In an address given to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point on March 6, 1974, Ayn Rand explains why it is important to study philosophy.
Since I am a fiction writer, let us start with a short short story. Suppose
that you are an astronaut whose spaceship gets out of control and crashes on an
unknown planet. When you regain consciousness and find that you are not hurt
badly, the first three questions in your mind would be: Where am I? How can I
discover it? What should I do?
You see unfamiliar vegetation outside, and there is air to breathe; the
sunlight seems paler than you remember it and colder. You turn to look at the
sky, but stop. You are struck by a sudden feeling: if you don’t look, you
won’t have to know that you are, perhaps, too far from the earth and no
return is possible; so long as you don’t know it, you are free to
believe what you wish—and you experience a foggy, pleasant, but somehow guilty,
kind of hope.
You turn to your instruments: they may be damaged, you don’t know how
seriously. But you stop, struck by a sudden fear: how can you trust these
instruments? How can you be sure that they won’t mislead you? How can you know
whether they will work in a different world? You turn away from the
instruments.
Now you begin to wonder why you have no desire to do anything. It seems so much
safer just to wait for something to turn up somehow; it is better, you tell
yourself, not to rock the spaceship. Far in the distance, you see some sort of
living creatures approaching; you don’t know whether they are human, but they
walk on two feet. They, you decide, will tell you what to do.
You are never heard from again.
This is fantasy, you say? You would not act like that and no astronaut ever
would? Perhaps not. But this is the way most men live their lives, here, on
earth.
Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to
which underlie man’s every thought, feeling and action, whether he is
consciously aware of it or not: Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do?
...
The only trouble seems to be that they are not very active, not very confident,
not very happy—and they experience, at times, a causeless fear and an undefined
guilt, which they cannot explain or get rid of.
They have never discovered the fact that the trouble comes from the three
unanswered questions—and that there is only one science that can answer them:
philosophy.
--- Philosophy: Who Needs It, Ayn Rand (1974)
And here is a contrasting view, which also, in my opinion, happens to be a pretty accurate description of the modern world.
To suppress any revolt in advance, one does not have to act violently. It is enough to create collective conditioning so powerful that the very idea of revolt will no longer even occur to people. ...
An ignorant individual has only a limited horizon of thought and the more his
thinking is limited to material, mediocre concerns, the less he can revolt...
It must be ensured that access to knowledge becomes increasingly difficult and
elitist, that the gap between the people and science widens, that information
for the general public is anaesthetised of any subversive content. Above all,
no philosophy.
Mass man, thus produced, must be treated as what he is: a product, a calf, and
must be watched over as a herd must be. Anything that allows his lucidity, his
critical mind to be put to sleep is socially good, anything that would risk
awakening it must be fought, ridiculed, stifled.
Any doctrine that challenges the system must first be designated as subversive
and terrorist and those who support it must then be treated as such.
--- The Obsolescence of Man, Günther Anders, 1956.
Lucidity? What lucidity? Critical mind is deep asleep. Public education and government curriculum made sure of that.
Monero (XMR):