Thinking is not only necessary to get and keep a good job, succeed in school and win at board games; it is required to make sound decisions and take beneficial actions. In other words, your brain isn’t merely for business, chemistry, and Monopolyr, but also for guiding your life.
You know that you won’t get far in chemistry class without understanding the periodic table of the elements, the Bohr or later models of the atom, or how to apply these ideas.
What most people fail to realize is that you can’t succeed in a much more important area, the living of your life, without principles derived from observation with equal scientific rigor.
You wouldn’t tell a surgeon to operate on you guided by his feelings, whims, or wishes.
Your life, after all, depends on his knowledge of human anatomy and on his acquired skill and practiced technique. Your life, however, is exactly what is at stake in every decision you make.
It is true that acting purely on impulse or sacrificing your happiness to others may not kill you instantly, as a doctor’s mistake might. However, suicide can be performed in slow motion as well.
Consistently evading facts or sacrificing interests may not be an immediate a road to destruction, but it is a path that leads only to one place.
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged depicts a world where the importance of thought is impossible to evade—a world where the men of the mind go on strike.
It shows the negative effects in industry, government, art, and ethics. It demonstrates that, in every field, it is human thought that is the precondition for success, achievement and happiness.
It is this message that is crucial to everyone’s life and it is for this reason that everyone should read Atlas Shrugged.