I shall begin by giving you four examples and asking you to identify what psychological element they have in common.
1. I once knew a businessman in a large Midwestern city, who was an unusually hard-working, active, energetic person. He had built a small business of his own and had risen from poverty to affluence. He was the adviser and protector of an enormous conglomeration of relatives, friends, and friends of friends, who ran to him, not merely for loans, but for help with problems of any kind. He was in his late thirties, but acted as a sort of tribal patriarch.
It was hard to tell whether he enjoyed or resented his role; he seemed to take it for granted, as a kind of metaphysical duty: he had probably never thought of questioning it. He did enjoy acting as a small big shot, however, and doing favors for people, about which he was very generous. He had, apparently, some marginal connections with his particular district's political machine and he loved obtaining for his friends the sort of favors that were unobtainable without special pull, such as extra ration coupons (in World War II) or the fixing of traffic tickets. The concept of "friends" had some peculiar significance to him. He watched their intentions like a hypochondriac watches his health - in a manner that projected a touchy suspiciousness and a fierce loyalty to some unwritten moral code.
Politically, he tended to be a conservative, and was usually complaining about this country's trends. One day, he launched into a passionate denunciation of the liberals, the government, the unfairness to businessmen, the arbitrary power of political machines. "Do you know how powerful they are?" he asked bitterly, and proceeded to tell me that he had tried to run for some minuscule city office, but "they" had ordered him to withdraw his candidacy "or else," and he had complied.
I said that such problems would always exist so long as government controls existed, and that the only solution was a system of full, laissez-faire capitalism, under which no groups could acquire economic privileges or special pull, so that everyone would have to stand on his own. "That's impossible!" he snapped; his voice was peculiarly tense, abrupt, defensive, as if he were slamming a mental door on some barely glimpsed fact; the voice conveyed fear. I did not pursue the subject: I had grasped a psychological issue that was new to me.
2: A well-known lady novelist once wrote an essay on the nature of fiction. Adopting an extreme Naturalist position, she declared: "The distinctive mark of the novel is its concern with the actual world, the world of fact", And by "fact" she meant the immediately available facts--"the empiric element in experience." "The novel does not permit occurrences outside the order of nature - miracles… You remember how in The Brothers Karamazov when Father Zossima dies, his faction (most of the sympathetic characters in the book) expects a miracle: that his body will stay sweet and fresh because he died 'in the odor of sanctity. ' But instead he begins to stink. The stink of Father Zossima is the natural, generic smell of the novel. By the same law, a novel cannot be laid in the future, since the future, until it happens, is outside the order of nature...',
She declared that' 'the novel' s characteristic tone is one of gossip and tittle-tattle... Here is another criterion: if the breath of scandal has not touched it, the book is not a novel… The scandals of a village or a province, the scandals of a nation or of the high seas feed on facts and breed speculation. But it is of the essence of a scandal that it be finite... It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets." Why facts of this kind should be regarded as the province of theology, she did not explain. "Yet these 'scandals,' in the theological sense, of the large world and the universe have dwarfed the finite scandals of the village and the province..."
She then proceeded to explain what she regards as "the dilemma of the novelist": we forget or ignore the events of the modem world, "because their special quality is to stagger belief."
But if we think of them, "our daily life becomes incredible to us... The coexistence of the great world and us, when contemplated, appears impossible." From this, she drew a conclusion: since the novelist is motivated by his love of truth, "ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone," the novel is "of all forms the least adapted to encompass the modem world, whose leading characteristic is irreality. And that, so far as I can understand, is why the novel is dying."
3. The following story was told to me by an American businessman. In his youth, he took a job as efficiency-expert adviser to the manager of a factory in South America. The factory was using U.S. machines, but was getting only 45 percent of the machines' potential productivity. Observing the low wage scale, he concluded that the men were given no incentive to work - and suggested the introduction of pay by piecework.
The elderly manager told him, with a skeptical smile, that this would be futile, but agreed to try it.
