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? By the time they are old enough to understand these questions, men believe they know the answers. Where am I? Say, in New York City. How do I know it? It is self-evident. What should I do? Here they are not too sure - but the usual answer is: what everybody else does. 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 unidentified guilt, which they cannot explain or get rid of.
Evasion, by contrast, is an active process aimed at a specific content. The evader does expend effort; he purposely directs his attention away from a given fact. He works not to see it; if he cannot banish it fully, he works not to let it become completely real to him.
The drifter does not integrate his mental contents; the evader disintegrates them, by struggling to disconnect a given item from everything that would give clarity or significance in his own mind. In the one case, the individual is immersed in a 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.
To an evader, a feeling of some kind is more important than truth. A man finds a certain fact or policy to be unpleasant, frightening, or guilt-provoking. Reality to the contrary notwithstanding, he does not want the fact to be real or the policy to be necessary; so he decides to blank out the offending datum. Or a certain idea or policy gives a man pleasure, reassurance, or relief, and he wants to believe in or practice it, even though he knows reality is against him in the issue; in Ayn Rand's words, place an "I wish" above an "It is".
Unlike the basic choice to be in or out of focus, the choice to evade a specific content is motivated, the motive being the particular feeling that the evader elevates above reality.
The process of evasion, as we will see, is profoundly destructive. Epistemologically, it invalidates a mental process. Morally, it is the essence of evil. According to Objectivism, evasion is the vice that underlies all other vices. In the present era, it is leading to the collapse of the world.