Octavio Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude, explores what it means to be a human being in general and a Mexican human being in particular. He explores the character of Mexico as if it were a human being, and even when he is examining abstract ideas---such as love---he also talks about Mexico:
Society denies the nature of love by conceiving of it as a stable union whose purpose is to beget and raise children. . . . Every transgression against this rule is punished. . . . (In Mexico the punishment is often fatal if the transgressor is a woman, because . . . we have two sets of morals: one for the "senor," another for women, children and the poor) (199).
Paz is a poet and a social thinker, and his picture of human nature and the Mexican character is full of original images. Paz has a clear idea of what the life of humanity should be about. He writes of the "very meaning of all human activity, which is to assure the operation of an order in which knowledge and innocence, man and nature are in harmony" (27).
The "solitude" of the title of the book is a state which humanity finds itself in as a result of the "collapse" of "universal order" (26). This is a collapse which Paz says cannot be stopped from happening in human consciousness.
In other words, a human being believes that there is order in the universe. Then, at some point in the development of that human being, he or she stops believing in that universal order. The world seems to be more and more complicated and mysterious. But human beings need a sense of order, so this human being imagines a new sense of order which arises out of his or her self.
Paz argues that "exile, expiation and penitence should proceed from the reconciliation of man with the universe" (27). In other words, the human being's loss of a sense of universal order is a natural part of the human being's development. But this development is healthy only if it is completed. Paz argues that it is ...