In the first three weeks of the new plan, productivity soared.
In the fourth week, no one showed up for work: virtually the entire labor force vanished-and did not come back until a week later. Having earned a month's wages in three weeks, the workers saw no reason to work that extra week; they had no desire to earn more than they had been earning. No arguments could persuade them; the plan was discontinued.
4. A professor of philosophy once invited me to address his class on ethics; they were studying the subject of "justice" and he asked me to present the Objectivist view of justice. The format he proposed was a fifteen-minute presentation, followed by a question period. I pointed out to him that it would be very difficult to present, in fifteen minutes, the basis of the Objectivist ethics and thus give the reasons for my definition of justice.
"Oh, you don't have to give the reasons," he said, "just present your views." (1 did not comply.)
The circumstances and the people in these four examples are different; the type of mentality they display is the same. This mentality is self-made, but many different factors can contribute to its formation. These factors may be social, as in the case of the South American workers-or personal, as in the case of the lady novelist - or both, as in the case of the Midwestern businessman. As to the professor of philosophy, the modern trend of his profession is the factor responsible for all the rest.
These cases are examples of the anti-conceptual mentality.
The main characteristic of this mentality is a special kind of passivity: not passivity as such and not across-the-board, but passivity beyond a certain limit- i.e., passivity in regard to the process of conceptualization and, therefore, in regard to fundamental principles. It is a mentality which decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further. What does it accept as "enough"? The immediately given, directly perceivable concretes of its background - "the empiric element in experience."
To grasp and deal with such concretes, a human being needs a certain degree of conceptual development, a process which the brain of an animal cannot perform. But after the initial feat of learning to speak, a child can counterfeit this process, by memorization and imitation. The anti-conceptual mentality stops on this level of development - on the first levels of abstractions, which identify perceptual material consisting predominantly of physical objects - and does not choose to take the next, crucial, fully volitional step: the higher levels of abstraction from abstractions, which cannot be learned by imitation. (See my book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Such a mind can grasp the scandals of a village or a province or (at secondhand) a nation; it cannot grasp the concepts of "world" or "universe"- or the fact that their events are not "scandals."
The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as "self-evident." It treats concepts as if they were (memorized) percepts; it treats abstractions as if they were perceptual concretes. To such a mentality, everything is the given: the passage of time, the four seasons, the institution of marriage, the weather, the breeding of children, a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a revolution, a book are phenomena of the same order. The distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made is not merely unknown to this mentality, it is incommunicable.
The two cardinal questions, the prime movers of a human mind - "Why?" and "What for?"--are alien to an anti-conceptual mentality. If asked, they elicit nothing beyond the conventionally accepted answers. The answers are usually some equivalent of
"Such is life" or "One is supposed to."
Whose life? Blank out.
Supposed-by whom? Blank out.
The absence of concern with the. 'Why?' , eliminates the concept of causality and cuts off the past. The absence of concern with the "What for?" eliminates long-range purpose and cuts off the future. Thus only the present is fully real to an anti-conceptual mentality. Something of the past remains with it, in the form of stagnant bits of a random chronicle, like a kind of small talk of memory , without goal or meaning. But the future is a blank; the future cannot be grasped perceptually.
In this respect, paradoxically enough, the hidebound traditionalist and the modern college activist are two sides of the same psycho-epistemological coin. (*)
The first seeks to escape the terror of an unknownable future by seeking safety in the alleged wisdom of the past. ("What was good enough for my father, is good enough for me!") The second seeks to escape the terror of an unintelligible past by screaming his way into an indefinable future. ("If it's not good for my father, it's good enough for me!") And, paradoxically enough, neither of them is able to live in the present - because man ' s life span is a continuum whose only integrator is his conceptual faculty.
In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of association. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders.
This works, up to a certain point- i.e., so long as such a person deals with other persons whose folders are stuffed similarly, and thus no search through the entire filing system is ever required.
