Similarly, obsessional negativism is exhibited in popular popular belief systems about ethics and politics:

Virtue is reduced to abstinence from sex, pride, and other "sins."
Justice is reduced to the elimination of human differences.
Freedom is reduced to the avoidance of hunger, insecurity, and other negatives.

This course will show that virtue, justice, and freedom are all properly understood in terms of positives. The pursuit of negatives as if they were positives is also evident in contemporary social systems, driven by fear and crisis and force, rather than by imagination and voluntary creative effort.

The difference between existence and nonexistence—or, equivalently, between the positive and the negative—is the most fundamental distinction that people must make in order to understand the world around them. Popular thinking, however, constantly confuses the present with the absent or mistakenly views the two as symmetrical equivalents. Numerous such errors will be encountered and corrected in this course.

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