...and yeah, I really do *think.*
What still stays with me the most, years after reading Atlas Shrugged, is the (truthful) irony. The irony of having dependent enemies. The irony of only being able to defeat them by becoming something other than yourself. The irony of loved-ones being the biggest threat to being true to other things that you love (ie, a person's love doesn't always have a homogeneous direction. A person would be lucky to have laser-like love). The very cruel irony in the possibility of being confused about which "side" you are on, such as Cheryl (I'm not sure if this is the exact text, it's all I could find online):
“She had to escape from Jim she thought. Where?–she asked, looking around her with a glance like a cry of prayer. She would have seized upon a job in a five-and-ten, in that laundry, or in any of the dismal shops she passed. But she would work, she thought, and the harder she worked the more malevolence she would draw from the people around her, and she would not know when truth would be expected of her and when a lie, but the stricter her honesty, the greater the fraud she would be asked to suffer at their hands. She had seen it before, and had borne it, in the home of her family, in the shops of the slums, but she had thought these were vicious exceptions, chance evils to escape and forget. Now she knew they were not exceptions, that theirs was the code accepted by the world, that it was a creed of living, known by all, but kept unnamed, leering at her from people’s eyes in that sly guilty look she had never been able to understand–and at the root of the creed, hidden by silence lying in wait for her in the cellar of the city, and in the cellars of their souls, their was a thing which one could not live. No exit–her shreds of awareness were saying, beating it into the pavements in the sound of her steps–no exit…no refuge…no friend. Like that dog she heard about, she thought…somebody’s dog in somebody’s laboratory…the dog who got his signals switched on him and saw no way to tell satisfaction from torture, saw food change to beatings and beatings change to food, saw his eyes and ears deceiving him and his judgment futile and his consciousness impotent in a shifting, swimming, shapeless world, and gave up, refusing to eat at that price or to live in a world of that kind…No! was the only conscious word in her brain: no! no! no! not your way! not your world, even if this "NO" is all that's to be left of mine!”.
The only way, I think, to live sanely once you get to that point, is to somehow accept the duality of things, and keep trying to solve the mystery (though the painfulness of Cheryl's particular situation, and certainly of the dog's situation, make that very difficult to hope for in those situations):
"Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that." - GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
But I like logic. Love it, actually; always have! So I'm not sure if I can go so far as to accept the further conclusions of Chesterton:
"There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to a man’s mental balance. . . . Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic; I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination...The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. . . . The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
Poor Gödel (a logician who supposedly died of paranoia). Perhaps Chesterton was right afterall (immersion in logic drives people crazy). Or, perhaps Goedel was actually right (ie, not paranoid). Each is a scary thought in its own right (ie, perhaps I find neither interpretation to be preferred). A World Without Time had a brief passage of Goedel's own thoughts relating to this:
"...for a Platonist or conceptual realist, the mind encounters an ideal entity in a manner parallel to the way the eye tracks a physical object. In both cases, we are confronted with something real that we have not ourselves created. We grasp it, therefore, only partially and in stages, gaining new insights as we shift perspective. 'We begin with vague perceptions of a concept,' says Gödel, 'as we see an animal from far away or take two stars for one before using a telescope.' Since the entity is not a child of our own imagination, we will never exhaust the information to be gained by different ways of approaching it, but we may reach a limit after which we no longer find ourselves bumping up against surprises or running into mysteries.'"
Perhaps this is what real thinking is like. Gatto is fond of pushing what he calls "dialectical thinking." As far as I can tell, it means being able to consider an issue from opposite/multiple point of view simultaneously. A narrow mind simply cannot hold that much information at one time. Gatto is always quoting somebody (I can't remember just who at the moment), who basically said that if you cannot think dialectically, you are not really even human, you are little better than an animal.
Perhaps this is what real thinking really is like. If so, there are some days when the strain of trying to *REALLY* think makes we want to conclude that ignorance really is bliss.
