“If some men do not choose to think, but survive by imitating and repeating, like trained animals, the routine of sounds and motions they learned from others, never making an effort to understand their own work, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by those who did choose to think and to discover the motions they are repeating. The survival of such mental parasites depends on blind chance; their unfocused minds are unable to know whom to imitate, whose motions it is safe to follow. They are the men who march into the abyss, trailing after any destroyer who promises them to assume the responsibility they evade: the responsibility of being conscious.”
- Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness
In the Spring 2012 semester, I discovered that not only a large portion of students suspend their consciousness, but that college as an institution is designed that students can do this and STILL SUCCEED.
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