I am reviewing Ayn Rand’s 80-year-old novel, The Fountainhead. The Cliff Notes summary on it online seem accurate, so I want to start by quoting the second paragraph from the Notes: “Having grown up in the totalitarian dictatorship of the Soviet Union, holding an impassioned belief in political freedom and the rights of the individual, Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead as a tribute to the creative freethinker. Its hero, Howard Roark, is an innovative architect, a man whose brilliant and radically new designs are not understood and are rejected by the majority of society. Roark, like many inventors and creative thinkers of history, struggles to win the acceptance of his ideas against the tradition-bound masses, who follow established norms and are fearful of change. The theme, as Ayn Rand states it, is individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but in men’s souls. The book is about the conflict between those who think for themselves and those who allow others to dominate their lives.”
My response: There is no doubt that her departing from the Soviet Union as a young Jew, knowing first-hand what collectivism and Communism do to brutalize each person it touches, rendered her fertile, imaginative mind sympathetic to and fervently promoting individualism and political freedom.
It seems that she is warning America that flirting with collectivist isms, mob conformity and totalitarian political plans can make the Soviet Union happen here.
On a personal and cultural level, Rand is urging each American to be a creative thinker, inventor or scientist, to no long group-live, groupthink and group-conform. She pushes liberty and individualism and powerful, actual use of one’s own mind.
Roark seeks to be dominated by none and to dominate none, and that is the cultural and political stance of my anarchist-individuator supercitizen.
On Page 253 of the novel, Roark replies to Austen Heller, that he, Roark, only feels completely natural when he works. Here is another brilliant insight from Rand: she knows we are most human and most fulfilled—not necessarily happy but meaning-suffused, a wave to Jordan Peterson—when we are self-realizing as individuals, doing what we are meant to do. As workers and inventors and artists, we are most human as evolved, living, doing humans working towards our better self of tomorrow. Roark knows that each building he plans and brings to construction is a focus and endeavor of prime importance to him.
He makes up his own mind all the time: he lets no other do his thinking and deciding for him, and that is the essence of individualism, and we all need to reach that point.
On Page 256 Toohey is ill-advising a young away from individual-living and independent thinking: “He was saying to a somber young female who wore glasses and a low-cut evening gown: ‘My dear, you will never be more than a dilettante of the intellect, unless you submerge yourself in some cause greater than yourself.”
Note how Toohey, part of the ruling clerisy, push collectivism self-immolation of the young thinker, giving up her right to think and live on her own, submerging her ego into a cause greater than herself. She is to surrender herself for and to the cause, and elite rulers like Toohey have just amassed a bit more power from another gullible but willing victim.
On Pages 266 and 267 the plot thickens: with Toohey bloviating about pure equality as the noblest of all human conceptions, when in fact, absolute equality can never be guaranteed unless by government coercion, holding down all individual creation, enterprise, and production. Enforced equality of outcome in the name of brotherly love is the most wicked, degrading concept ever invented by intellectuals and idealists.
Dominique Francon, on these same pages, is the inimical journalist belittling and drumming up support against Mr. Enright and Roark for Roark’s original and daring design, of the Enright House. She appeals to Joel Sutton to take awarding the building of that House away from Roark and given to popular mediocre, follower, Peter Keating. I noted a pattern in this novel whereby collectivist intellectuals pushed by Dominique and Toohey redo and altar to transmogrify, distort and disfigure works of art by Roark, just as deconstructionists like Derrida and postmodern artists redo great traditional artwork to deconstruct and destroy them—Stephen Hicks has some examples of this going on in his seminal book on Explaining Postmodernism. Note how the unerring artistic intuition of Rand is noting the same pattern, like the elves in Tolkien could create, but the forces of evil could not create but would take lovely creatures like elves and destroy them, remaking them into orcs and goblins. Postmodernists and collectivists cannot compete with modernists inventors and individualists, so they destroy their products of creation and production out of jealousy and revenge, returning cosmos to chaos and disorder and ugliness.
Ayn Rand seems unworldly at times, almost like an ivory-tower professor with the correct views but not somehow connected to practical workers, working with their hands. For example, Roark’s pure indifference to and superhuman knack for his stoical disregard of other’s opinions and attacks against him without getting angry or violent seem unrealistic in everyday life where someone as exceptional as Roark, a great soul is abused and misused, by the packs around him.
His superhuman response is something to aim for, but we do care what others think, and we should listen to their input a little at least, for some of their criticisms may be legitimate and spot on, while till making the final decision on our own.
Jordan Peterson and I are more moderate than Rand: we like the idea of the sovereign individual over collective and tribal identity drives, but we still allow for some group interaction and group enjoyment.
There is something all-or-none in Rand that seems hollow, unrealistic (not how the world works), and too rarefied to me somehow as if she needed to be so certain about absolutely everything to keep herself together but life is messy and complicated and her black-and-white pronouncements at time seem inapplicable and simplistic, Still, her main concepts and theory are quite sound.
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