Test Level 3: Inference and Application - CAT MCQ

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

Liberia has been hemorrhaging heavily. Even before the recent fighting, humanitarian workers had access to barely a third of the country. Later, as the fighting grew more intense, the safety of those who could have saved the lives of others could no longer be ensured. Relief work ground to a halt. An already explosive humanitarian situation burst at the seams. Acute shortages of food and water are reported and cholera is rampant. The then cycle of violence cost a staggering 150,000 lives.
Liberia's suffering has prompted some to advocate a limited police action: go in quickly, shoot the law-breakers, restore security and feed the people. These sentiments are laudable. But humanitarian interventions that have to conjure up policing are fraught with not just collateral risks for those who are engaged. They also raise serious questions vis-vis national sovereignty. The international community has yet to clearly agree on the basis and scope of humanitarian interventions.
In the interim, peacekeeping appears to be an honourable compromise and first-aid to the suffering. Peacekeepers thus continue to be the most visible demonstration of humanity's concern for fellow human beings. However, the hiatus between the expectations of the suffering and what peacekeepers can do for them remains. Peacekeepers are erroneously expected to overwhelm unruly and rogue elements, punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The problem is that this expectation, though understandable, is antithetical to peacekeeping which in essence is non-judgmental. Based on consent, impartiality and use of force only for self-defense, the peacekeepers' first lesson is not to take sides. Punitive action, however desirable, does not therefore fall strictly as yet within the realm of peacekeeping. In fact, the United Nations Charter did not foresee peacekeeping at all. Against the backdrop of two world wars, the framers of the U.N. Charter envisaged collective security to deter an aggressor akin to the perpetrators of the two world wars. Thanks to the cold war it soon became apparent that aggressions of the world war kind may not be replicated and transnational conflicts could be contained from spiraling into a global war. The cold war also kept a lid on simmering ethnic and civil discontent. Inter-state conflicts were consequently relatively straightforward for the architects of peacekeeping. Parties came under heavy pressure to relent the moment they began hostilities. Frequently this led to a ceasefire. The ceasefire needed to hold lest breaches became a reason for fresh hostilities. Against this canvass, the presence of outside non-partisan elements was conceived as a practical measure to aid in the maintenance and consolidation of the truce. As a spin-off, this presence would contribute to a climate conducive for the parties to talk out their differences in calm, and to ease the plight of innocents.
With time, however, peacekeeping has had to undergo changes. A complex world has now rendered peacekeeping multifunctional. No more is peacekeeping limited to just observing truces or ceasefires. Humanitarian assistance has increasingly become the staple of peacekeeping. Demobilization, election monitoring, reconstruction, institution building and even administering - on an interim or transitional basis - are some of the myriad tasks that have come within peacekeeping's ambit.
But nowhere down the road had the original precepts of peacekeeping changed to a policing role for peacekeepers, at least not until Rwanda and Srebrenica violently challenged the status quo. Peacekeepers should not normally distinguish between perpetrators and victims; and even if they can they may not have the means to prevent a tragedy as seen in those cases. Therefore, without the means there is no use in sending peacekeepers just to be turned into casualty statistics. Yet for those who are struck by the horrors of a war brought to their doorsteps by cable television, and for those who bear the brunt of suffering these nuances are immaterial. The very precepts of the U.N. demand that we do not simply watch, but do something.
Yet it is unclear if the international community is more willing and able since then to commit itself to preventing such wrongs. Without that resolve and concomitant, determined involvement, an over-ambitious role for lightly-armed peacekeepers might render the exercise farcical.

Q. The presence of outside non-partisan elements in the troubled state, had which of the following effects?
I. It aided in maintenance and consolidation of the truce.
II. It led to establishment of independent states.
III. It provided a climate conducive for parties to talk out their differences.

