Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And
his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of
you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful
suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the
refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of
unfocusing your mind’ and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of
judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you
refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the
verdict “It is.” Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate
existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is
not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say “It
is,” you are refusing to say “I am.” By suspending your judgment, you are
negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’—he is
declaring: “Who am I to live?”
This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or
non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.