The Fountainhead 5

 

On Page 426 Rand has Dominque and Peter Keating ask each other where their “I” personality is, that first-hander (Rand’s technical word for an active individuators), the personality of a real person that is alive, individual, filled with purpose, reason, will, personality and tangible accomplishment, Both Dominique and Peter are second-handers (inactive nonindividuating conformist mediocrities): Dominque has first-rate ability, and Peter does not even try. She told Peter that, when she was married to him, all he wanted her to be a mirror: “People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they are reflecting too.”

 

First-handers live through themselves, and second-handers live through others.

 

On Page 428: Rand the psychological and artistic genius has Dominique explain a concept to her ex-husband: It’s said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that’s not true. Self-respect is something that can’t be killed. The worst thing to do is to kill a man’s pretense at it.

Dominique knows the stellar solidity and worth of Roark, the first-hander that respects himself. His self-respect is not even dented by what the mob throws at him, but, when Keating loses his pretense at self-respect (as manipulative, shameless parasite and second-hander)—self-respect he never forced himself to live up to as an ethical standard of performance and existing, self-respect he never felt or merited as a social and career cannibal of achievement by Roark and others.

 

On Page 438 and 439, Rand’s psychological brilliance is once again evident: Dominique prostitutes herself to Gail Wynand so Peter Keating can get a commission that he has not deserved. Gail agrees to buy her and then later marry her, but he sees her for what she is: “When she rose to leave, he asked: ‘Shall I tell you the difference between you and your statue?’ ‘No.’

‘But I want to. It’s startling to see the same elements used in two compositions with opposite themes. Everything about you in that statue is the theme of exaltation. But your own theme is suffering.’

‘Suffering. I am not conscious of having shown that.’

‘You haven’t. That’s what I meant. No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain.’

 

For a first-hander, her performances, creations and achievements is an exaltation of the self, and when she fails to self-realize, she debases the self, loses self-respect, and suffers more than she should, the kind of suffering that is not natural evil, but is self-inflicted.

 

Dominique was a first-hander when she posed nude for the sculptor, Mallory, and has always been a second-hander in her personal life. As part of art, Dominique exalted the best in herself as an individual, and in her personal life, she debased herself, and never went against the mob (until the very end of the novel when she finally, openly sides with Roark, and marries him.).

 

Despite Rands flaws as an artist, thinker and in her personal life, she is a genius and her brilliant woman, Dominique, lived as a first-hander, when she willed to as part of the sculpture project. That is real feminism: that women can be first-handers too, and do not worry about the famous rape scene. Rand ultimately gets it right on most thing, her atheism being her biggest mistake.

 

On Page 447, Rand has Gail comment on how second-handers like to debase themselves by feeling small before nature. Though we should love nature and be good stewards of nature while making a living from its resources and bounty, we should not worship, demur and degrade ourselves as less than nature. The modern Envirostatist movement is predicated on preach pro-nature and anti-humanistic themes. Rand the secular humanist, artist, philosopher, and businesswoman, pro-capitalist at that, she does not worship nature, and here is where atheistic Randism shares another world with the Judeo-Christian view that Yahweh gave humans dominion over nature. There is a Logos and objective element to both of these Western standpoints that share the correct orientation to nature, and humans are given rank over nature, not to immerse themselves contritely in nature with their guilt-ridden heads held low is disgrace.

 

Rand the genius psychologist does it again on Page 453 when she has Mallory characterize Roark as the only one of them to achieve immortality. Now, she is a physicalist, and this is the only world that is and there is nothing after the grave, so the only way a human, from her materialist point of view, can be immortal is leaving works of art or inventions so monumental as to live on forever in human society, or to be famous in history.

 

Roark is none of those, but he is such an uncompromising first-hander that he is a great soul, and his works and commissions are from a sure, immortal guiding consciousness.

 

Page 465: Dominique is willing to be a wife to Roark if he will give up architecture. She betrays him all the time and he refuses to give up his personhood as the price of loving her.

 

On Page 514 Roark turns down a potential commission: “I don’t work with collectives. I don’t consult. I don’t cooperate. I don’t collaborate.” I have concluded that Rand not only is right about individualism and egoism being superior and more ethical than collectivism and altruism, but I am convinced that she knew, really knew what it was to be a first-hander, to grow and reason one’s way through life willing to become an existent great soul. What she preached, she understood, she believed in, and it was what she practiced.

 

On Page 528, Gail attempts to apologize that the Banner newspaper had hurt Roark in the past, but Roark the stoic has not been hurt at all by enemies or friends because he is neutral and just makes up his own mind about everything. There is a piece of wisdom here for the reader from Rand: if one aspires to live as a first-hander, one must not be impressionable to either praise or criticism from the public, but live by what one thinks about oneself. To self-realize, this point is critical.

 

On Page 549 Gail asks Roark if he ever held power over a single human being, and Roark answered that he would not take it if the power was offered to him. It is egoist loving of the first order to allow others to be free to maverize as one is oneself.

 

Rand’s ethical explanation of power here is close to my own. The first-hander or the living great soul lets none rule him, and he refuses to rule anyone. In that way, he maintained personal liberty, power, personal power-wielding and independence for all people in his life, including himself and that is self-love or out of self-respect as Howard insists, to keep all free and all self-sufficient and self-ruling.

 

On Page 551 Roark declares: “I was thinking of the people who say that happiness is impossible on earth. Look how hard they all try to find some joy in life. Look how they struggle for it. Why should any living creature exist in pain? By what conceivable right can anyone demand that a human being exist for anything but his own joy?”

 

Objectivists believe that we only live once and our mortal life here is all we have, so why not dump guilt and be joyful, but the joy that Rand pushes is the life of an individuators, and that is hard work and self-discipline, and in such inventive mode of being that is where the lasting joy and thrill of living are felt.

 

As a moderate, I think God put us here to experience both joy and suffering, and pleasure and pain, and if we maverize, then our natural suffering can be converted and transformed into a worldly and spiritual joy, akin to the special joy that Rand is advocating for her followers.

 

To be a good person is to live as a living angel or a living great soul, maverizing so that the suffering an joy one experiences and the pain an pleasure one feels are all experiential tools aiding the self to love himself, God and others more. Then his suffering and joy ennoble, not degrade him. Jordan Peterson warns that if an agent allows his suffering to make him feel like a victim of reality’s arrows and hurled missile, then that agent will turn bitter, arrogant, resentful and seek revenge by hurting others and himself and whatever sick joy that he would experience and seek to repeat then makes him a cruel person, and that is not the way to live. He is unhappy and has no self-esteem and he is addicted to an ism satanism to spread hate and selflessness to all people The happy person is a Howard Roark, that esteems himself, and absorbs and sublimates whatever joy or suffering that reality introduces him to.

 

On Page 554 Toohey promotes total compulsion for the masses as the means by which they will enjoy total freedom, and that is close to what Hegel offered the German people—there is no more cruel and dangerous proposal than Toohey’s envisioned nightmare for the world.

 

On Page 669, Howard speaks at his trial over dynamiting Cortlandt House after the hacks deconstructed his brilliant design. He compared himself to other heroic, vilified, historic first-handers who endured much persecution but prevailed in the end.