Akin to the conventionalist’s type of unfreedom is another one, which consists in the subject’s enslavement to prejudices. In one class of instances, the prejudices are themselves conventional in origin; in other cases, however, they are traceable to purely personal experiences. Thus, some men are woman-haters because they have had one or several unpleasant experiences with women. Some people abhor all animals because they have once been bitten by a dog. Others are forever angry at Italy because they have once been cheated there. Others, again, are confirmed anti-Semites because they have come across a number of unattractive Jews. There are. even people who, owing to some distasteful memories that cling to their school days, refuse to appreciate ancient culture.

Briefly, although many prejudices are rooted in conventional traditions, many others have their source in rash generalizations. Now prejudice always means unfreedom, seeing that it means the obscuring of objective judgment by mere accidental impressions. Above all, it implies a shrinking of one’s intellectual horizon. Prejudiced people are in an eminent sense narrow-minded.

Our lack of true consciousness, too, can be held accountable for our prejudices. We allow our judgment to be guided by mere associations which interpose themselves between the object and our vision, and so falsify our impression. Instead of letting the thing itself, with its true content, speak to us, we suffer our position to be determined by some association which in our mind, from purely subjective causes, happens to adhere to that thing.

For instance, we find a place unlovely and depressing because on some earlier occasion we were ill there. A melody seems to us devoid of beauty because it reminds us of a gloomy period of our life. We feel repelled by a person because he was present at some painful, humiliating episode of our past; or again, we close our mind to a certain truth because it was a person we dislike who first drew our attention to it.

The true Christian must be entirely free from prejudices. In him, all prejudices must be uprooted, so that unhampered by any conventions and any fortuitous experiences and associations, he may accord to every good the response that is objectively due to it in conspectu Dei. And, conversely, the more one has made one’s home in Christ and boldly moved one’s center of gravity into the supernatural realm, the more those shackles will tend to fall away.

Rancor diminishes true freedom

Rancor on account of some (real or imaginary) wrongs one has suffered, and similar experiences of resentment, are always likely—unless they have been consciously effaced in confrontation with Christ—to injure the freedom of the soul. An insult that rankles will, even though it may not engender any generalized prejudice, create a spasm thwarting the free flow of love.