Within such limits, the person can be active and willing to work hard - like the Midwestern businessman, who exercised a great deal of initiative and ingenuity, within the limits set by his particular city district - like the lady novelist, who wrote many books, within the terms set by her college teachers - like the professor of philosophy, who spent his time analyzing results, without bothering about their causes.
A person of this mentality may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions (without remembering where or how he picked them up). But if one asks him what he means by a given idea, he will not be able to answer. If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty space-and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.
This kind of psycho-epistemology works so long as no part of it is challenged. But all hell breaks loose when it is - because what is threatened then is not a particular idea, but that mind's whole structure. The hell ranges from fear to resentment to stubborn evasion to hostility to panic to malice to hatred.
The best illustration of an anti-conceptual mentality is a small incident in a novel published years ago, whose title, unfortunately, I do not remember. A commonplace kind of blonde goes out on a date with a college boy; when she is asked later whether she had a good time, she answers: "No. He was awfully boring. He never said anything I'd ever heard before."
The concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality can cope only with men who are bound by the same concretes - by the same kind of "finite" world. To this mentality, it means a world in which men do not have to deal with abstract principles: principles are replaced by memorized rules of behavior, which are accepted uncritically as the given. What is "finite" in such a world is not its extension, but the degree of mental effort required of its inhabitants. When they say "finite," they mean "perceptual."
Within the limits of their rules (which are usually called "traditions"), the inhabitants of such worlds are free to function- i.e., to deal with concretes without worrying about consequences, to deal with results without bothering about causes, to deal with "facts" as discrete phenomena, unhampered by the "intangibles" of theory-and to feel safe. Safe from what?
Consciously, they would answer: "Safe from outsiders." Actually, the answer is: safe from the necessity of dealing with fundamental principles (and, consequently, safe from full responsibility for one's own life).
It is the fundamentals of philosophy (particularly, of ethics) that an anti-conceptual person dreads above all else. To understand and to apply them requires a long conceptual chain, which he has made his mind incapable of holding beyond the first, rudimentary links. If his professed beliefs - i.e., the rules and slogans of his group-are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word "outsiders," to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang - the world of all those people who do not live by his "rules." He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror. The threat is not existential, but psycho-epistemological: to deal with them requires that he rise above his
"rules" to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it.
"Protection from outsiders" is the benefit he seeks in clinging to his group. What the group demands in return is obedience to its rules, which he is eager to obey: those rules are his protection -- from the dreaded realm of abstract thought. By whom are those rules established? In theory , by tradition. In fact, by those who happen to be the leaders of his group; the way it stands in his mind is: by those who know the mysteries he does not have to know.
Thus, his survival depends on the substitution of men for ideas - and on the subordination of the metaphysical to the man-made. The metaphysical is beyond his grasp --- laws of nature cannot be grasped perceptually-but man-made rules are absolutes that protect him from the unknowable, psychologically and existentially. The group comes to his rescue if he gets into trouble - and he does not have to earn their help, it is given to him automatically, it is not at the precarious mercy of his own virtues, flaws or euors, it is his by grace of the fact that he belongs to the group.
As an example of the principle that the rational is the moral, observe that the anti-conceptual is the profoundly anti-moral.
The basic commandment of all such groups, which takes precedence over any other rules, is: loyalty to the group-not to ideas, but to people; not to the group's beliefs, which are minimal and chiefly ritualistic, but to the group's members and leaders. Whether a given member is right or wrong, the others must protect him from outsiders; whether he is innocent or guilty, the others must stand by him against outsiders; whether he is competent or not, the others must employ him or trade with him in preference to outsiders. Thus a physical qualification -the accident of birth in a given village or tribe - takes precedence over morality and justice. (But the physical is only the most frequently apparent and superficial qualification, since such groups reject the nonconforming children of their own members. The actual qualification is psycho-epistemological: men bound by the same concretes.)
