How Force Disrupts the Process of Thinking
Concretizing a key premise in Ayn Rand’s case for why the use of force is evil, excerpted from Tara Smith’s book on the First Amendment.
In 2024, ARI Press released Tara Smith’s The First Amendment: Essays on the Imperative of Intellectual Freedom. In the book, Smith and other contributors survey the freedoms afforded by the First Amendment — notably free speech and religious freedom — as united by the common principle of intellectual freedom. In this excerpt from Smith’s essay “What Good Is Religious Freedom,” the author identifies and elaborates on a core principle that supports the imperative of intellectual freedom, one that she sees rooted in the work of John Locke, but amplified and grounded more securely in the philosophy of Ayn Rand: the idea that physical force is the enemy of rational cognition.
Force Impedes the Acquisition of Knowledge
[This excerpt begins after an exposition of the views of various critics of John Locke’s view that force cannot induce sincere belief.]
[U]nder dictatorships that deny intellectual freedom, some constructive thought, some knowledge, and correspondingly, some production of material values do continue to take place. Production does not grind to a halt. Yet the Lockean position does not entail that it should; it does not deny the possibility of all such values. What it challenges is a certain image of the relationship between these values. In particular, it challenges the assumption that knowledge and the creation of values can occur independently of the freedom or restriction of individuals’ minds.1
The Lockeans’ critics argue as if, because certain intellectual and material goods can exist in a society that stifles intellectual freedom, such freedom must be irrelevant.2 This is a stunningly superficial account of the situation, however. While the combination of “freedom denied, goods supplied” might, at a quick glance, appear to refute the Lockean argument, this accepts the goods at face value without inquiring into their origins. A simple question is critical: how do people acquire these goods? By means of what activities and by virtue of what conditions? Can intellectual or material goods (literature, science, airplanes, smartphones, penicillin) be had under simply any conditions? Are they impervious to the freedom of men’s environment?
Hardly. Witness the dramatically different standards of living in free and intellectually constricted nations.3 Witness the dearth of discoveries, inventions, and innovation that emerge from repressed societies. How many new ideas — novel techniques, innovative processes, and useful products based on these — are spawned by the inhabitants of obedience regimes? How many scientific discoveries have been achieved under the intellectual dictatorships of North Korea or Afghani theocrats?4 How many patents were held by the residents of Pol Pot’s Cambodia?5 When entire areas of inquiry are legally forbidden, individuals’ minds are prevented from engaging with information that might be true and with ideas that might spark creative connections and the development of new knowledge.6
Intellectually repressive regimes tend to lag in material well-being by all the conventional measures of health, life expectancy, GNP, purchasing power, product quality, standard of living.7 Numerous economic studies make plain the material fruits of freedom.8 While these studies primarily measure the effects of economic freedom, rare is the regime that restricts economic freedom while respecting intellectual freedom. Indeed, doing so would be counter-productive from the standpoint of the repressors. For effective restriction of one requires restriction of the other. As Rand’s work emphasizes, for human beings, the creation of any goods requires a process of thinking: identifying the relevant needs, adopting specific aims so as to meet them, and devising suitable means of achieving those aims.9 “[E]verything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort,” she writes.10 “Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.”11
Don Watkins and Yaron Brook describe the “production of wealth [as] fundamentally an intellectual project.”12 Wealth creation must be, in its inception, knowledge creation.13 As the economist Deirdre McCloskey puts it, “Our riches were not made by piling brick upon brick . . . but by piling idea upon idea.”14 Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has long been demonstrating that material well-being does not depend on economic freedom alone.15 Sen considers what he calls political freedoms as “among the constituent components” of economic development.16 Freedom of thought is part and parcel of the ability to devise new products, new techniques, and new means of trade. Consequently, for dictators to restrict people’s intellectual activities while leaving free their economic activities, in hopes of material prosperity, would be a doomed enterprise. The starvation of the mind necessarily constricts the products of the mind. By the same token, for dictators to restrict people’s economic activities while leaving free their intellectual activities would court rebellion, since intellectually free people will be likely to realize how much better their material conditions could be.
