Ayn Rand is extremely popular with modern, libertarian-minded folk because she preaches individualism from an atheistic standpoint. According to Rand, the exercise of pure reason sheds light on an objective reality whereby notions of altruism, collectivism, selflessness, and other code words for tyranny are shown to be false. Rand's assertion was and is deeply flawed, for "pure reason" has been exercised to perpetrate collectivist massacres such as the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, China's Cultural Revolution, and Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. Many of the people opposing those revolutions (i.e., counter-revolutionaries) were labeled irrational or insane, and duly dispatched. Truth be told, we are witnessing the same dynamic unfold in America, as alluded to in my last post where I mentioned that any adherence to the limited-government principles this country was founded on is now deemed "crazy." This is evolving beyond mere rhetoric, as various government agencies now label constitutionalists as "extremists" and potential "terrorists," even conducting investigations and detentions for mere speech in some instances.
The point is that "pure reason" is only as good as the people exercising it, and given what we have to work with, the results are often bad. At best, "pure reason" causes endless debate and confusion. At worst, it causes genocide. For humans to function either individually or socially, there must be an arbitrary standard of right and wrong that lies beyond all debate. That arbitrary standard is, of course, a religious and supernatural one. The atheism that Rand fervently embraced was her and her followers' own worst enemy. Rand should have paid heed to her mentor, Isabel Paterson, whose intelligence was tempered by a quality that Rand utterly lacked: wisdom. Paterson admonished Rand that human freedom and dignity cannot survive absent some conception of God. As is often the case, the world remembers the brash and erroneous rather than the quiet and correct.
That lengthy introduction aside, I wanted to recommend The Fountainhead to anyone who considers reading Rand. Her most famous work is Atlas Shrugged, which has grown all the more popular because of its prescient narrative of American collapse. But The Fountainhead is far more profound because rather than illustrate what happens when collectivists run amok, it gets to the heart of what truly separates an individualist from a collectivist.
Howard Roark is the character who embodies individualism. Roark is a brilliant architect who does not seek to dominate, flatter, or win favor. All he seeks is excellence, a quality that rubs most everyone around him the wrong way. His teachers chastise him and expel him from school for his rejection of stale forms that everyone else mindlessly follows. His classmate, Peter Keating, is one such person and is regarded as a brilliant architect with a bright future, yet he secretly knows that he lacks Roark's talent. Keating often asks Roark for help on projects and continues to do so after embarking on a career with the most reputable firm in the nation. For his part, Roark produces exquisite work and continues helping his friend, but Roark sinks into obscurity and penury while Keating soars. Because his work is fresh and original, most people can't even perceive its excellence, so Roark has great difficulty finding clients. The few who do perceive Roark's excellence hate Roark for it and seek to destroy him. Chief among these antagonists is Ellsworth Toohey, a leftist "intellectual" who molds public opinion in a newspaper column and takes aim at Roark and attacks his work at every opportunity. In one bit of dialogue, Toohey admits that his goal is to tear down excellence and impoverish the mind of man so that all may be equal, revealing the leftist inferiority complex in a plain manner that no real leftist ever would.
The plot takes several interesting twists and turns, but the culmination (for me, anyway) is when Roark blows up a low-cost government housing project -- not because he has something against low-cost housing, but rather because the designers of the project broke their word to use his design with no modifications. The watered-down monstrosity they eventually produced was an affront to Roark specifically and to human dignity generally, so the uncompromising Roark blew the mother up, and he remained unrepentant about it. Such unrepentant pursuit of excellence is what separates individualists from collectivists, and the latter fear and hate the former. Sadly, they outnumber the former as well.
America was exceptional precisely because it was founded by those few who engaged in the unrepentant pursuit of excellence. But America has been overtaken by the many Keatings and Tooheys, the "second-handers" who know they are not excellent and seek to tear down anyone who is. They largely have succeeded, but something far more terrifying than their utopian paradise of equality awaits.
