Hello, I'm Mukund Vijayaraghavan. Here you will find fun in-depth essays or research on focused subjects, one at a time.

Observations on: The Fountainhead

This is an essay borrowed from my personal blog. It would be a waste not to publish it here; it came to me spontaneously, fully formed in my mind as soon as I was done reading the book. Here it is verbatim:

I started reading this #novel (Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead) on the recommendation of one of my closest friends. There is something she said before I began that I absolutely agree with now: “Either you get it, or you don't”. That is the simple truth of the book. Liking or agreeing with the ideas of the author is another matter; comprehending it is a yes/no answer. I can say with certainty that I would not have understood the book for what it is if I had read it during my teenage years. I would have gone through the plot, deriving little meaning from the philosophies contained within, oblivious to the characters who are themselves metaphors for sets of characteristics and principles in life. Reading the book itself was intoxicating, and I found myself relating to and agreeing with many of the author's ideas, which I will outline below.

A simple search of the book on the Internet (including long discussions on subreddits and book forums) tells me that the following two kinds of polarization are not uncommon. In fact, they are the norm:

Note here that the nature of liking is also striking – 'like' is thinking that it has important and relevant ideas; 'dislike' is due to supposed nonsensical nature or banality.

Onward now. The Fountainhead is at its core a book of #philosophy, and every aspect of the book – including the plot, characters and interactions – seeks to advance and reinforce that philosophy's core ideas.

Here is a list of #observations I noted down while reading:

Distortion of reality

People live in their minds. No matter what we think otherwise, our brain is the center of our living being – the body is physical, the heart is a romanticized social entity, and the soul is highly debatable/disputed. This we know so far based on sufficient study and evidence. Our life is based on our memories (what we know so far) and the calculations of making and living new memories every day (what we do not know, i.e. new experiences).

The Fountainhead shows how people are willing to sacrifice their reality for an easier alternative or one that suits their immediate needs (or rather wants), willing to follow the realities of others (rather than their own), and how easily people can let go of reason in the face of challenging personal struggles.

Take the case of Peter Keating, one of the main characters of the book. Keating knows for a fact that he is a terrible architect who cannot conceive his own designs, and always has to resort to imitating/copying the styles of traditional (tried and tested) designs. And yet he distorts his reality: he soon assumes that he must be good at architecture because everyone else tells him so, when this is in fact not due to technical merit, but due to top scores, good connections and following the norm. He gains a new reality through others; he does not have a vision/core of his own and he does not know how to satisfy himself as an architect. This new reality works for him well, while it does – he lies to himself about his own abilities – until his illusion comes crashing down in the face of true reality: he never really liked architecture, was never good at it; he had always wanted to be a painter.

The fake nature of people and their everyday interactions

There is a basis by which you can tell people apart- how they converse and how they express themselves. How they converse with other people, how they converse with you – alone and in the presence of friends/others. That will shine a light into their personality, and you can tell if they are being genuine or fake. Genuine people stand out with their individuality and distinct characteristics. This is tricky: for eg. small talk can be fake, but it does not need to be. It depends on the people involved.

With fake nature comes fake everyday interactions. Again, Peter Keating serves as the best example – he is after all, the antithesis of our idealistic protagonist. Immediately after getting hired at a top architecture firm, Keating fakes his way through any and every conversation. He lies, manipulates and disingenuously works his way to the top position in the company. All of this, even as he fakes passion for his job, giving a false pretense of importance and bravado in his everyday behaviour, and using false talk to advance his career.

Individualism vs. Collectivism

The Fountainhead depicts the individual being having a single, coherent (system of) thought far more powerful and precious than the collective having a (system of) thought which is diluted by each individual in the group. According to Rand, the realization of the singular vision of the individual is the epitome of productive achievement. Collectivism suppresses the freedom of the individual to do whatever they want; conformation to specific beliefs and practices follows, and the vision is greatly changed or weakened/destroyed.

