Excerpt from web page titled "Getting to Our Fantastic, Non-fictional Future", dated February 10, 2011, by Edward Hudgins, at
http://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/4378-getting-to-our-fantastic-non-fictional-future

(This excerpt was shared on Twinkie BBS in the Spirituality Forum by me on 9/15/2016.)

"... A society is composed of individual human beings. They have volition. They have their own individual goals and aspirations. They are not the stuff to be manipulated to make some collective called 'society' happy and prosperous. A society is made up of such individuals who themselves are the ones who seek their own happiness and prosperity in community with others.

"Reason in the Individual

"So you get the point. Pointy-headed intellectuals and philosopher-kings should not rule their fellows. That’s not how reason brings us a brighter tomorrow.

"Consider how that vision contrasts with Ayn Rand ’s portrayal of Galt’s Gulch in _Atlas Shrugged_ . No one rules this hidden valley in Colorado. Men and women have gathered here to escape from the sort of totalitarian rulers that Marxists and American progressives would foist upon us. As in other utopian visions, there is no conflict in the valley and no need for police or jails. Individuals are prosperous, productive, and happy. They consider themselves fortunate to be in such a world. 

"So how is Galt’s Gulch different from the other failed utopias? Those who are attracted to Rand’s vision should understand it as partly allegorical and not to be taken as an anarcho-paradise that we can literally bring about. Both Rand herself and the Objectivist philosophy recognize the need for objective law, police to enforce laws, and courts to administer justice. There will always be bad people as well as good ones. But the vision of Galt’s Gulch is important for what it illustrates about the nature of the best society.

"To begin with, individuals in this vision put their own self-interest and lives first, not the good of society. Individuals seek the best for themselves and use their rational capacity to rule themselves, and—this is crucial—to discover what actually is in their self-interest.

"'Rational' in this context does not simply mean being clever in pursuit of any old subjective end. Cheats use their brains to scam old ladies through internet cons. Liars use their brains to get elected to political office in order to line their own pockets and help their cronies. Religious cult leaders and political demagogues can cleverly manipulate the minds of their followers. Drunks and drug addicts might be smart enough to secure enough money to continue on a path to self-destruction.

"Rational self-interest actually consists of acting in the objective ways, consistent with our nature, that will best allow us to survive and flourish. It requires the virtue of honesty. One must always strive for the truth whether that knowledge will topple some cherished prejudice or not; that is, one must never attempt to fake reality. 

"It requires the virtue of independence. Individuals must take the responsibility of judging for themselves, by their own lights, what is best for themselves and how best to achieve their goals. This means that they must not be content to follow what others think because majority opinion doesn’t make truth. Millions of others can and have been wrong.

"It requires the virtue of productivity, of recognizing that one must create the means of one’s own survival and flourishing. And it requires that individuals take pride in their productive achievements.

"Rand shows us in Galt’s Gulch what sort of society we might expect if individuals ran their lives according to rational self-interest. We would have productive individuals trading with one another, respecting the individual liberty of one another, having benevolence toward others, and giving others the spiritual thanks they earn through their virtues and efforts.

"Let’s now ask how we might proceed to this better future. What are the practical paths to a better, more virtuous tomorrow? There are many paths but I will offer three here that are crucial but often overlooked.

"The Path From the Cradle

"'Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.' So goes the old Jesuit saying. Almost two millennia earlier Plato was quite clear that his ideal republic would be firmly rooted right from the cradle in the right education. Rational individualists can rightly reject the educational content coming from the Society of Jesus and the Academy in Athens. But they should recognize the importance of childhood education for relatively swift social change and even for its revolutionary potential.

"Take the example of the Sunday School movement in Britain. The 1700s saw the migration of rural populations into London and other urban centers as a result of industrialization. This shift also resulted in serious social problems, most notably urban crime, resulting in part from economic insecurity and from the severing of rural peoples from the institutions that had previously ordered their lives.

"But in the 1780s Christian denominations—Methodists most notably—began founding Sunday Schools for the children of the newly urbanized population. These schools supplemented regular church services, which tended to be stale and rote. In these schools, children learned basic civil behavior and literacy as well as Bible lessons. By 1831 some 1.25 million British children attended Sunday Schools, perhaps a quarter of the youth population. These schools had much to do with preventing Britain from having the problems with radicalized proletariats that would plague other countries.

"When Objectivists and libertarians think about a better world of free and rational individualists, they too rarely focus on the moral foundations that are laid down in childhood. One does not have to be a determinist to appreciate that how children are raised will strongly influence their moral character. Sure, individuals can overcome bad childhoods and bad cultures. But not easily!