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

THE DECADES-OLD proposal to link all of India's major rivers with one another was revived with much fanfare last year. Most political parties welcomed it then as a solution to the country's drinking water and irrigation problems. But it has not taken long for the proposal to come face to face with the hard reality of planning what will be the largest project ever taken up in India. A number of States, from Punjab in the north to Kerala in the south, have expressed their opposition to a transfer of river waters from their territory to other States. The latest example is the considerable anxiety in Kerala about including a link between the Pampa and the Achankovil (flowing through Kerala) and the Vaippar (in Tamil Nadu) in the proposed national river grid. This is only one of many reasons why the ambitious, many would say unrealistic. Schedules for execution of the project have already been thrown out of gear.
The high-level task force on the project, constituted in December 2002, was expected to prepare the schedule for completion of feasibility studies and estimate the cost of the project by the end of April this year. It was to then come up in June with the options for funding the project. It was also expected to convene a meeting in May/June of State Chief Ministers and obtain their agreement and cooperation. None of these deadlines has been met and there is no indication that these events will take place in the near future. This is not surprising, for while the interlinking proposal has been spoken about for decades, all the complex engineering, economic, environmental and social issues involved in the project have never been carefully studied. It is, therefore, not an easy task to draw up in a few months even the time lines for implementation. It will also be impossible to complete within a decade (as decreed by the Supreme Court) execution of a project that at first approximation is estimated to cost Rs. 5,60,000 crores, which is twice the size of India's gross domestic product at present. In fact, the one Government committee that did examine aspects of the proposal to some extent, the National Commission for an Integrated Water Resources Development Plan, was in 1999 ambivalent about the benefits of interlinking the country's rivers.
The drought of 2002 was the context in which the proposal to build a grid connecting India's rivers was revived. Before another drought leads to another round of active interest in the project, it is necessary to come up with answers to two broad sets of questions. The first question is, what will be the total costs and benefits of a river grid project in economic, environmental and social terms. The second will be, what are the different options to meet the future requirements of water and is the interlinking proposal the best among them. Answers to these questions will have to address issues in agricultural technology, patterns of water use, extraction of ground and surface water resources, efficiency in consumption of water in crop cultivation, resource mobilization, human displacement and changes in the environment. A plan on such a scale and of such complexity as the proposal to link the country's rivers can be taken up only after a range of such substantive issues are analyzed threadbare.

Q. What is the main idea of the passage?

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

THE DECADES-OLD proposal to link all of India's major rivers with one another was revived with much fanfare last year. Most political parties welcomed it then as a solution to the country's drinking water and irrigation problems. But it has not taken long for the proposal to come face to face with the hard reality of planning what will be the largest project ever taken up in India. A number of States, from Punjab in the north to Kerala in the south, have expressed their opposition to a transfer of river waters from their territory to other States. The latest example is the considerable anxiety in Kerala about including a link between the Pampa and the Achankovil (flowing through Kerala) and the Vaippar (in Tamil Nadu) in the proposed national river grid. This is only one of many reasons why the ambitious, many would say unrealistic. Schedules for execution of the project have already been thrown out of gear.
The high-level task force on the project, constituted in December 2002, was expected to prepare the schedule for completion of feasibility studies and estimate the cost of the project by the end of April this year. It was to then come up in June with the options for funding the project. It was also expected to convene a meeting in May/June of State Chief Ministers and obtain their agreement and cooperation. None of these deadlines has been met and there is no indication that these events will take place in the near future. This is not surprising, for while the interlinking proposal has been spoken about for decades, all the complex engineering, economic, environmental and social issues involved in the project have never been carefully studied. It is, therefore, not an easy task to draw up in a few months even the time lines for implementation. It will also be impossible to complete within a decade (as decreed by the Supreme Court) execution of a project that at first approximation is estimated to cost Rs. 5,60,000 crores, which is twice the size of India's gross domestic product at present. In fact, the one Government committee that did examine aspects of the proposal to some extent, the National Commission for an Integrated Water Resources Development Plan, was in 1999 ambivalent about the benefits of interlinking the country's rivers.
The drought of 2002 was the context in which the proposal to build a grid connecting India's rivers was revived. Before another drought leads to another round of active interest in the project, it is necessary to come up with answers to two broad sets of questions. The first question is, what will be the total costs and benefits of a river grid project in economic, environmental and social terms. The second will be, what are the different options to meet the future requirements of water and is the interlinking proposal the best among them. Answers to these questions will have to address issues in agricultural technology, patterns of water use, extraction of ground and surface water resources, efficiency in consumption of water in crop cultivation, resource mobilization, human displacement and changes in the environment. A plan on such a scale and of such complexity as the proposal to link the country's rivers can be taken up only after a range of such substantive issues are analyzed threadbare.