This leads us to another basis by which people are divided into in the book – we have the individual and the conformist. The individual always sticks to their own vision, their principles and methods, while the conformist always relies on second-hand vision, existing practices and seeks to do things based on how everyone else does them. All decisions made by the conformist are based on what others think or want. Here we see the weakness of the dichotomy created by Rand – people in the real world cannot be perfectly divided into these two groups; people are much more complex and are motivated by too many factors to be split into individualistic or conforming.

Collectivism put in the right context, may be the only right way to do many, many kinds of work – cooperation and collaboration are key to human survival and growth. The collectivism talked about in The Fountainhead is specifically about the conforming type of collective: the group that always reaches consensus without challenge or criticism, the group in which every person feeds off of others in an attempt to know or contribute something, the group which constantly reassures itself (echo chambers).

“Individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but within a man's soul”, was said by Rand to be the primary theme of the book. We can assume the dichotomy was created to experience true opposites (opposing ideas) by imbuing them in characters – Howard Roark is the consummate individual, Peter Keating is the ever-accepting conformist (spurred by the conformist advocate and indoctrinator Ellsworth Toohey).

Selfishness vs. Selflessness

Selfishness, in the case of The Fountainhead, does not mean concern exclusively for oneself while disregarding others. Rand's selfishness is the idea of living for oneself in the sense of having real character as opposed to mere selfishness (as in the traditional sense – being uncaring, petty or placing others in harm). Selfishness here means having a real self, a full inner personality which lives for its own sake.

Selflessness / Altruism on the other hand is rejected by Rand; she sees living just for the sake of others to be a loss of self, loss of the person's ego, which she considers a social virtue. Her argument here is that whenever humanity has progressed in history, there has always been a selfish egoistic motive behind it – that man has never been motivated to invent or innovate by losing his self and living only for others. Note here the usage of egoistic, not egotistic.

When put in the context of a strong dichotomy, again- I will admit that although there is truth to it, the real world is far more different. Rand does not explain how she reached this conclusion and the reasoning we get is based on anecdotal examples (although there may be plenty). I genuinely believe both selfishness (as in having a self/core, in the context of The Fountainhead) and selflessness (altruism) are not opposing ideas, and that we need both, without the ethical premise that only one is the way to morality.

Selfishness and selflessness in the context of The Fountainhead are best explained by a scene in the book, in words spoken by Roark:

“I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.”

— Howard Roark to Gail Wynand

Absolute integrity and brutal honesty

This, to me, is the core of the book. This is my favourite lesson to draw from The Fountainhead- to draw from the ideal person – Howard Roark. He is the beacon of integrity and honesty, a man of uncompromising ideals, the 'heroic man' (man as he should be, according to Rand). He is too idealistic for the world, and the reader learns that fact early- he struggles against the odds of conformist collectivism and disingenuity in the world. He is independent, lives through his work (his work is the sole purpose of his life), is confident and places integrity above everything else.

The idea that brutal honesty is the only way to live is also embodied by him. He does not compromise, he keeps his word, he does not lie (not even a tiny white lie), and is blunt and to-the-point in his interactions. His ideal is that if we conform to others' expectations of us, we lose our sense of self and we can no longer function as ourselves; by being honest with oneself, one can be liberated/freed of the expectations of any other person or society (if society does not easily allow one to be honest).

“Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.”

— Kent Lansing to Howard Roark
(saying it to the one man who does not need to hear it)

Conclusion

This analysis is of course, based on my understanding of the book, immediately upon finishing it, looking up its Wikipedia page and checking out how the book is perceived in modern times (on websites such as Reddit). I plan on doing another analysis someday on what I think are the shortcomings or limitations of the ideas of the novel. Some of these ideas feature as part of Rand's Objectivism philosophy, which is an entire, different body of work. This write-up is based solely on my experience with the book.

Thank you for reading :)