Alan Watts
Author: Alan Watts
Publisher: Vintage (1973)

The problem is this: man is a self-conscious and therefore self-controlling organism, but how is he to control the aspect of himself which does the controlling?  All attempts to solve this problem seem to end in a snarl, whether at the individual level or at the social.  At the individual level the snarl manifest itself in what we call acute self-consciousness, as when a public speaker frustrates himself by his very effort to speak well.  At the social level it manifests itself as a loss in freedom of movement increasing with every attempt to regulate action by law.  In other words, there is a point beyond which self-control becomes a form of paralysis - as if I wanted simultaneously to throw a ball and hold it to its course with my hand.