Q. The passage is likely to have been sourced from

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

Esteemed members of the Jury …. If you want to condemn these twenty men, then do it. I beseech no kindness on behalf of any one of them. They are no better than any other twenty men or women; they are no better than the millions down through the times who have been indicted and convicted in cases like this. And if it is obligatory for my clients to show that America is like all the rest, if it is necessary that my clients shall go to penitentiary to show it, then let them go. They can afford it if you members of the jury can; make no mistake about that.
The State says my clients “dare to disparage the Constitution.” Yet this police officer (who the State says is a fine, right–living person) twice dishonored the federal Constitution while a prosecuting attorney was standing by. They entered Mr. Foster’s home without a search warrant. They overhauled his papers. They found a flag, a red one, which he had the same right to have in his house that you have to keep a green one, or a yellow one, or any other color, and the officer daringly rolled it up and put another flag on the wall, nailed it there. By what right was that done? What about this kind of patriotism that violates the Constitution? Has it come to pass in this country that officers of the law can trample on constitutional rights and then excuse it in a court of justice?
Most of what has been shown to this jury to incite emotions in your souls has not the least bearing on confirming conspiracy in this case. Take Mr. Hepburn’s speech in Aspen. It is devoid of any conspiracy whatsoever.
Whether that speech was a comic story or was serious, I shall spare the efforts of discussing it. But I shall make a point to state that if it was serious it was as gentle as a summer’s spell of rain in contrast with many of the avowals of those who are accountable for working conditions in this country. We have heard from people of position assert that individuals who carp the actions of those who are getting prosperous should be put in a cement ship with leaden sails and sent out to sea. Every vicious appeal that could be envisaged by the brain has been used by the dominant and the strong. I reiterate, Mr. Hepburn’s speech was gentle in comparison.
My clients are damned because they say in their platform that, while they vote, they believe the ballot is secondary to education and organization. Counsel proposes that those who get something they did not vote for are sinners, but I guess you the jury know in true light that my clients are right. Most of you have an eight–hour day. Did you get it by any vote you ever cast? No. It came about because workers laid down their tools and said we will no longer work until we get an eight–hour day. That is how they got the twelve–hour day, the ten–hour day, and the eight–hour day–not by voting but by laying down their tools. Then when it was over and the victory won . . . then the politicians, in order to get the labor vote, passed legislation creating an eight–hour day. That is how things changed; victory preceded law . . .
You have been informed that if you acquit these defendants you will be despised because you will endorse everything they believe. But I am not here to defend my clients’ belief. I am here to protect their right to communicate their outlook. I ask you, then; to make your mind up on this case upon the facts as you have heard them, in light of the law as you infer it, in light of the history of our country, whose foundation you and I are ought to guard.

Q. The statement that "They can afford it if you members of the jury can" is most likely meant to imply that

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on their content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

Sartre was not alone or wholly original in marrying phenomenology and existentialism into a single philosophy. Phenomenology had already undergone the profound transformation into ‘fundamental ontology’ at the hands of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his large, if incomplete, 1927 masterwork, Being and Time. The book is an examination of what it means to be, especially as this is disclosed through one’s own existence. The 1945 synthesis of phenomenology and existentialism in 'Phenomenology of Perception’ (Phenomenologie die la Perception) by Maurice Merleau – Ponty, Sartre’s philosophical friend and political antagonist, follows hard on the heels of Sartre’s own 1943 synthesis, Being and Nothingness with which it is partly inconsistent. Sartre’s existentialism, like that of Merleau Ponty, is ‘existential phenomenology’. Maurice Merleau–Ponty offers a phenomenology of the body which eschews mind–body dualism, reductivist materialism and idealism. He influenced Sartre politically and collaborated in editing Les Temps Modernes but broke with Sartre over what he saw as the latter’s ‘ultrabolshevism’.
Sartre’s Marxism was never a pure Marxism. Not only did he never join the PCF (Parti Communiste Francais), the second massive synthesis of his philosophical career was the fusion of Marxism with existentialism. The large 1960 first volume of ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ is an attempt to exhibit existentialist philosophy and Marxist political theory as not only mutually consistent but as mutually dependent: as dialectically requiring one another for an adequate understanding of human reality. This neo–Hegelian ‘totalizing’ philosophy promises us all the intellectual apparatus we need to understand the direction of history and the unique human individual in their complex mutual constitution. The German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770 – 1831) thought that philosophical problems could be exhibited as apparent contradictions that could be relieved, overcome or ‘synthesized’. Hence, for example, human beings are both free and causally determined, both mental and physical, social and individual, subjective and objective, and so on; not one to the exclusion of the other. ‘Synthetic’ or ‘totalizing’ philosophy shows seemingly mutually exclusive views to be not only compatible but mutually necessary.
Sartre’s Marxism is a ‘humanistic’ Marxism. His faith in Marxism as the most advanced philosophy of human liberation is tempered by his awareness of the crushing of the aspirations of the human individual by actual Marxism in, for example, the Soviet collectivization of the farms and purges of the 1930s and 1940s, the suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the decades of atrocities in the Soviet Gulag, the ending of the Prague Spring in 1968. Like the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, Sartre does not think the oppression of the individual by communism is only a problem of political practice. He thinks Marxist political theory is misconstrued. Unlike Popper however, he seeks to humanize Marxist theory rather than reject it utterly. Also unlike Popper, he thinks the neglected resources for a theory of the freedom of the individual can be found within the early writings of Marx himself. The young Marx is to be construed as a kind of proto–existentialist.
The putative synthesis of existentialism and Marxism is extraordinarily ambitious. Some of the most fundamental and intractable problems of metaphysics and the philosophy of mind are obstacles to that synthesis. Classical Marxism is determinist and materialist. Sartre’s existentialism is libertarian and phenomenological. Marxism includes a theory of history with prescriptive prognoses for the future. Existentialism explores agency in a spontaneous present which bestows only a derivative existence on past and future. Marxism is a social theory in which class is the subject and object of change. In existentialism, individuals do things and things are done to individuals. Marxism has pretensions to be a science. Existentialism regards science as part of the very problem of dehumanization and alienation.
Despite the fact that Sartre’s overt anarchism emerges only at the end of his life – it is mainly professed in a series of interviews with the then secretary Benny Levy for the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur – Sartre also claimed in the 1970s that he had always been an anarchist.