The point is, the kind of “repeat after me” society created by intellectual repression is not conducive to breakthroughs that advance knowledge or to innovations that improve people’s lives. Obviously, intellectual repression does not cause the immediate annihilation of all life-enhancing values. People can still get by when their range of thought is restricted. The problem is that they cannot prosper.17 They can produce only to the extent that they rely on the knowledge that freer minds had previously acquired; they are reduced to the position of parasites.18 While those who are restricted may be able to coast on the knowledge of others for a while, the straitjacketing of their minds means that they will not be able to generate any further knowledge. “Intellectual go-along” can take these people only as far as the minds of the rulers who set the boundaries concerning which ideas will and will not be permitted.19
It is also significant that even people’s understanding of things that had previously been discovered will atrophy if they are not permitted robust and skeptical engagement with that knowledge. A person must grasp the basis for a claim, at least in rudimentary terms, in order for it to have the status of knowledge in his mind. As simple a claim as that water is H2O is meaningless in the mind of a person who has no comprehension of chemical elements. Indeed, it is people’s re-thinking of accepted ways and beliefs that frequently prompts better ideas — corrections, refinements, extensions, fresh applications. This is how knowledge advances. More on this, later.
Let us return from this probing of intellectual freedom more directly to the dispute between Lockeans and their detractors. The thrust of the critics’ charge is that repression works.20 Contrary to Lockean assertions of coercive instruments’ impotence to alter people’s beliefs, Leiter and Waldron maintain that dictators successfully use such means to accomplish exactly what they want.21 It is crucial to ask, however, repression “works” to accomplish what, precisely? Coercion certainly can deliver the obedience that a dictator wants. If some dictators do not care what the masses believe but simply want certain conduct, force can achieve that. It cannot alter belief, however, according to the Lockeans, and this is what they find problematic.22 While they recognize that physical force can compel physical compliance, outward conformity with a dictators’ demands does not necessarily signify genuine conviction. You cannot “get religion” via cattle-prod. In this, I think, the Lockeans are leading us to a significant truth. They do not grasp it fully, however, as we shall see.
Undeniably, as Leiter and Waldron point out, through the systematic dissemination of propaganda and tight control over the thoughts and theories that people are permitted to be aware of, repressors can lead people to accept false conclusions.23 Forcible restrictions can limit the materials that are available for a person to consider as well as the incentives that he has to entertain various lines of thought (incentives posed by the punishments attached to deviation from the state-approved orthodoxy). Such manipulation of the intellectual environment will naturally influence the conclusions that people draw, even if they are scrupulously rational with the material they are fed. Yet none of this touches the heart of the Lockean claim, which concerns the nature of rational thought.
What the critics regard as the censors’ “success” rests in the fact that some of their victims do end up believing the censors’ desired conclusions as a result of the regime’s deliberate distortions.24 Even this is not precisely what the Lockeans dispute, however. The problem, as the Lockeans see it, is that these people will embrace false ideas.25 One does not need to agree about the truth of a particular religious doctrine to appreciate that they are on to an important epistemological fact. This is where Rand takes their insight further. By examining more closely the necessary conditions of rational thought and knowledge, she deepens and fortifies the Lockean line.
Rand explains that “[a] rational mind does not work under compulsion.”26 A human mind cannot function cognitively — in a way that enables it to understand a phenomenon, to know reality — while it is bound by the standing order to affirm what the dictators decree. By demanding that a person act against his own judgment, “[f]orce invalidates and paralyzes” his capacity for judgment; it renders it moot.27 Yet while a person’s mind “may be hampered by others, . . . silenced, proscribed, imprisoned,” Rand observes, “it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument.”28
To be still more precise, a mind cannot be forced to understand a particular argument or to know a particular conclusion. It cannot be forced to do the kinds of things that a human mind uniquely can.
Those who manipulate an intellectual environment can foster people’s assent to the manipulators’ specific goals. That is not the same as fostering rational inquiry, however. And rational inquiry is the only path to genuine knowledge (concerning god or any subject). The laws of a censor cannot compel a person’s inferences to be logical or his conclusions to be valid. They cannot force a person to think in the way that generates knowledge, that brings awareness of reality. Therein rests its ultimate bankruptcy.29
John Stuart Mill offered a famous defense of intellectual freedom that touches on some kindred claims.30 While Mill’s aim was to defend the political freedom of thought, his observations also address the basic conditions that are necessary for knowledge.31
Even true ideas will deteriorate, Mill reasoned, in the minds of people who are not accustomed to challenging them.32 If a person does not understand the grounds of an idea, that which makes it true, it will sit as a mere prejudice or superstition in his mind. Moreover, “[h]e who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” Mill observes.33 A person can only rationally assess the merits of competing views when he grapples with opposing positions and understands the arguments beneath them.34 The upshot is, the acquisition of knowledge depends on unrestricted access to ideas and unrestricted engagement with them. This is exactly what intellectual repression expunges.
