The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as “self-evidentâ€. It treats concepts as if they were (memorized) precepts; it treats abstractions as if they were perceptual concretes. To such a mentality, everything is the given: the passage of time, the four seasons, the institution of marriage, the weather, the breeding of children, a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a revolution, a book are phenomena of the same order. The distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made is not merely unknown to this mentality, it is incommunicable.
Since early childhood, their emotions have been conditioned by the tribal premise that one must “belong,†one must be “in,†one must swim with the “mainstream,†one must follow the lead of “those who know.†A man’s frustrated mind adds another emotion to the tribal conditioning: a blindly bitter resentment of his own intellectual subservience. Modern men are gregarious and antisocial at the same time. They have no inkling of what constitutes a rational human association.
Ayn Rand. “The Missing Link.†Philosophy: Who Needs It, 1982