Primitive tribes are an obvious example of the anti-conceptual mentality - perhaps, with some justification: savages, like children, are on the pre-conceptual level of development. Their later counterparts, however, demonstrate that this mentality is not the product of ignorance (nor is it caused by lack of intelligence): it is self-made, i.e., self-arrested. It has resisted the rise of civilization and has manifested itself in countless forms throughout history. Its symptom is always an attempt to circumvent reality by substituting men for ideas, the man-made for the metaphysical, favors for rights, special pull for merit - i.e., an attempt to reduce man's life to a small backyard (or rat hole) exempt from the absolutism of reason. (The driving motive of these attempts is deeper than power-lust: the rulers of such groups seek protection from reality as anxiously as the followers.)
Racism is an obvious manifestation of the anti-conceptual mentality; So is xenophobia -- the fear or hatred of foreigners ("outsiders"). So is any caste system, which prescribes a man's status (i.e., assigns him to a tribe) according to his birth; a caste system is perpetuated by a special kind of snobbishness (i.e., group loyalty) not merely among the aristocrats, but, perhaps more fiercely, among the commoners or even the serfs, who like to "know their place" and to guard it jealously against the outsiders from above or from below. So is guild socialism. So is any kind of ancestor worship or of family "solidarity" (the family including uncles, aunts and third cousins). So is any criminal gang.
Tribalism (which is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality) is a dominant element in Europe, as a reciprocally reinforcing cause and result of Europe's long history of caste systems, of national and local (provincial) chauvinism, of rule by brute force and endless, bloody wars. As an example, observe the Balkan nations, which are perennially bent upon exterminating one another over minuscule differences of tradition or language. Tribalism had no place in the United States-until recent decades. It could not take root here, its imported seedlings were withering away and turning to slag in the melting pot whose fire was fed by two inexhaustible sources of energy: individual rights and objective law; these two were the only protection man needed.
The remnants of European tribalism, imported by the more timid immigrants, took the innocuous form of "ethnic" neighborhoods in cities, each neighborhood offering its own customs, traditional festivals, old-country restaurants, and words in its native language on battered store-signs. Those signs were battered, 'because the men who clung to the tribal rule of giving trade priorities to fellow-tribesmen, remained in the backwaters of impoverished neighborhoods, while the torrent of productive energy that placed merit above tribe, swept past them, carrying away the best of their children.
There was no harm in such backwaters, so long as no one was forced to remain in them. The pressure of enlightenment by example was undercutting the group loyalty of the most stubbornly anti-conceptual mentalities, urging them to venture out into the great world where no man is an "outsider" (or all men are, as far as special privileges are concerned).
The disintegration of philosophy reversed this trend, Tribalism is a product of fear, and fear is the dominant emotion of any person, culture or society that rejects man's power of survival: reason. As philosophy slithered into the primitive swamp of irrationalism, men were driven -- existentially and psychologically - into its primordial corollary: tribalism. Existentially, the rise of the welfare state broke up the country into pressure groups, each fighting for special privileges at the expense of the others - so that an individual unaffiliated with any group became fair game for tribal predators. Psychologically, Pragmatism lobotomized the country's intellectuals: John Dewey's theory of "Progressive" education (which has dominated the schools for close to half a century), established a method of crippling a child's conceptual faculty and replacing cognition with "social adjustment", It was and is a systematic attempt to manufacture tribal mentalities. (See my article "The Comprachicos" in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.)
Observe that today's resurgence of tribalism is not a product of the lower classes of the poor, the helpless, the ignorant - but of the intellectuals, the college-educated "elitists" (which is a purely tribalistic term). Observe the proliferation of grotesque herds or gangs -- hippies, yippies, beatniks, peaceniks, Women's Libs, Gay Libs, Jesus Freaks, Earth Children - which are not tribes, but shifting aggregates of people desperately seeking tribal "protection,"
The common denominator of all such gangs is the belief in motion (mass demonstrations), not action - in chanting, not arguing-in demanding, not achieving-in feeling, not thinking - in denouncing "outsiders," not in pursuing values - in focusing only on the "now," the "today" without a "tomorrow" - in seeking to return to "nature," to "the earth," to the mud, to physical labor, i.e., to all the things which a perceptual mentality is able to handle. You don't see advocates of reason and science clogging a street in the belief that using their bodies to stop traffic, will solve any problem.