The Process, Not the Conclusion
While recognizing the limited things that force can accomplish, the Lockeans’ focus on what force cannot deliver helps us to recognize how destructive it is. To understand the correlative value of intellectual freedom more fully, we need to investigate the mechanics of human thought more closely. What follows is an attempt to elaborate Rand’s account at a more fine-grained level.35 From the outset, bear in mind that thinking is not an end in itself, but serves a definite purpose — namely, the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge, in turn, is valuable in order to inform action — to guide human beings to the kinds of actions that can advance our well-being. The process by which a person forms conclusions determines whether or not he is able to do that.
In assessing any defense of religious freedom, therefore, it would be a mistake to focus on the value of religion or on the value of one particular religion versus another (such as Anglicanism versus Catholicism). Rather, we should consider how a person comes to his religious belief. What are the sorts of things that a person does as a means of reaching a religious conviction? While the exact steps vary in different cases, typically, he will engage in some assortment of the following: he thinks; he prays; he observes others; he emulates others in certain respects; he talks to others about their religious beliefs; he reads the doctrines and arguments of a particular religion or he reads about a religion — some of its history, its detractors’ criticisms. However extended or abbreviated a given person’s process, however deep or shallow, systematic or casual, ultimately, he makes up his mind. He decides whether to learn more about other people’s beliefs or whether to “try out” alternative religions. He decides whether he will continue to participate in the rituals that he practiced as a child or whether to suspend all religious belief or all interest in finding answers to the kinds of questions that religion characteristically addresses (questions about mortality, meaning, value, etc.). The point is, a person thinks in order to embrace whatever religious views he does have. Even if a particular person’s thinking is minimal or relatively un-inquisitive, it is he who chooses to follow a given path. What is significant for us is that religion represents a conclusion. A person must be free in order to be able to investigate the relevant evidence and draw that conclusion rationally.
Ultimately, a person must be free in order to reach valid conclusions — the rational, reality-hugging conclusions that enable him to understand the world around him, to act on that basis, and thereby advance his well-being. Such freedom naturally brings with it the opportunity to think irrationally and to make poor decisions. The immediate point, however, is that it is not the sanctity of any particular conclusion that underwrites the value of religious freedom. Rather, it is the process by which human beings reach conclusions and can attain the understanding of the world that their well-being depends on. Freedom of the mind is indispensable to that process. This is the foundation of intellectual freedom’s value — and correlatively, of religious freedom’s value.
How Force Obstructs Rational Thinking
Consider: What does thinking consist of? What is required to reach a conclusion and what is required to reach it rationally — in a way that can yield knowledge? Milton’s observation that “reason is but choosing” captures a crucial part of the answer.36
A process of thinking involves confronting a series of choices. To think about whether some proposition is true, a person must choose between ever-shifting arrays of alternatives that his mind lobs up to him — including those as basic as what thoughts to attend to. He must decide which thoughts, of the many that might occur to him, to consider further and which to set aside; which to consider the relevance of and, if he deems some relevant, which to assign credence to. To do this, in turn, he must determine how to assess the relevance and credence of each idea.
Further, he must figure out what weight to assign to those ideas that he does regard as true. What is their probative significance? How strongly do they support a particular conclusion? He must also consider the implications of various possible answers for the issue at hand and for other beliefs about other issues. If this conclusion about this presidential candidate is valid, for instance, am I logically compelled to revise my previous conclusions about his overall merit or about who to vote for? Or about whether to vote at all, this year?
Let us take a fairly commonplace example by which to examine thought more closely. Consider an eighteen-year-old confronting the following question: Should I attend this university or one of the other two that has accepted me? What are some of the sub-questions he would need to answer, to answer that? A barrage of questions will need his attention.
