 Per usual, I'll just start out reading an excerpt here to get us rolling and we'll see where it goes. So I'm on on page 17 of the PDF and we'll link this in the show notes as well for anyone who wants to follow along. Rand writes, psychologically, the choice to think not is the choice to focus or not. Existentially, the choice to focus or not is the choice to be conscious or not. Metaphysically, the choice to be conscious or not is the choice of life or death. And she goes on to write that that which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality. He is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. So, you know, she's obviously putting the primacy on choice here, you know, making the point that, I guess, we're free to choose our own means and ends. But if we choose improper means, then we will not necessarily get to the desired ends, in particular, referring to reason and or ethics here. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, she's really, you know, arguing here that there's one fundamental choice that all other choices are derivative, but really, there's one fundamental choice. There's one core to the whole idea of free will. And that is, do you choose to think or not to think? Do you choose to focus your mind or not? Do you choose to be conscious, i.e., of your environment and of your own mental activity? Or do you choose to not? Be conscious of it. And once you make that choice, once you make the choice to focus, everything else, you know, leads from that. Because once you're engaged with reason, once you're focused, once you're conscious, then now, you know, what does consciousness do? It's integrating the facts of reality. You're thinking, you're doing the work that's necessary for human survival. She's also staying here. So that's one is kind of, it's a unique perspective on free will. Free will is not about, am I flicking up my finger now and am I doing that because I chose to do it or whatever? You know, like the experiment is a bunch of experiments around these things. Free will is the fundamental choice that you make in some sense every morning when you get up, but in some sense, every every minute, at least you're, you're engaged with the world to think or not to think. So if you think about Hamlet's to be or not to be, she's arguing fundamentally that is to think or not to think. And if we, if we want to live a good life, we have to think. And that's the second point she makes. The second point she's making here is human beings have a specific nature. And that nature requires specific action in order for the human being to be successful. So think about, it's like a nutrition. We have a particular, you know, biology and certain foods are good for us, certain foods are poison. And it's sometimes hard to tell, you know, we know nutrition is a pretty, pretty dismal, dismal field sometimes. But we know that some food is probably good and some food definitely is poison. The same thing she's saying about human life in a more spiritual sense, you know, in a more integrated sense, mind and body. Some things are poison, some things are good for you. And the thing that A allows you to differentiate between the two and the thing that really guides you towards what's good for you is reason. And therefore, the choice to think, the choice to reason is the fundamental choice for life and to choose anything else above reason is a choice towards death, towards poison. Yeah, that makes sense to me that I recently just did this series on platonic and neoplatonic philosophy. And it was making this, one of the core points there is that reason, human reason has this ecstatic dimension to it, that it's always somewhat paradoxically trying to undermine itself. Like, you know, if you have, you use reason to figure something out, but the idea of figuring something out is so you can figure something better out, right? So this is kind of the process of civilization, the process of maturity at the individual scale, right? So we're constantly learning and then reforming our, I guess, lens or presuppositions about the world to, you know, improve, right, to become more civilized and more mature in the process. Well, to discover the truth, to discover the nature of the world around us and, you know, I mean, this is not exactly, this is different than Plato in a sense that for a random reason is very much tied to reality. It's to this world. Plato reason is always tied to another dimension, another world, because for him, there's a world of forms which we cannot observe directly and which reason connects us to that world of forms. Rand rejects that there is no world of forms. What reason is tying us to is the reality in front of us is the world that's out there and it gives us the tool to understand it, to know it and then to know how to deal with it. And yes, it's a constant process of improvement because constantly we get new data, we learn new things, we build microscopes, we build telescopes, we develop the tools to refine our knowledge of reality over time. Makes sense. I guess the question I would have here is, though, is if reason is that which properly couples us to reality, who is the arbiter of whether we are being reasonable or not in any given action? You know, you use the example of nutrition, for instance, and I agree. There are objectively some foods that are good for the human body and some that are bad, but there's also this, you know, element of subjectivity as well, right? Some people I don't do well with carbs, for instance, my partner can eat carbs all day long, no problem. So there's this little bit of this individual element to the consumer as well. Is that similar to reason that, you know, one person could think a certain action is reasonable, another person could say it's not? Like, who are the two? Absolutely. So, so, you know, for you, it would be unreasonable to eat carbs if you don't do well with carbs, right? And for your partner, it's not an issue. So one of the inputs that you need to decide what food is good is my biology. It's not just what the characteristics of the food, it's the interaction between the characteristics of my food and my biological nature as an individual