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it cannot offer a secure foundation for our self-esteem.

People with healthy self-esteem are able to take risks and to give their all to a project or ambition, because, although failure may hurt or upset them, it is not going to damage or diminish them.

It is instructive to compare healthy self-esteem with pride and also with arrogance. If self-confidence is “I can” and self-esteem is “I am”, then pride is “I did”. To feel proud is to take pleasure from the goodness of our past actions and achievements.

arrogance stems from hunger and emptiness.

so there can be no such thing as excessive self-esteem. Instead, it betrays all the opposite.

Whenever we live up to our dreams and promises, we can feel ourself growing. Whenever we fail but know that we have given our best, we can feel ourself growing. Whenever we stand up for our values and face the consequences, we can feel ourself growing. Whenever we come to terms with a difficult truth, we can feel ourself growing. Whenever we bravely live up to our ideals, we can feel ourself growing. That is what growth depends on. Growth depends on bravely living up to our ideals, not on the ideals of the bank that we work for, or our parents’ praise, or our children’s successes, or anything else that is not truly our own but, instead, a betrayal of ourself.

Nor is he someone who ever betrayed knowledge and integrity in favour of deception and unconsciousness.

More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free.

'have taken techniques from the human-potential movement, from the encounter, sensitivitytraining and humanistic-psychology movements, and combined them with cult ideology and persuasive sales methods - and packaged them in various combinations.''

Dr. Singer estimates that there are 2,500 to 3,000 cults in the United States

United

Dr. Cath defined a cult as a group of people joined together by a common ideological system fostered by a charismatic leader

The symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy,'' said Dr. Clark, ''are similar to those seen or reported as resulting from cult conversions: increased irritability, loss of libido or altered sexual interest; ritualism, compulsive attention to detail, mystical states, humorlessness and sobriety, heightened paranoia.''

Dr. Cath said: ''Keeping devotees constantly fatigued, deprived of sensory input and suffering protein deprivation, working extremely long hours in street solicitation or in cult-owned businesses, engaging in monotonous chanting and rhythmical singing, may induce psychophysiological changes in the brain. The rhythmical movement of the body can lead to altered states of consciousness, and changes in the pressure or vibration pattern of the brain may affect the temporal lobe.''

''cult-conversion syndrome'' represents an overload of the brain's ability to process information.

He seems calm, even normal

his IQ is over 140

The subjects rate whether the picture is a moral violation on a scale of 1 to 5. Kiehl says most psychopaths do not differ from normal subjects in the way they rate the photos: Both psychopaths and the average person rank the KKK with a burning cross as a moral violation. But there's a key difference: Psychopaths' brains behave differently from that of a nonpsychopathic person. When a normal person sees a morally objectionable photo, his limbic system lights up. This is what Kiehl calls the "emotional circuit," involving the orbital cortex above the eyes and the amygdala deep in the brain. But Kiehl says when psychopaths like Dugan see the KKK picture, their emotional circuit does not engage in the same way.

He notes that alcoholics have brain abnormalities. Do we give them a pass if they kill someone while driving drunk?

Neuroscience and neuroimaging is going to change the whole philosophy about how we punish and how we decide who to incapacitate and how we decide how to deal with people

Just like DNA, he believes brain scans will eventually be standard fare. And that, he and others say, could upend our notions of culpability, crime and punishment.