Evasion

Evasion is one of the two secondary choices available to a volitional being, the other being thought. It involves an active disintegration of percepts—a process of deliberately drawing false conclusions, drawing false connections between concepts, and generally of rejecting reality on the premise that if one ignores reality then one can change it. In short, we can say that evasion is the active disintegration of percepts.

In the words of Ayn Rand, evasion is:

[man’s] basic vice, the source of all his evils, [it] 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.” [Evasion] 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?”¹

The fundamental distinction between evasion and drift is that evasion is still an active process of cognition—the evader is still operating his reason to form concepts from percepts, but he is doing so in an aberrant fashion. “In the one case, the individual is immersed in fog by default; he chooses not to raise his level of awareness. In the other case, he expends energy to create a fog; he lowers his level of awareness.”² Allow me to concretise this abstraction to highlight the distinction: there is a volcano erupting, sending streams of lava down towards a man.

If this man is in drift he will be simply “blissfully”³ ignorant of the fact that the lava is rushing towards him—this information is indeed streaming in through his eyes and ears and whatever else, but these sensory impressions are just washing over him, perhaps due to some drug-induced stupor.

If the man is instead in a state of focus but is evading what he sees then perhaps he will begin praying that the lava stop, or shouting incantations at it, or reciting his philosophy 101 course that taught him that his eyes are deceiving him and that the lava is a mere subjective illusion brought about by his social conditioning. This man is not blind to the lava, he is rather “refusing to see” it.

For completeness, the man engaged in thought would be running away from the lava, or perhaps donning his suit of Rearden metal armour, or using the freeze ray that he invented last week, or sitting safely behind the anti-lava walls that were built decades ago the second people came and knew what volcanos are.