Chapter 1, For the New Intellectual Summary and Analysis

Rand opens proclaiming that in a dying society, individuals have two choices: to deluding themselves or facing the truth and rebuild. She sees the United States as following the first course and wants her story to be the one that wakes it up. A culture should be judged by its dominant philosophy, as express in morality, politics, economics and art. Intellectuals are a nation's bodyguards but America's bodyguards have become corrupt. All the primary philosophical, psychological, economic and social doctrines of the age preach that man is feeble, as is his mind, that he has no free will, responsibility or merit, that he is wicked and that no man should strive to be great.

The reaction to decline is no solution as it involves becoming anti-intellectual, relying on folksy wisdom instead. The intellectual...