After three months worth of pro free-market philosophy from Ayn Rand, and many, many dog-eared pages of memorable concepts within “Atlas Shrugged”, my literary ride aboard Taggart Transcontinental has finally finished. I wish I would have read “Atlas…” sooner and perhaps avoided those times of commiseration during my teens and early 20s, operating under an implied assumption that someone other than me was responsible for my own actions and in-actions.
The book’s essence – man and his mind – is not just applicable to industry and business but in art too. I interpreted that correlation as such: Make work. Use your mind as it was meant to be used because our “motive power” as artists – what drives us – is the satisfaction in presenting to others the little secrets of our nature that we all uniquely perceive.
A 1200-page book, summarized in one word: Think.
Dug it.
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.