human being. And we know that individual human beings have different somewhat different natures in a sense of how we process food and how some people are allergic to gluten. Other people are not things like that. We take that into account when deciding what food is appropriate. And that is true of other things. But there are certain principles, for example, that are true of all human beings. That is, for all human beings, all adult human beings, thinking is the way in which we survive. Thinking is the means, and that's not individualized, if you will. But it is true that the particular values, the particular things that turn out to be good for us or not good for us, will depend on who we are and what our specific nature happens to be. So the core choice being to think or not to think, what does not thinking look like? Is that the pure imitation that she talks about? I can't remember if it was earlier or later. Is that what does not thinking look like? It looks like what most people do most of the time, I think. I mean, I think it's true. I think most people drift. Most people are, you know, they're awake, but they're not engaged. They just go through life accepting what's around them. Or maybe they engage, they turn it on, like the thinking when they're at work, right? But as soon as they get home, they flop in front of the sofa, they put on something stupid on TV, they get a beer or whatever it is, a glass of wine or whatever, and they veg, right? And there's a reason why it's called vegging because you're shutting down your mind. So but some people even at work, they're not ambitious. They don't really care or they just they're good at following orders or they're good at mimicking the co-worker, but they never engage. They're never on. They're never pushing things forward. And I think it works. Most people somewhat engage because they know in the sense their paycheck depends on it. But so many people go through life, not really engaging when it comes to their life, their choices and the way they live their life. They do what their parents tell them. They do what they say, you know, what society tells them. They do what they co-workers tell them. They don't actually think for themselves. They don't engage fully. And that would be just hypothesizing here. But I'm presumably you're going to be a bit more challenged at work and that will activate your engagement to some extent. Whereas at home, you can it's easier to fall into a pattern of of not being challenged. So you can just veg. Yeah, that's part of it. I also think that it's it's there's a direct survival. Instead of motivation, right, you don't get to paycheck. How do you feed your kids if you don't do anything at home or if you don't think about politics or you don't think about all these other things? The consequence are not direct, right? We all we all are suddenly awake and alert and focused when the tiger is right in front of us, right? And we plan strategies on how to get away. Or we we we keep. But if somebody tells us the tiger is a week away, how, you know, so many people just just they can't think a week. You know, they don't they don't engage, right? So so one guy will prepare. And one guy will not. And and, you know, you put you put somebody on a desert island. One guy's a Robinson Caruso and another guy will just eat the coconuts and survive somehow, but the Robinson Caruso will thrive on the island. And the other guy will not. So people this is a this is a fundamental choice that I think people make. And sadly, I think most people partially because they're not, you know, when you're a kid, when you're a little kid, how many times, you know, you ask why and you're curious and you're engaged and you you alert and you're focused and how many parents slap their kids down, right? Don't ask, stop asking. Don't be obnoxious. Why do you want to know? Why do you have to know everything? Right. And so some kids, the lesson they learn from that is, you know, being engaged, being focused, asking questions. Not worthwhile. I'll just shut it down. It's just not worth it. So partially it's education, partially it's some fundamental choice people make that's impossible to explain. But the fact is that we see so many adults out there who don't think for themselves, who don't, who are not really alive, not really engaged with being alive. Yeah, that's actually kind of scary to think about if we're living in a world of mostly unengaged, unawake humans. I think there's probably a lot of negative consequences to that. Well, I mean, we've talked about, you know, there's so many, for example, economic truths that are pretty straightforward, right? We've talked about central banking and so on. This is not rocket science. And, you know, right now people are living through inflation and they're living through and everybody's like, OK, there's inflation. It's not good. I don't like Joe Biden, right? And but there's no thinking beyond that. Well, what about the system? What about the Federal Reserve? What about other bouts of inflation? How does this compare? What causes it? What are the relationships? Some people engage in that thought and some engage in the thought and come to the wrong conclusion, right? But very few engage in the thought, right? Most people just, OK, it sucks to have inflation. I hate Joe Biden today. And that's the level at which they engage with it. And they don't go anywhere else. And that's the world in which we live. That's a world in which we live where a Russian, you know, people can engage in war. Why would anybody ever want to go to war? I mean, it's lose, lose, right? Nobody wins in a war. And and and you see you see so much human behavior out there that when you sit back and look, it just doesn't make any sense. If people actually want to live good lives, they shouldn't be doing this. And the only explanation is they're just not thinking. They're just not engaged. They're just not aware. They're just drifting along or following the leader. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to Iran book show dot com slash support. I go to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. 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