The Fountainhead 4

 

On Page 305 of Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, Toohey pens this proverb: “In spiritual matters there is a simple, infallible test: everything that proceeds from the ego is evil; everything that proceeds from love for others is good.”

 

My response: altruist ethics are evil more than good, and egoist ethics are good more than evil, so love of self causes less harm and does more good in the world than does love for others, which can do some good, but when the selfless are parts of a mob, cult or mass movement, then their hatred of others causes incalculable harm.

 

On Page 307 Toohey refers to himself as a dangerous person, The Humanitarian.

 

On Page 312 Roark refers to himself as a loner, an egoist—these names are mine not his but he refers to conformists, collectivists and joiners or group-livers (my names again) as one and the same, and these are connections and relations that I have written on many times, and this is the first time I have seen another thinker write of it through her protagonist. She also then, I infer, would go along with concepts of individual-living, and developed individuals as great souls, and powerful, original self-actualizers.

 

Here is her quote for Roark applying for a commission: “I won’t tell you how much I would like to do it,” Roark said to him at the end of their first interview. “But there’s not a chance of my getting it. I can get along with people—when they are alone. I can do nothing with them in groups. No board has ever hired me—and I don’t think one ever will.”

 

I too, as a maverized loner and great soul, can get along with people when they are alone, but not when they are in groups. Groups are instinctive, demonic associations that always strive to create a mob of pure consciousness, just one brain, one consciousness with twenty members. Morality of goodness is good relative to the degree that people will remain decent and self-controlling, not part of the pack at any price for any reason at all.

 

On Page 317, atheist, socialist guru Toohey is setting up Roark by getting Hopton Stoddard to hire him, but Toohey warns Stoddard that he should not be offended if Roark informs him that he does not believe in God. Stoddard is shocked, but Toohey reassures him not to believe Roark is not a believer: “He is a profoundly religious man. You can see it in his buildings.”

 

Rand the atheist is a woman of profoundly felt, believed and practiced religious values, high level work and effort by the great soul achiever, and there is such reverence for the work achieved and produced by these doers, that their reverence for personal excellence borders on religious fervor, and that is what Roark poured into the buildings he designed, and that is why he insisted on complete freedom to do as he saw fit. This is Rand’s ideal individual.

 

On Pages 340 and 341, Toohey the manipulator persuades Stoddard to sue Roark for the temple deign, and then bring in replacement hack architects to undo and remake Roark’s building to conform to conventional standards. Hack Peter Keating would remodel Stoddard House. Note the deconstructionist attack and the smashing the beauty of the work of modernist artists like Roark, and Toohey does it for power, to crush and to reduce happy, independent people and because he loves to hurt others,

 

On Page 355, at the trial Dominique testified that: “Howard Roark built a temple to the human spirit. He saw man as strong, proud, clean, wise, and fearless. He saw man as a heroic being. And he built a temple to that. A temple is a place where a man is to experience exaltation . . .”

 

Roark is a secular humanist that loves humans and wants them to aim high, and Roark like Rand likely regards the religious as selfless, evil and anti-humanistic and they can be and often have been, but I think the benevolent divinities are individualists, egoists and individuators so they wants human to be proud, industrious, creative and make like the deities do.

 

Toohey and the collectivists are anti-human and anti-joy and cosmos be they religious or atheistic.   

 

Dominique asks, on Page 357, why Roark at the trial, should be a martyr to the impossible, what is the use of building for a world that does not exist? But Roark is out to glorify man and that is not blasphemy, by glorifying man, individuators glorify the benevolent gods, those maverizers in whose image we are made We are not competing with them but assisting in extending their realm of cosmos across the universe. We should believe in these deities and glorify them openly and repeatedly but humans as maverizers are not competitors of and enemies of divine maverizers for then the children of light are on the same team as the Light Couple and their Good Spirits.