How expensive would it be to attend that school? What is the financial aid package? How much debt can I afford to take on? How much wage-earning work can I handle while in school? When would I be able to pay off the accumulated debt? What are some realistic timetables? To what extent would the pay offered by a job after graduation have to become a primary concern in deciding whether to take a job? What are the odds that I could land jobs that would deliver the needed pay scale? How much pressure would that much debt create? Is it worth it?
What are my job prospects, holding a degree from that school? How much do I care about those? How much should I care about those? Should that be the deciding factor — my likelihood of securing a sufficiently remunerative job immediately after graduating? What about a job that is rewarding in other respects? Which other respects? What is the school’s environment like, the quality of life that I can expect? Is its strength in literature but its weakness in so many other areas a problem if I decide to abandon literature and change majors? Is the school’s large size a plus or a minus? Are the benefits of its broad range of courses, people, and extracurricular activities offset by the danger of feeling overwhelmed or anonymous at such a large institution? What about those frigid winters? What about its distance from an airport, for when I need to go home? How much should those things affect my decision?
Obviously, parallel questions will arise for the other schools. Further, a person might wonder: Should I postpone starting school and re-apply next year? Should I really go to a university at all? Is this a better option for me than working in Uncle Joe’s company? Or than joining the Marines, which has worked out so well for my cousin?
The above is easily twenty-plus questions, generated without venturing beyond the most obvious. One might object that I overcomplicate issues. After all, most of us engage in this kind of thinking quite routinely and less laboriously. My point, though, is that however attentive or deliberate a person might be, thinking largely consists of addressing a cascade of intellectual intersections, a sprawling network of questions demanding answers, and answers spawning additional questions. The number and complexity obviously depend on the primary issue. “Pepper on your salad?” does not normally warrant extended analysis. “Should I marry her?” normally does. What is important for understanding the value of religious freedom (and wider intellectual freedom) is the fact that these choices can only be made rationally if the roads to logical answers are unobstructed. If, instead, a person lives under a repressive regime in which evidence is withheld, “truth” is dictated, and permitted conclusions are strictly controlled, his process of thinking is short-circuited, stymied by No Go zones, regions of cognitive activity declared Off Limits.
To return to the person choosing a school, suppose his government denies people information about specific schools or fields of study that it deems threatening. This means that his thinking about his principal question and its numerous offshoots must be diverted to thinking about the consequences of his pursuing what he deems the logical course. That is, if he continues to explore the principal question as his judgment sees fit, he will be penalized. He must now consider the penalties attached to his course — penalties that have nothing to do with the nature of the alternatives (the schools, their programs, costs, etc.) and everything to do with the rulers’ wishes. Absent the government restrictions, he is able to assess the issue on its merits. With them, he must assess it on the basis of the external penalties he will suffer if he reaches conclusions that the authorities disapprove of.
Simply put, force is a game-changer. The threat of coercion changes the subject. It diverts a person from thinking about the best answer to a substantive question by evidence and logic to calculating, instead, what penalties would be imposed if I conclude a or b or c? How likely am I to suffer those penalties? How severe are they? Are they worth risking? This is a completely different set of questions, the pursuit of which does not advance him at all on finding the logical answer to his original question (be it about schooling, religion, or anything else). The investigation of those is sidetracked, at best, burdened by the imposition of this new cascade of questions, the answers to which tell him nothing about the merits of one school — or one religion — versus another.
In short, laws that deny intellectual freedom pre-empt a person’s ability to reach conclusions about an issue rationally — by the relevant evidence and logic. For the threat to punish deviant thoughts does not offer reasons why one conclusion is more sound than another. It does not illuminate the actual character of the alternatives. By attaching penalties to particular lanes of thought, such laws simply impose arbitrary barriers (arbitrary, insofar as they bear no relation to the logic of alternative conclusions about the substantive question).
Consider two kinds of propositions:
(1) If you do x, it will be bad for you because of the nature of x (e.g., If you maintain that diet, you are likely to suffer from heart disease).
(2) If you do x, it will be bad for you because we will punish you (e.g., If you maintain that diet, we will fine you).