Most of those embryonic tribal gangs are leftist or collectivist.
But as a demonstration of the fact that the cause of tribalism is deeper than politics, there are tribalists still further removed from reality, who claim to be rightists. They are champions of individualism, they claim, which they define as the right to form one's own gang and use physical force against others - and they intend to preserve capitalism, they claim, by replacing it with anarchism (establishing "private" or "competing" governments, i.e., tribal rule). The common denominator of such individualists is the desire to escape from objectivity (objectivity requires a very long conceptual chain and very abstract principles), to act on whim, and to deal with men rather than with ideas - i.e., with the men of their own gang bound by the same concretes.
These rightists' distance from reality may be gauged by the fact that they are unable to recognize the actual examples of their ideals in practice, One such example is the Mafia. The Mafia (or "family") is a "private government," with subjects who chose to join it voluntarily, with a rigid set of rules rigidly, efficiently and bloodily enforced, a "government" that undertakes to protect you from "outsiders" and to enforce your immediate interests - at the price of your selling your soul, i.e., of your total obedience to any "favor" it may demand. Another example of a "government" without territorial sovereignty is offered by the Palestinian guerrillas, who have no country of their own, but who engage in terrorist attacks and slaughter of "outsiders" anywhere on earth.
The activist manifestations of modern tribalism, of Left or "Right," are crude extremes. It is the subtler manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality that are more tragic and harder to deal with. These are the "mixed economies" of the spirit - the men torn inwardly between tribal emotions and scattered fragments of thought-the products of modern education who do not like the nature of what they feel, but have never learned to think.
Since early childhood, their emotions have been conditioned by the tribal premise that one must "belong," one must be "in," one must swim with the "mainstream," one must follow the lead of "those who know." A man's frustrated mind adds another emotion to the tribal conditioning: a blindly bitter resentment of his own intellectual subservience. Modern men are gregarious and antisocial at the same time. They have no inkling of what constitutes a rational human association.
There is a crucial difference between an association and a tribe. Just as a proper society is ruled by laws, not by men, so a proper association is united by ideas, not by men, and its members are loyal to the ideas, not to the group. It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one's own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.) - not by the physiological or geographical accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition.
When men are united by ideas, i.e., by explicit principles, there is no room for favors, whims, or arbitrary power: the principles serve as an objective criterion for determining actions and for judging men, whether leaders or members.
This requires a high degree of conceptual development and independence, which the anti-conceptual mentality is desperately struggling to avoid. But this is the only way men can work together justly, benevolently and safely. There is no way for men to survive on the perceptual level of consciousness.
I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. But a certain hypothesis has haunted me for years; I want to stress that it is only a hypothesis. There is an enormous breach of continuity between man and all the other living species. The difference lies in the nature of man's consciousness, in its distinctive characteristic: his conceptual faculty. It is as if, after aeons of physiological development, the evolutionary process altered its course, and the higher stages of development focused primarily on the consciousness of living species, not their bodies. But the development of a man's consciousness is volitional: no matter what the innate degree of his intelligence, he must develop it, he must learn how to use it, he must become a human being by choice. What if he does not choose to? Then he becomes a transitional phenomenon -- a desperate creature that struggles frantically against his own nature, longing for the effortless "safety" of an animal's consciousness, which he cannot recapture, and rebelling against a human consciousness, which he is afraid to achieve.
For years, scientists have been looking for a "missing link" between man and animals. Perhaps that missing link is the anti-conceptual mentality.

'The Missing Link' was written in 1973 and appears in Ayn Rand's Philosophy: Who Needs It, released in 1982.