Q. Maurice Merleau-Ponty became political adversary of Sartre because of what he considers

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

The 1980s have come to be regarded as the decade of corporate consolidation in the United States, with the number of mergers and their dollar value both setting records. Many public forums have questioned, on both social and economic grounds, the merits of this takeover frenzy. Even more controversial than the mergers themselves, however, is the reaction of the management of target firms. No longer is management content to be passive or to put up minimal resistance in the face of an unwelcome takeover attempt. Indeed, the responses of target managements have become as imaginative as the methods used by the would–be acquirers. These so–called anti-takeover tactics have received nearly universal condemnation from government regulatory bodies, the financial press, and some academic publications. Why is there so much criticism when management resists takeovers? At the most general level, such criticism is based on studies that find a negative return to shareholders when a negotiated (friendly) merger is unsuccessful. These studies examine the cumulative return from the period just prior to the first public announcement of the proposed merger through the announcement of cancellation. Results range from a total return of –9.02 per cent to + 3.68 per cent, with an average of –2.88 percent. In unsuccessful mergers, therefore, stockholders in target firms lose on average nearly 3 per cent of the shares' value.
But looking at the returns only through the termination date can be misleading. Other studies examining the period from six months prior to an offer to six months after the offer have found that the total return averages nearly +36 per cent, even though the offer was unsuccessful. Given the typical stock market reaction to unsuccessful negotiated mergers, this is a curious finding. The explanation for this seeming anomaly emerges when firms are divided into two groups: those eventually acquired by some other bidder, and those not acquired. Firms that were not acquired eventually lost the entire 36 per cent return. But firms subsequently acquired, earned an additional 20 per cent return above the initial 36 per cent, earning shareholders a total return of 56 per cent. Those earnings compare favorably to the overall average return of 30 percent earned by shareholders & of all companies successfully acquired. These results suggest that some form of resistance by management may be desirable. Playing "hard to get" may influence the initial suitor to increase the bid, or it may permit time for competing bids to be submitted. It is possible, however, to have too much of a good thing. When management actions are designed solely to eliminate a takeover by a specific bidder, then shareholders may be harmed. Nevertheless, anti-takeover tactics do not deserve the blanket condemnation they receive  in the press.

Q. According to the passage, under which of the following conditions do firms, on the average, yield the greatest return to their shareholders?

