Capitalism 2.0: Rationality

Here are two more passages from Ayn Rand:

“Rationality is man’s basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival and, therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that which is anti-mind, is anti-life.”

“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest—but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”

I am very bothered by a world order which suspends logic, which suspends rationality. At least my rational thinking is not giving me any confidence that the world order we’re in right now will yield a sustainable, universal well-being, and not destroy a thus far reasonably functional system which has delivered hundreds of million people out of poverty.

I cannot reconcile welfare as the solution. I acknowledge welfare as a partial solution for a certain class of people – mentally ill, homeless people living on the streets whose minds are incapable of allowing them to function in rational terms, for instance, makes sense to me.

But welfare for auto companies, for auto workers?

For the bottom of the pyramid, micro-finance and micro-franchise are great models. But we hear nothing of those. We hear only about welfare these days.

Capitalism 2.0 would work much better if we address the bottom of the pyramid with micro-credit and micro-equity, and help people become small-scale entrepreneurs. Not this colossal mass of suspended reality enclothed in distorted logic.

This segment is a part in the series : Capitalism 2.0