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Almost everyone admires and seeks these three, openly or covertly. Very few have all three, not very many of us even have any one of them, and most of us are far, far away from all three. Yet they are still dangers in that in the seeking and, if we succeed, the having, they foster pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. 

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Puck, a mischievous fairy, gets pairs of lovers tangled up in various mistaken identities (it is a comedy, remember) and at one point speaks forth his famous line, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Puck is so right. We are fools in so many ways, and one powerful way is that we mistake external circumstances as evidence of internal virtues, confuse accidental status and labels as fruits of intention and capabilities, and imagine beauty, wealth, and fame to be evidence of merit and virtue. Puck deserves a good laugh if it were not that our error and folly twist individuals and civilizations into torments of pain and suffering. In Shakespeare’s play all ends well and people go their happy ways. Not in real life. There we stumble around in snares and delusions.