"...in American culture insecurity is rampantly bred into us."

Key 23 | Occulture Evolved:

"...some people don't push themselves because they're either afraid of failure, or they're afraid of success. The formr is pretty easy to understand. Nobody likes bad results. And in American culture insecurity is rampantly bred into us. So people limit themselves to safe bets. But there's also the fear of success. Fear that magic really DOES work, which requires having a responsibility of some sort associated with one's practice of it. People are afraid to take the reins of a power they deem godly; they fear becoming Icarus, of falling prey to hubris and being struck down.

We're also kept down by modern Western thought, which dictates causality and Cartesian duality. Not content with disagreeing with more esoteric thought, the egregore of Western civilization has sown the seeds of fear into our heads--the fear that, if we embrace beliefs outside of a certain norm, we are insane. Not evil, which can be romanticized and thereby reclaimed, but insanity, which supposedly denotes a REAL danger."