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

One can never know, only surmise, what tragedies, despair and silent devastation have been going on for over a century in the invisible underground of the intellectual professions – in the souls of their practitioners – nor what caIculable potential of human ability and integrity perished in those hidden, lonely conflicts. The young minds who came to the field of the intellect with the inarticulate sense of a crusade, seeking rational answers to the problems of achieving a meaningful human existence, found a philosophical con game in place of guidance and leadership. Some of them gave up the field of ideas, in hopeless, indignant frustration, and vanished into the silence of subjectivity. Others gave in and saw their eagerness turn into bitterness, their quest into apathy, their crusade into a cynical racket. They condemned themselves to the chronic anxiety of a con man dreading exposure when they accepted the roles of enlightened leaders, while knowing that their knowledge rested on nothing but fog and that its only validation was somebody’s feelings.
They, the standard bearers of the mind, found themselves dreading reason as an enemy, logic as a pursuer, thought as an avenger. They, the proponents of ideas, found themselves clinging to the belief that ideas were important: their choice was the futility of a charlatan or the guilt of a traitor. They were not mediocrities when they began their careers; they were pretentious mediocrities when they ended. The exceptions are growing rarer with every generation. No one can accept with psychological impunity the function of a Witch Doctor under the banner of the intellect. With nothing but quicksands to stand on – the shifting mixture of Witch-doctor-ism and Attila-ism as their philosophical base – the intellectuals were unable to grasp, to identify or to evaluate the historical drama taking place before them: the industrial revolution and capitalism. They were like men who did not see the splendor of a rocket bursting over their heads, because their eyes were lowered in guilt. It was their job to see and to explain – to a society of men stumbling dazedly out of a primeval dungeon – the cause and the meaning of the events that were sweeping them faster and farther than the notion of all the centuries behind him. The intellectuals did not choose to see.
The men in the other professions were not able to step back and observe. If some men found themselves leaving their farms for a chance to work in a factory, that was all they knew. If their children now had a chance to survive beyond the age of ten (child mortality had been about fifty percent in the pre-capitalist era), they were not able to identify the cause. They could not tell why the periodic famines – that had been striking every twenty years to wipe out the “surplus” population which pre-capitalist economies could not feed – now came to an end, as did the carnages of religious wars, nor why fear seemed to be lifting away from people’s voices and from the streets of growing cities, nor why an enormous exultation was suddenly sweeping the world. The intellectuals did not choose to tell them.
The intellectuals, or their predominant majority, remained centuries behind their time: still seeking the favour of noble protectors, some of them were bewailing the “vulgarity” of commercial pursuits, scoffing at those whose wealth was “new,” and, simultaneously, blaming these new wealth-makers for all the poverty inherited from the centuries ruled by the owners of nobly “non-commercial” wealth. Others were denouncing machines as “inhuman,” and factories as a blemish on the beauty of the countryside (where gallows had formerly stood at the crossroads). Still others were calling for a movement “back to nature,” to the handicrafts, to the Middle Ages. And some were attacking scientists for inquiring into forbidden “mysteries” and interfering with God’s design.
The victim of the intellectuals’ most infamous injustice was the businessman.
Having accepted the premises, the moral values and the position of Witch Doctors, the intellectuals were unwilling to differentiate between the businessman and Attila, between the producer of wealth and the looter. Like the Witch Doctor, they scorned and dreaded the realm of material reality, feeling secretly inadequate to deal with it. Like the Witch Doctor’s, their secret vision (almost their feared and envied ideal) of a practical, successful man, a true master of reality, was Attila; like the Witch Doctor, they believed that force, fraud, lies, plunder, expropriation, enslavement, murder were practical. So they did not inquire into the source of wealth or ever ask what made it possible. They took it as their axiom, as an irreducible primary, that wealth can be acquired only by force – and that a fortune as such is the proof of plunder, with no further distinctions or inquiries necessary.
With their eyes still fixed on the Middle Ages, they were maintaining this in the midst of a period when a greater amount of wealth than had ever before existed in the world was being brought into existence all around them. If the men who produced that wealth were thieves, from whom had they stolen it? Under all the shameful twists of their evasions, the intellectuals’ answer was: from those who had not produced it. They were refusing to acknowledge the industrial revolution. They were refusing to admit into their universe what neither Attila nor the Witch Doctor can afford to admit: the existence of man, the Producer.
Evading the difference between production and looting, they called the businessman a robber. Evading the difference between freedom and compulsion, they called him a slave driver. Evading the difference between reward and terror, they called him an exploiter. Evading the difference between pay checks and guns, they called him an autocrat. Evading the difference between trade and force, they called him a tyrant. The most crucial issue they had to evade was the difference between the earned and the unearned.
