Capitalism 2.0: Intellectual Laziness

Here’s another interesting discourse from John Galt’s speech which is a good lens through which to examine several of our recently discovered “bugs” in capitalism: sub-prime lending and borrowing, Madoff’s scam, etc.

“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.”

Now, ask the question why people who were making unreasonable amounts of money off Madoff or the sub-prime scams, did not pause to think. Assuming that these people were not stupid, they must have asked the question: “Isn’t this too good to be true?”

They must have figured out something evil was going on underneath the surface, yet they did not question the goings, as long as the money kept pouring in.

Well, I would submit that not only was evil in play, so was intellectual laziness and dishonesty. People were willing to suspend their rational judgment to allow whatever was going on without questioning. So now that they have to count the consequences, why is that unfair?

This segment is a part in the series : Capitalism 2.0