Vuducow

When men abandon reason, they find not only that their emotions cannot guide them, but that they can experience no emotions save one: terror The spread of drug addiction among young people brought up on today's intellectual fashions, demonstrates the unbearable inner state of men who are deprived of their means of cognition and who seek escape from reality--from the terror of their impotence to deal with existence Those two quotes are from very beginning of P:WNI. Relax, and read what I said instead of being an armchair shrink. You don't know what needs I feel. It's a fact that Rand keeps repeating this 'terror' theme. I've just given three quotes from the first few pages of PWNI.

Uh, have you guys read Philosophy: Who Needs It or For the New Intellectual? It is literally mentioned in at least half the pages!! Starts with "He is blind on two fronts: blind to the world around him and to his own inner world, unable to grasp reality or his own motives, and he is in chronic terror of both." I don't have her book on hand but once I get it in PDF, I can search the number of times she says terror, and I bet you most of the instances isn't about like "dictatorial terror" -- it's about feeling terror about not being an objectivist.

I've read Ayn Rand for a while. Certainly all of her fiction and much of her non-fiction; currently reading Philosophy: Who Needs It. Throughout her essays, Ayn Rand writes, essentially, that people who don't embrace reality as an absolute, etc, are confused and terrified at the inconsistencies of their philosophies and reality. Why? My observations don't support it. People don't lose sleep at night wanting cheaper gas and to tax oil companies out of existence, for example. Average people don't even think about causality much. So why do most pages in Ayn Rand's non-fiction say that these non-objectivist savages are just terrified of life, etc? Most average people don't even *think* in these terms!