Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—and of self-protection. Reason is
the most selfish human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man’s own mind,
and its product—truth—makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the
power of any pack or any ruler. Deprived of the ability to reason, man becomes
a docile, pliant, impotent chunk of clay, to be shaped into any subhuman form
and used for any purpose by anyone who wants to bother.
There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or
“limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some
authority. Philosophically, most men do not understand the issue to this day;
but psycho-epistemologically, they have sensed it since prehistoric times.
Observe the nature of mankind’s earliest legends—such as the fall of Lucifer,
“the light-bearer,” for the sin of defying authority; or the story of
Prometheus, who taught men the practical arts of survival. Power-seekers have
always known that if men are to be made submissive, the obstacle is not their
feelings, their wishes or their “instincts,” but their minds; if men are to be
ruled, then the enemy is reason.