell inside a solipsistic prison of its own assumptions. Worse, in its inflation and increasingly manic desperation, the civilization possessed by that objectifying stance has now become a centrifugal force of destruction and self-destruction in a world too intimately interconnected to accommodate such a titanic juggernaut so out of balance with the whole.

In your whole life nobody has abused you more than you have abused yourself. And the limit of your self abuse is exactly the limit you will tolerate from someone else. If someone abused you more than you abuse yourself, you probably walk away from that person. But if someone abuses you a little less than you abuse yourself, you will probably stay in that relationship and tolerate it endlessly,