Laws repressing religious freedom are of the second type. In the minds of those subject to them, their commands will stand as random roadblocks to reasoning about the issue. The restricted person is given no evidence to consider and no arguments to examine. For the purposes of rationally answering a substantive question (What should my religious views be?), they are useless. Indeed, Rand claims that they are worse than useless37 because such arbitrary imperatives impose barriers to cognition.38 Since the victim is given no reason to believe these state-ordained ideas but only reason to obey the attendant orders, they will paralyze his ability to proceed rationally. Proceeding rationally, as we have seen, would require interrogating the truth of premises, examining their logical implications, identifying the relationships between one hypothesis and other hypotheses and conclusions, and so on. When ideas are presented to a person not as entrants in the enterprise of rational examination of an issue but as edicts that stand on force, however, they will function in the mind as red lights — Stops! — to the logical progression of thought.39
To be clear, Rand’s claim is not that laws that deny intellectual freedom render a person incapable of all rational thought.40 They render him incapable of proceeding rationally within the sphere of compliance. That is, they make it impossible for him to proceed in a way that at once complies with the arbitrary demand and that follows the rational course that can lead to knowledge on the relevant question. For he must continually second-guess his mind’s rational inferences: But will this please the authorities? Will this step satisfy them, or might it appear a sign of my insubordination? Might it lead me to another inference that would upset them? If so, should I really continue along that line of thought? Appeasing those in power becomes the paramount concern, since their disfavor could quash all of a person’s plans. It is in this way that intellectual repression thwarts the use of reason and obstructs the acquisition of knowledge.41
By “values,” I mean those goods, material or spiritual, that objectively contribute to human well-being. The concept thus encompasses such things as food, clothing, and medicine as well as knowledge, art, friendship, and self-esteem. See Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, 10, 16–19, 25–27 (1964); Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, 206–20, 241–49 (1991); Tara Smith, Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality, 83–85 (2000); Tara Smith, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, 19–32.
See Ruven Chu et al., Censorship and Freedom of Speech, Stanford Computer Science.
United States vs. North Korea, Index Mundi.
International Science Ranking, Scimago J. & Country Rank.
Dezan Shira, Cambodia Recognizes First Patent Application, Asean Briefing (Mar. 12, 2015).
“Innovation in the Arab World: From Zero to Not Much More,” The Economist, June 4, 2016, at 42.
Matthew Nitch Smith, The 17 Countries with the Worst Quality of Life in the World, Business Insider (July 1, 2016).
See Economic Freedom Report, Fraser Institute; Economic Freedom Report: The Relationship Between Economic Freedom and Economic Well-Being, Fraser Institute, (summary essay on the link between economic freedom and economic well-being); 2016 Index of Economic Freedom, Heritage Foundation; Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, Cato Institute; Dan Mitchell (June 27, 2014), “The Amazing Hockey Stick of Economic Progress,” International Liberty (famous “hockey stick graph” of material growth resulting from greater freedom); Marginal Revolution University (June 25, 2014), “The Hockey Stick of Human Prosperity,” YouTube; Angus Maddison, The Contours of World Development, The World Economy (May 17, 2010).
See Ayn Rand (1967), “What Is Capitalism?,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 11, 16–17; Ayn Rand (1964), “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness, 22–24; Rand illustrates this theme dramatically across her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957). See generally Ayn Rand (1957), Atlas Shrugged (describing the necessity of freedom for man to pursue his highest potential and the society that best enables him to do so).
Rand, “What Is Capitalism?,” 17.
Rand, “What Is Capitalism?,” 17.
Don Watkins and Yaron Brook (2016), Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality, 90, 102–103.
Watkins and Brook, Equal Is Unfair, 102–103.
Deirdre McCloskey, “How Piketty Misses the Point,” Cato Policy Report (July/Aug. 2015). For extensive elaboration, see generally Deirdre McCloskey (2016), Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, vol. 3 of The Bourgeois Era (arguing that people across the world are richer than at any point in human history because of ideas and economic competition).
Amartya Sen (1999), Development as Freedom, 5.
See Sen, Development as Freedom. Sen counts as political freedoms “liberty of political participation and dissent,” “free speech and elections,” “democratic arrangements” such as “a multiparty democracy with elections and free media,” and freedom of “public discussion and participatory political decisions.” See pages 5, 11, 51–52, 123. For his definitions of specific types of freedom, see pages 38–40.
For Rand’s remarks on this, see Ayn Rand (Robert Mayhew ed., 2005), Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A, 32–34. Bear in mind that these were made in spontaneous response to oral questions.
