"THE TRAP": "MAN IS BORN FREE; AND EVERYWHERE HE IS IN CHAINS"

Social contracts, if honestly designed to maintain life in human society, are crucial tasks. But no kind of social contract will ever solve the problem of human agony. The social contract, at best, is no more than a makeshift to maintain life. It has heretofore not been able to remove the agony of life.

These are the constituents of the great riddle: 
--Man is born equal, but he does not grow equal.

 --Man has created great teachings, yet each simple teaching has served his oppression. Man is the "Son of God", created in His image; yet man is "sinful", a prey of the "Devil". How can the Devil and Sin be, if God alone is the creator of all being?

--Humanity has failed to answer the question as to how there can be evil if a perfect god has created and governs the world and man.
--Humanity has failed in establishing a moral life in accordance with its creator.
--Humanity has been ravaged by war and murder of all sorts ever since the inception of written history. No attempt to remove this plague has ever succeeded.

--Humanity has developed many kinds of religions. Every single kind of religion turned into another way of suppression and misery. Humanity has devised many systems of thought to cope with Nature. Yet nature, functional and not mechanical, as it really is, has slipped through its fingers.

--Humanity has run after every bit of hope and knowledge. Yet, after three thousand years of search and worry and heartbreak and murder for heresy and persecution of seeming error, it has arrived at little more than a few comforts for a small sector of humanity, at automobiles and airplanes and refrigerators and radios.
After thousands of years of concentration upon the riddle of the nature of man, humanity finds itself exactly where it started: with the confession of utter ignorance. The mother is still helpless in the face of a nightmare which harrasses her child. And the physician is still helpless in the face of such a small thing as a running nose.