Every one of us started out as a mental communist. A very small child believes that wishing makes it so. The world revolves around him. Food appears, toys appear, someone else pays for everything. When reality says no, he cries: "It's not fair!" And when something breaks, it's someone else's fault. Normally, children figure out around four that it isn't so. The mental communist doesn't. The rest of us learn it from reality. The stove is hot. The toy breaks. The friend leaves. Wishes don't move the world; work does. Freud called it the passage from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. It is called growing up. The mental communist never made that passage. He is fifty years old, and still four. Why? Because he was protected from reality for too long. A comfortable home, endless studies, a job in an institution where being wrong costs nothing, and a state that plays the parent. Peter Pan was the boy who wouldn't grow up. Today Neverland has a campus, a newsroom and a ministry. And so the fantasies became delusions. A child's fantasy is soft. It gives way when reality pushes. A delusion is hard. It survives every piece of evidence – that is what makes it a delusion. You recognize the grown child easily. The tantrum when reality says no – today we call it outrage. Rights without duties. Someone else always pays – only the parent has become the state. Every failure is someone else's fault: he started it. And the imaginary friend – "humanity," "the people," "history" – who always agrees with him. Here is the danger. A child's fantasy is guarded by his parents. A grown man's delusion is guarded by power – and paid for by everyone else. What grows people up is what it always was: consequences, work, responsibility for someone other than yourself. And nothing ends a fantasy faster than your own baby crying at three in the morning. A civilization is built by adults. It cannot be run from Neverland.