I agree with the colleagues that you've written a clear, forceful account of the central psychological issue you and they wrestle with. You have also shown, equally effectively but perhaps not quite as consciously, how humans use their mythology to make sense of their world and to regulate the anxiety that originates from their awareness of its limitless complexity. You have described what is in this context the important functional meaning of slavery: to be defined socially as a person without choices. You have not said, but you have grasped, that one can also define oneself internally as a person without choices. These are the "mind-forged manacles" William Blake heard clanking everywhere, and which—as I may have mentioned once or twice—I hear clanking all around me every time I enter the Law School. They are made of anxiety, of fear. By building a network of fetters around us, we contain our dread by reassuring ourselves that we are in a coffle with others, and that there is safety in numbers. The law firm is a bulwark against the fear of not knowing how to be a lawyer.

You see how the myth of Egypt and the myth of Eden are conflated to make the halves of which the fetter is composed. The idea that if you leave you cannot return becomes an overwhelmingly powerful argument even though it is factually evidently false. Facts contrary to the myth, no matter how many times repeated, cannot establish themselves firmly in students' minds. This is repression of cognitive dissonance: to know the falsehood of the myth is to be faced again with the limitless complexity of the ways you can invent your life.

So our first step—taken with hope, hopefully, in this course—is to shake the certainties as they begin to develop, preventing them from forming such a smooth surface that it can deceive us completely into ignoring everything underneath. RachelGholstonSecondPaper expresses perfectly why this does—and should—cause immense resentment. LizzieGomezSecondPaper shows precisely where the resentment and bitterness that is the burden of knowing you can't just keep splitting heals: in the relationships with other human beings—clients, partners, mentors, students, proteges, colleagues—that inspire, share and guide our passions

But this is law school. So in addition to helping us to think deeply about how to frame our lives, it has to provide us a workshop in which to begin defining realistic, buildable plans for the initial stages of our effort. That means helping us to acquire resources: expertise we can sell and a network that can help us practice, find clients and opportunities to grow. It also means helping us to maintain psychic balance, not to ignore our fears and not to tumble blindly in the wind of them. Law school does not perform these tasks automatically, though they are the basic requirements, because it is poorly designed, having been made for a world that is transforming into something very different. But, as colleagues have noted, it can perform these tasks for you, because people who are here can form the relationships with you that you need, if they take the trouble to do so.

You know the answer to that, Toma: It would be my pleasure. Also my job.