Ignoring the existence of the faculty they were betraying, the faculty of discrimination, the intellect, they refused to identify the fact that industrial wealth was the product of man’s mind: that an incalculable amount of intellectual power, of creative intelligence, of disciplined energy, of human genius had gone into the creation of industrial fortunes. They could not afford to identify it, because they could not afford to admit the fact that the intellect is a practical faculty, a guide to man’s successful existence on earth, and that its task is the study of reality, not the contemplation of unintelligible feelings nor a special monopoly on the “unknowable.”
The Witch Doctor’s morality of altruism – the morality that damns all those who achieve success or enjoyment on earth – provided the intellectuals with the means to make a virtue of evasion. It gave them a weapon that disarmed their victims; it gave them an automatic substitute for self-esteem and a chance at an unearned moral stature. They proclaimed themselves to be the defenders of the poor against the rich, righteously evading the fact that the rich were not Attilas any longer – and the defenders of the weak against the strong, righteously evading the fact that the strength involved was not the strength of brute muscles any longer, but the strength of man’s mind.
But while the intellectuals regarded the businessman as Attila, the businessman would not behave as they, from the position of Witch Doctors, expected Attila to behave: he was impervious to their power. The businessman was as bewildered by events as the rest of mankind, he had no time to grasp his own historical role, he had no moral weapons, no voice, no defense, and – knowing no morality but the altruist code, yet knowing also that he was functioning against it, that self-sacrifice was not his role – he was helplessly vulnerable to the intellectuals’ attack. He would have welcomed eagerly the guidance of Aristotle, but had no use for Immanuel Kant. That which today is called “common sense” is the remnant of an Aristotelian influence, and that was the businessman’s only form of philosophy. The businessman asked for proof and expected things to make sense – an expectation that kicked the intellectuals into the category of the unemployed. They had nothing to offer to a man who did not buy any shares of any version of the “noumenal” world.
To understand the course the intellectuals chose to take, it is important to remember the Witch Doctor’s psycho-epistemology and his relationship to Attila: the Witch Doctor expects Attila to be his protector against reality, against the necessity of rational cognition, and, at the same time, he expects to rule his own protector, who needs an unintelligible mystic sanction as a narcotic to relieve his chronic guilt. They derive their mutual security, not from any form of strength, but from the fact that each has a hold on the other’s secret weakness. It is not the security of two traders, who count on the values they offer each other, but the security of two blackmailers, who count on each other’s fear.
The Witch Doctor feels like a metaphysical outcast in a capitalist society – as if he were pushed into some limbo outside of any universe he cares to recognize. He has no means to deal with innocence; he can get no hold on a man who does not seek to live in guilt, on a businessman who is confident of his ability to earn his living – who takes pride in his work and in the value of his product – who drives himself with inexhaustible energy and limitless ambition to do better and still better and even better – who is willing to bear penalties for his mistakes and expects rewards for his achievements – who looks at the universe with the fearless eagerness of a child, knowing it to be intelligible – who demands straight lines, clear terms, precise definitions – who stands in full sunlight and has no use for the murky fog of the hidden, the secret, the unnamed, the furtively evocative, for any code of signals from the psycho-epistemology of guilt.
What the businessman offered to the intellectuals was the spiritual counterpart of his own activity, that which the Witch Doctor dreads most: the freedom of the market place of ideas.
To live by the work of one’s mind, to offer men and products of one’s thinking, to provide them with new knowledge, to stand on nothing but the merit of one’s ideas and to rely on nothing but objective truth, in a market open to any man who is willing to think and has to judge, accept or reject on his own – is a task that only a man on the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology can welcome or fulfill. It is not the place for a Witch Doctor nor for any mystic “elite.” A Witch Doctor has to live by the favor of a protector, by a special dispensation, by a reserved monopoly, by exclusion, by suppression, by censorship.
Having accepted the philosophy and the psycho-epistemology of the Witch Doctor, the intellectuals had to cut the ground from under their own feet and turn against their own historical distinction: against the first chance men had ever had to make a professional living by means of the intellect. When the intellectuals rebelled against the “commercialism” of a capitalist society, what they were specifically rebelling against was the open market of ideas, where feelings were not accepted and ideas were expected to demonstrate their validity, where the risks were great, injustices were possible and no protector existed but objective reality.

Q. “The most crucial issue they had to evade was the difference between the earned and the unearned.” Which of the following best supports the above statement?