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The Posting from Gravy Earlier, referencing the pertinent portions of “Atlas Shrugged” spurred me to remember one of my favorites portions of the novel: Ayn may have been politically naive, and having grown up under Communist Rule, may have been wrong in regards to the virtues of naked Capitalism, but she was not wrong about the following:

“Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think – not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment – on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.”