Everyone desires approval, but when the desire is so dramatically inflated that approval is needed from everyone, it's function radically reverses itself. Instead of exerting a socializing effect, by bringing re-enforcing desires which are socially useful, there is, in fact, a de-socializing effect: the circle of family, friends, and aquaintences are demoted in the mind of the approval-seeker to supportive roles (or even obstacles), while the elusive key to happiness lies outside this social network.

Is this expansive drive also socially productive? Inevitably there are countless chances for society to recoup value, but the essential motive force is anti-social, and I've seen too many lousy outcomes to be optimistic. The desire is to dis-entangle oneself from the cloying, corrupting, comfortable relationships -- actually from society itself.

Internally, the preoccupation becomes disapproval rather than approval, as universal approval is always subject to disproof, and can never be finally proven. But isn't disapproval a socializing force, too? Clearly, and the most powerful one we have. But the receptors for approval and disapproval, I submit, are fundamentally different. Using approval-seekers to find disapproval is a bad idea, and results in unpredictable, often explosive outcomes.

So what does this all have to do with Luther? Simple -- society cannot be end-run, neither by a personal god, or by any other form of universalization of the individual. This procedure -- of resolving the personal destiny in terms of universal approval -- is merely one strain of the Luther virus that runs unchecked among PBs.