Excerpts from “Philosophy: Who Needs It”

Existentially, the rise of the welfare state broke up the country into pressure groups, each fighting for special privileges at the expense of the others—so that an individual unaffiliated with any group became fair game for tribal predators. Psychologically, Pragmatism lobotomized the country’s intellectuals: John Dewey’s theory of “Progressive” education (which has dominated the schools for close to half a century), established a method of crippling a child’s conceptual faculty and replacing cognition with “social adjustment.” It was and is a systematic attempt to manufacture tribal mentalities.

There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.

The mental process underlying the egalitarians’ hope to achieve their goal consists of three steps: 1. they believe that that which they refuse to identify does not exist; 2. therefore, human ability does not exist; and 3. therefore, they are free to devise social schemes which would obliterate this nonexistent.

Defiance, not obedience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority. The nation that ran an underground railroad to help human beings escape from slavery, or began drinking on principle in the face of Prohibition, will not say “Yes, sir,” to the enforcers of ration coupons and cereal prices. Not yet.

If America drags on in her present state for a few more generations (which is unlikely), dictatorship will become possible. A sense of life is not a permanent endowment. The characteristically American one is being eroded daily all around us. Large numbers of Americans have lost it (or have never developed it) and are collapsing to the psychological level of Europe’s worst rabble.

The academia-jet set coalition is attempting to tame the American character by the deliberate breeding of helplessness and resignation—in those incubators of lethargy known as “Progressive” schools, which are dedicated to the task of crippling a child’s mind by arresting his cognitive development.

We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something—and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being.

Source: Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982) by Ayn Rand.