I don’t know if I get your meaning exactly in that last one, but I’ll try and hope it helps.
No, I don’t think evasion is contagious at all, because no one can get past your last “line of defense” so to speak in your mind. I’m not sure if it was Rand or Branden, but one of them has a saying that I can’t put any better, and that’s: “‘Why?’ is a threshold others cannot cross without your consent.”
Yeah I guess you could say that there are people who choose to practice a habit of thinking and examined living on the one hand, and people who practice evasion and obfuscation on the other hand, and most people are somewhere in the middle. I think it’s true that most people just “think when I feel like thinking.” Nobody, of course, can literally “never think,” but for most people it seems is just a think they do when they want to, and don’t when they don’t. In this way, since the masses don’t create their own ideas, or dedicate a lot of time and effort to independent intellectual pursuits, it is the professional intellectuals (represented by the characters of Ferris, Eubank, Pritchett, Scudder, etc.) that disseminate and the ideas down into the culture, which the masses either reject or adopt.
In that way, you could say that they are victims of the anti-mind and anti-production ideas, but they allow themselves to be. Whether or not someone uses their own judgment or passively accepts something is totally up to them, so I don’t think we can say they didn’t have the same opportunity to think for themselves. All thought is necessarily thinking for yourself, or else it’s just accepting passively. But this starts to get into psychological aspects of thought, which is a lot more murky for me to pontificate on. But for the moral aspect, we have to be careful to mention that the degree of someone’s morality or immorality is not how much thinking or how intelligent someone is, but if they are independent, if they hold facts above others’ say so, if they put their own understanding first, that they view the judgment of their minds valid, appropriate to serving their happiness, etc. Anyone regardless of social position within the division of labor can practice this virtues to the extent they have functioning mental capacities.
But yeah, I think you’re right that the average person probably has no concept of how thinking and production shape the world around them. I know I didn’t.
So as far as the production element goes, we have to see productiveness in a more basic light. It’s not about rich versus poor, or purely economic production, in the sense of making money or producing wealth. The mandate that we be producers stems from the kind of being we are and the kind of reality we live in, and extends to all areas of life, not such career or job or income. Productiveness just means taking those actions necessary to achieve values, putting your thinking and your valuing into physical action. This applies to love, relationships, recreation, work, whatever. This is in the self-interest of anyone regardless of their income or wealth-position within the market economy.
Since man is not a ghost or floating wraith, and we don’t live in some kind of limbo, this is required for everyone. If someone literally just sat there and didn’t do anything, ever, he would be in the words of Aristotle “no better than a vegetable.” We would recognize this as some kind of mental illness for someone who just sat around the house and never moved. So the purpose of thinking and valuing is to put them into action and thus gain the values that life and happiness require. Note that on a deserted island, this wouldn’t even be up for debate. For everyone that is alive, they are surviving off the virtue of productiveness. Even people who repudiate and heap hatred upon those who produce still survive off of it, whether its first-hand, or second-hand. Of course, not all second-handed people in this instance are bad or wrong, for there are of course some people who cannot produce for whatever reason, or there are some instances in which you need a “hand up” in which getting help from others is perfectly necessary. For instance, my parents helped me out with rent payments, and it would be pretty dumb of me not to accept their help. It is necessary to point out it is another basic fact that not all people are equal, not all people are perfect clones of one another. Someone people have abilities and skills other people lack, some people put forth more effort, some people save more and pass it on to future generations, and some people leave nothing for the future. If this were not so (i.e. if all men were perfect clones), then there would be no economy because no trade would be possible (see Mises Human Action for details of this point.) The entire point of the emergence of cooperation, division of labor, exchange, is because of the inborn, natural inequality of man, in order to facilitate cooperation and mutually beneficial rearrangements of the material things in existence.
But there is a separate category within the “second-hand” instance of survival that is evil, and that is the kind of parasitism of demanding others support your existence. This is exemplified by the obvious example of slavery, but it need not be so obviously evil, it could be inducing guilt, lying, manipulating, browbeating, demanding others do their “duty” to sacrifice, etc. This is the kind of second-handedness that can’t be justified by reason, and for which the entire purpose of the altruist morality, spread by those characters in Atlas Shrugged, exists, i.e. to make possible certain people to practice what would otherwise kill them on the deserted island. This is the shackling of the people who do use thought and do put forth effort for the sole reason so that I don’t have to, and for which the entire purpose of Galt’s strike was for the producers to say “FU, I will not be your slave. See what happens without me.”