The Fountainhead

I could sit here and write a review for every book I read and movie I watch, but that wouldn’t do. I would run the risk of boring myself and I can do that very well on my own! Even so, I rarely have the opportunity to discuss what I read with anyone else and when the book in question is so interesting as my latest read, my urge to talk about it gets the best of me. So, even if only by a few brief paragraphs on an anonymous blog, I'd like to say just a few things about Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead so that I can look back and remember something about my thoughts.

In The Fountainhead, Rand presents to us her conception of the ideal man: the producer who lives by his own effort who does not receive charity, does not give to the undeserving, and who honors achievement while rejecting envy and victimhood. Her hero is a creator, a man of ideas, a builder who depends on his own talents and then uses what he creates to trade with other independent people to reach his goals. You can discern in her philosophy the fundamentals of laissez-faire capitalism in which a strictly limited government protects each person's rights to life, liberty, and property and forbids infringement of those rights by other individuals.

Looking back at my years of schooling, I have vague recollections of reading excerpts of the works of Marx, Hegel (?), Jung (collective unconscious), Bryant (populism) and other authors whom I would broadly term "collectivists". To one extent or another their philosophies advocated a certain communal approach to economics and politics. My teachers often presented this material with a wistful longing, as though they would implore us to consider the error of our ways. There is something in the human psyche that is easily persuaded to feel guilty of our achievements, especially when we are confronted with the non-achievement of others. The idealist in us is persuaded and even led astray by these well-meaning feelings of—is it benevolence? No, it’s pity and there’s a world of difference between the two. The latter has the power to kill the creative impulse of the individual that drives prosperity. It also has the ability to make slaves of both the pittied and those that pity (read the book!).

Rand makes exactly these points in The Fountainhead and so, if we were intellectually honest (a trait I honor tremendously) we would have to acknowledge that her writings offer a response to the collectivist theories I’ve mentioned above. Indeed, a good teacher would require his students to study such a thoughtful and intellectually rigorous expression of the countervailing view. Instead, all I ever got was a reluctant acknowledgement (did I detect a flicker of shame?) that this country, marked by the individualist ethos like none other, remains a bastion of opportunity and freedom. No, my teachers were not particularly intellectually honest. Shame on them.

I don’t mean to impugn all of academia by my comments, but I dare say my experience was not atypical.