People who do not think “can survive only by imitating and repeating a routine of work discovered by others — but those others had to discover it, or none would have survived.” Rand, “What Is Capitalism?,” 17. While the context of this statement was people who willfully refuse to think, the point applies equally to those who are forcibly prevented from thinking. Non-thinkers’ survival is made possible by those who are free to discover the knowledge that the satisfaction of their needs requires. See Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 19–20.
Wright discusses the comparable impairment of literary work, particularly drawing on the reflections of Polish author Czeslaw Milosz. Darryl Wright, Reason, Force, and the Foundations of Politics, 63. Censored writers may continue to generate output, but “[w]hat is impeded is the ability to write fluidly, authentically and insightfully.” See page 64.
Brian Leiter (2013), Why Tolerate Religion?, 10–11.
Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion?, 10–11; Jeremy Waldron (Susan Mendus ed., 1988), “Locke: Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution,” in Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives, 81.
Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion?, 10–11.
Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion?, 10–11.
Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion?, 10–11.
Lord King (1884), The Life and Letters of John Locke, 364. (Discussing what the Lockeans regard as false, that is, given their own beliefs about religious truth). Not all those who I have dubbed “Lockeans” shared the same faith, but they did each hold definite views concerning what constitutes religious truth.
Rand, “What Is Capitalism?,” 17, 23.
Rand, “What Is Capitalism?,” 2; see also Peikoff, Objectivism, 313.
Rand, “What Is Capitalism?,” 17.
Recent testimony of this comes from a victim of such intellectual repression. See generally Fang Lizhi (Perry Link, trans., 2016), The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State (Fang Lizhi describing the intellectual repression he faced as a scientist in China). His book’s theme is the “fundamental incompatibility between science and the kind of faith in their own infallibility demanded by China’s leaders.” Richard Bernstein, “‘The Most Wanted Man in China’ and ‘The Cowshed,’” New York Times, Feb. 19, 2016.
John Stuart Mill (1859), “On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” in On Liberty, 86–95 (David Browmwich and George Kateb, eds., Yale Univ. Press, 2003).
Mill, On Liberty, 86. While Mill and Rand are sometimes classified together as “libertarians,” my invoking Mill here should not be taken to suggest any deep affinities between his and Rand’s political thought. Rand had several serious differences with Mill concerning utilitarianism and individual rights, among other things.
Mill, On Liberty, 102.
Mill, On Liberty, 104.
Mill, On Liberty, 104-105.
Peikoff and Wright provide good analysis of the impact of physical force. See Peikoff, Objectivism, 310–23; Wright, Reason, Force, and the Foundations of Politics, 1–2.
John Milton (1644) (George H. Sabine, ed., Harlan Davidson, Inc. 1951), Areopagitica and Of Education, 25.
Peikoff, Objectivism, 316.
Rand, “What Is Capitalism?,” 17, 23; Peikoff, Objectivism, 313.
Yet another way to frame the difference: “Do as he says” and “Be rational” issue very different kinds of instructions. When a law commands you to “Do as we say” simply because we say it and we will hurt you if you do not (rather than because that law is rationally justified by the proper mission of government), that command is incompatible with the direction to be rational.
Rand, “What Is Capitalism?,” 17.
Other sources further explain the difference between engaging with a question when free and when under coercive threat of penalties. See Tara Smith (1995), Moral Rights and Political Freedom 143–55; Tara Smith (2015), Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System, 99–105; Peikoff, Objectivism, 310–23. Wright offers an extended breakdown of Rand’s view of the relationship between force and the human mind. Wright, Reason, Force, and the Foundations of Politics, 35–75; Darryl Wright (Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri, eds., 2016), “‘A Human Society’: Rand’s Social Philosophy,” in A Companion to Ayn Rand, 235–37. Rand frequently discussed intellectual freedom. See generally Ayn Rand (1982), Philosophy: Who Needs It, 211–30 (discussing various views of Supreme Court justices on intellectual freedom). See id. at 197–209 (discussing the problems associated with even minimal government censorship); Ayn Rand (Peter Schwartz, ed., 1999), Return of the Primitive: The Anti-industrial Revolution, 176–78.
Great article. A lot to digest. Curious as to how these thoughts square with the fact that a much less free country like China can produce such technological marvels, much more than us.