Suppose you're watching a movie in which the hero seems to be an individualist, and you have been starved for such a movie. In the first chapter, the hero turns down a very good job, rather than conform to the ideas of others. You feel a strong emotion of admiration and pleasure, and this emotion, quite validly, is important to you. It's the kind of emotion you do want to feel.

Well, at this point, you can do one of two things. You can continue to perceive, to see what the movie is about, to judge what you're viewing — or you can lose yourself in the pleasure you feel, focus only on it, look only for ways to maintain it, ignoring and evading any evidence that might contradict it.

Then, as you continue watching, the hero is shown establishing an socialist [environmentalist] cooperative, which, he says, will once and for all solve the problem of jobs [preserving nature] for everyone. Well, if your mind is functioning rationally, you will perceive that you have made a mistake — that is, that whatever this movie is preaching it isn't individualism. But, if you've focused on maintaining your emotion at any price, then you'll rationalize it by any means possible. You'll tell yourself that the hero really believes in his ideal, and this makes him an individualist; or that he's fighting for his idea, and this makes him an individualist, so that he's still a hero, et cetera, etc., etc. And you can watch the whole movie this way, reading into it what you want to see, explaining away what doesn't fit your desires, blinding yourself, destroying your perception for the sake of your emotion. A year later you might see the same movie in a different mood and ask yourself, in helpless amazement: "Why did I think what I thought?"

"So anyone who finds Avatar, or parts of it, concordant with Objectivism, is rationalizing? "

James Cameron himself hasn't been shy in publicly proclaiming the fact that he's an environmental activist who believes that humans and "industrial society" are "causing a global climate change" and "destroying species faster than we can classify them." In a recent interview with PBS' Tavis Smiley, Cameron admitted that he made "obvious" references in the film to Iraq, Vietnam and the American colonial period to emphasize the fact that humans have a "terrible history" of "entitlement" in which we "take what we need" from nature and indigenous peoples "and don't give back."