The generation of persons who are now in their forties, as well as some in their early fifties, is not the only one which has had to face the temptations of spurious ideals. Has there ever been a generation since the French Revolution which has not come into the presence of temptation by one body of fallacious ideals or another? In the present century, there has been a continuing series of temptations with all their deceptive allures. My own generation in its youth had its fill of temptations, slightly different from but closely related to the temptations faced by the generation which came of age in the Sixties. It might be interesting to compare the totalitarian temptation which my own generation faced to the antinomian temptation—embodied in a hatred of laws, rules, and institutions—with which the generation of the 1960s and 1970s was confronted.

Of what did the totalitarian temptation consist? It offered the prospect of a society free of conflict and injustice, in which human beings would be rewarded because they were human beings, without regard to superiority or inferiority, without regard to their ancestral religion or their ethnic derivation, and without regard to sexual characteristics. It would be a society in which there would be no power of some human beings over other human beings. The totalitarian temptation offered all the benign qualities of a pacific anarchistic regime, in which there would be no conflict among human beings because there would be no private property and