"Ayn Rand understood the importance of child-rearing. In Galt’s Gulch one striker tells Dagny Taggart that the striker’s two children 'represent my particular career.' She explains that 'I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror.'

"It will make a difference to tomorrow’s adult citizens whether as children they are raised to accept the pronouncement of authorities without question or to be inquisitive, to question, and to try to understand any idea presented to them; whether they are allowed to be the puppets of peer group pressures or are trained in the virtue of independence; whether they are allowed to behave in any way they wish without suffering adverse consequences or are taught to take personal responsibility for their actions; whether they are allowed to indulge every whim of the moment or are encouraged to have long-term goals; whether they are allowed to behave toward others any way they wish or are taught to respect others and to expect respect themselves.

"Children who are raised with their own flourishing as adults in mind will not only have the best chance of being happy, they will also be the citizens of a future society worth living in.

"One approach to childhood education that treats children as unique individuals and effectively fosters their flourishing is the Montessori method. Marsha Enright of the Council Oak Montessori School (Chicago) and the Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute, is most notable for bringing to this approach the Objectivist philosophy. Central to Enright's work are methods that emphasize the importance of the mind and techniques that foster independent thought, self-fulfillment, and self-responsibility.

"We’ve also seen in recent decades breakthrough work in evolutionary psychology and in understanding the functioning of the human brain and emotions. This work has profound implications for education. Knowing how our brains are hardwired, how the mind works, how our emotional infrastructure affects our thinking, and what tendencies we’ve inherited from our prehistoric ancestors will help us to develop better ways to raise our children as well as to guide our lives as adults.

"For example, many people, educators included, see the first step to rational thinking as suppressing one’s emotions so that one can calculate coolly. But Antonio Damasio, author of _Descartes’ Error: Emotions, Reason, and the Human Brain_, shows that it is impossible to separate thinking and emotions. He reports on cases in which patients with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex of their brains lose most of their emotional lives. But rather than suddenly being able to think clearly like a computer, they find it difficult to make rational judgments at all.

"Work done and reported by Jonathan Haidt, author of _The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom_, shows that most individuals often (and without their being fully aware of what they are doing) make decisions on moral matters based on deeply ingrained, perhaps biologically-based biases. Most people use reason to rationalize such judgments after the fact.

"Pascal Boyer, author of _Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought_, makes a strong case for most religious beliefs having a basis in biology. Specifically he argued that the way the mind functions to make inferences tends to bias us toward explanations of natural phenomena in terms of conscious intent.

"So do all of these findings suggest that we are at the mercy of our biology, that it’s impossible to think clearly and use reason to acquire truth? No. But it does suggest that we must recognize in us these possibly biological-based, hard-wired tendencies and make allowances for them in our own thinking and in the training of the young.

"We know, for example, that the desire for sweet and fattening foods has a biological basis. We know that children are prone to eat as much cake and ice cream as they can shove into their little mouths. And we know that parents can train their children in how to discipline those appetites and develop the habits of moderation. Those wanting a better future could not do better than to consider seriously how children might be trained to recognize and deal with their own biases in thinking.

"If those who wish a world of rational individualists in decades hence focus on child-rearing and childhood education, then they will be thanked in that future world by those they have raised.

"The Path Through the Wide Academy

"Most young people have their basic moral character formed before they reach colleges and universities. But even well-raised children can have their minds crippled by bad university education. And those who have might not have received the best nurturing possible can have their minds improved depending on the content and experience of their higher education. Many of the ideas formed in academia will, for better of worse, fire their interests; engage their minds; command their time, talents and mental efforts; form their understanding of the world; and cement in place the values that will guide their lives.

"We know the bad news. Faculties are heavily biased toward the political left. In their 2006 study _Political Beliefs & Behavior_, Gary Tobin and Aryeh Weinberg reported the findings of their random survey of 6,600 faculty members. Some 48 percent identify themselves as liberal compared to only 17 percent as conservative. A full 60 percent of social science and humanities faculty self-identify as liberal compared to 12 percent as conservative. Incredibly, only 35 percent of business faculty identify themselves as conservative. 'Conservative' certainly doesn’t equal 'rational individualist' and it would have been nice to have a third choice—libertarian. But the bias to the left is still clear.

"Curricula are terrible. They increasingly eliminate basic education, often in favor of politically-correct indoctrination. ..."