I believe that many times it does.
And there lies the soil in which all evil grows:
Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all others proceed.
And his basic vice, the source of all his evils,
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."
Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence,
an attempt to wipe out reality.
But existence exists; reality is not 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?"
"There is only one thing you can do when faced with a free man -- kill him."
People need to stop responding to threats in the fashion they do, once you start being pragmatic when faced with a threat you have begun to comply, and like blackmail you will comply again and again for you have sold your ethics.
If one is faced with a law they truly believe unjust, tell the judge you will not pay, for by doing so you have just sold your principles, tell him you will accept the consequences of holding those principles NO MATTER WHAT THEY ARE.
If fear of ridicule or retribution ties your tongue and keeps you from speaking the truth as you heart knows it -- you have just sold your ability to be righteous and you have tainted your loyalty to that which is good and right, and the next time you see someone ignoring their duty to the truth you are inclined to forgive them, for they are just like you, a sinner.
This is the soil in which evil grows, the threat and the silence and the guilt sweep the world into an apathy in which we absolve ourselves by gesturing to the whole and deeming it hopeless, condemning ourselves to insignificance.
Where once was a man, now slithers a worm, concerned only for himself and what he can grub out of the sewer he, via cowardice, helped create.
The venom begins to form, the disgust, the search for the 'evil ones' who are to blame, who have 'exploited the world' or 'sown lecherous thoughts' or 'those who hate'....
The holy war begins, the alignments of confusion and lies, the human sacrifice meant to eradicate the source of the intangible 'thing' the 'evil' that haunts and corrodes.
A perpetual folly, the excorcism of what cannot be extracted - a void within man.
That void is the insufficient respect for true courage, the lack of adherence to principles no matter the cost. Without that, man is forever on his belly, seeking the security of the womb, and the pleasant dream-state of sleep, of death.
A wonderful quote, and a lot of FR people will agree with it wholeheartedly...until you tell them it was written by Ayn Rand. LOL!