Welcome to the website of M. Northrup Buechner, Ph.D.

In "Objectivism Through Induction," Dr. Peikoff said that if a businessman is thinking about raising his price, and the government decrees no prices can be raised, then both (1) the businessman is mentally paralyzed in this delimited area; he cannot think further about raising his price, and (2) He can think about raising his price, but only as a fantasy. My question is, why is this not a contradiction?

After nine months of reflection, I have the following comments.

I think that (1) is absolutely true, for the following reasons:

The businessman cannot think about raising his price, because no matter what he thinks, he cannot act. The biological function of reason is to guide action. The fundamental evil of physical force is that it severs the link between reason and action, the link on which in principle the life of a rational being depends.

This is the crux of the evil of physical force, that it tears apart thought and action. That this is Ayn Rand's view is unmistakable in the two passage in which she identifies *how* force destroys thought. She says that the effect of force is "to negate and paralyze" thought (GS), and that "force invalidates and paralyzes a man's judgment" (CUI). The negation, the invalidation, consists of the effect on action. She makes this explicit, saying (in both cases in the same sentence), "to force him to act against his own judgment" (GS, my emphasis) and "demanding that he act against it" (CUI, my emphasis). His thought is paralyzed because it is negated, it is paralyzed because it is invalidated, and his thought is negated and invalidated because he is forced to act against it (or prevented by force from acting on it).

The paralysis is literal. The businessman literally has to stop thinking about raising his price after the government makes it illegal. This was an important new insight for me. Since the function of thought is to guide action, in stopping an action or forcing an action, force makes it irrational to think about that action.

It is through its effect on action that force destroys thought in a dictatorship. "You are free to think in Soviet Russia, but not to act on your thinking" (ARL, 9/10/73, her emphasis). The primary locus of individual thought is one's career. In the Soviet Union, any productive career required state approval at every step, in every decision, for every choice, because the state monopolized every occupation, and what was true of normal occupations was doubled or tripled for scientists. In addition, the Soviet citizen could not speak what he thought, or write it or publish it. He could not change his residence or change jobs or decide how to raise his children. He could not even think about what to do with his free time, since the state claimed it all. What could he think about? It seems that the only action of any significance for an individual life that was left to the individual was the selection of a mate -- but how do you find a mate who values freedom, when you cannot mention that you value it (thank you Harry, for this last point).

Clearly, Dr. Peikoff is right that force paralyzes thought. However, I am afraid that he would not agree with the reasons I have given above for that paralysis. If I understand him correctly, he holds that force paralyzes thought in some way independently of its effect on action.

Regarding point (2) of my April note, I do not think it is true that the businessman can think about raising his price as a fantasy. A man cannot think without a reason, goal, or purpose, and fantasizing is not thinking. Of course, Dr. Peikoff knows this very well, so I think he probably was using "think" loosely in point (2). In any case, a businessman cannot arbitrarily decide to figure out what price he would have charged, when that thought has no purpose in action.

By contrast, we can imagine purposes for which he would think: (a) He wants to demonstrate that he still controls his own mind, that his free will is intact, that he can still choose to think and to think about whatever he wants, in spite of the government's decree. (b) He plans to raise his price as a test case to challenge the law in court. (c) He has decided to break the law and charge the higher price surreptitiously. (d) He wants to figure out how much his profits are reduced as the basis for a law suitóanother test case. None of these cases remotely resembles a fantasy.

But my primary point here is the connection between force, action, and mental paralysis. I think that point can be summed up as follows: that which force removes from the realm of voluntary human action, force also removes from the realm of thought.

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