"Atlas Shrugged"

Sarah Palin's resignation as governor of Alaska, is a very healthy trend -- indicative of a totally new breed of people who become involved in government -- that she can also walk away from it rather than it becoming her ego, identity and power trip. That's very healthy -- for people in any field actually.

One shouldn't become so obsessed with their self-projection that they no longer have balance in their perspectives.

Of course it is shocking to the old mentality personalities who measure everything by these self-delusions, even to the point of ruining their health and lives, trying to maintain unrealistic delusions of the importance of what they think they're doing. It's easy to get hung up in it -- in politics, in show business, in athletics, in art, hobbies, drugs, recreations -- even exercise.

A lot of people unnecessarily kill themselves because they think they can't slow down a bit but have to keep going at a constant unvarying pace -- and so they get wiped out when a truck makes a right turn into their path. Or they think the objective of their recreational activities is to get the greatest adrenalin rush -- to overcompensate for their dull years at a job without taking any risks.

This distortion in what these individuals perceive and what is evident to everyone else, is called cognitive dissonance. They're not dealing with the reality most people see. Nowhere is that more true than the world of reality created by the mass media -- as what we should believe as though we need some direction constantly in this way.

So they tell us who and what is important to think is "in," and who and what is important to ridicule and abuse -- as the new "socially" (politically) correct.

The two great literary thinkers of the 20th century, both described this major concern of the mass media and the danger of conformity and demand for approval from the properly designated agencies and institutions that become nameless and faceless propagators of the "conventional wisdom" everyone is well-advised to heed, even at one's peril.

Sometimes, the best thing one can do, is to quit -- and see if that makes a difference, and even solves the problem. That would especially be true for those who find themselves in identities and jobs which are destroying themselves and causing them great unhappiness in life -- which is obvious to others as the excessive weight gain or distortion of features so that one becomes a virtual monster in appearance -- that most people are too desensitized to notice anymore.

That would be the look of a person whose facial muscles and features look like they are being pulled in a hundred different directions all at once. It is painful to look at such faces. So it is always remarkable to see normal people passing through in political offices -- rather than those who have known nothing else, and have become merely caricatures and parodies of themselves.

So it is good and healthy when a person can catch themselves becoming something other than what the group consensus wants them to become. That is the only hope for a better tomorrow.