To Set a Soul on Fire: Installment #7

Part 3: Man's Ego and a Dictatorship of the Second-Handers

Jun 05, 2025

To Set a Soul on Fire: The Self-Actualization of Ayn Rand is the third biography in my Self-Actualizing People in History series. I’m currently releasing it piecemeal, in installments, right here on Substack before its official publication. (This is Installment #7.)

Key Links:

Previous Installment • Table of Contents • Back to Installment #1

Part 3: An Ode to Man’s Ego

Interestingly enough, Ayn’s original idea for the novel she provisionally titled Second-Hand Lives, and which she later changed (again on the advice of her publisher) to The Fountainhead, came not from her conception of Howard Roark, but of the character that would serve as his literary foil—the uncreative, psychologically dependent, socially ambitious second-hand architect: Peter Keating.

It happened sometime in 1932-33, when a female coworker of Ayn’s at RKO, with whom Ayn also lived in the same apartment house, kindled the struggling writer’s curiosity. This woman too, Ayn observed, was ferociously struggling to advance her career, but with an odd, amoral ambition that drove her to lie, appease, and manipulate, in order to gain her ends. But what were those ends? “I liked the fact that she took her career very seriously,” Ayn remembered her puzzlement, “yet I disliked everything about her and her outlook on her career as against mine.” Finally, Ayn summoned the pluck to ask her: “What is your goal in life? What is it that you want to achieve?”[i] And the young woman, as if reciting an answer she had arrived at much earlier, responded immediately: “Here’s what I want out of life,” she declared. “If nobody had an automobile, I would not want one. [But] if automobiles exist and some people don’t have them, I want an automobile. [And] if some people have two automobiles, I want two automobiles.”[ii]

That response hit Ayn as a sudden revelation. Unlike every other self-actualizer in the present series, she never passed through a superegoist phase before arriving at psychological health. She was, as a result, totally unable to empathize with these kinds of people or to understand what in hell motivated them.

When she encountered some such irrationality in people—in their thoughts, or actions, or judgment—all she could do was wonder in bewilderment: “But how can they?” This woman’s answer, however, “was like a light bulb going on,” Ayn recalled. “Without that statement, I don’t think I could have ever arrived at the explanation. I owe The Fountainhead to that.”[iii]

The explanation, which Ayn figured out in a matter of days, lay in “the basic distinction between two types of people in the world:” the egoists and the second-handers.^[iv] This woman, Ayn realized, did not want a car for any personal utility or enjoyment, but merely because other people wanted one. And her goal wasn’t merely to obtain a car—whatever her reasons for thinking it valuable—but to acquire more cars than other people, and thus establish her own superiority by comparison. (Ayn Rand thus grasped the principle behind what I have called the Every-Man-a-King Complex.) While a car is normally just a tool of convenience, a means to some higher end (whether it be some difficult goal that the car makes easier, or simply the physical pleasure of riding in the car), to this woman the car was the end: not profiting by it, but using the sheer fact of its existence to think herself superior (or at least not inferior) to all other people—and, presumably, to have them think so too.

This woman, Ayn also thought, would conventionally be considered selfish, a ruthless egoist: a person willing to do whatever it took—abandoning all honesty, convictions, and standards; and becoming a hypocrite, a scoundrel, and a people pleaser—for the sake of advancing her career and making more money. But in which of these decisions did her “self” play any part? If the self, as Ayn wrote in The Fountainhead, is that which thinks, feels, judges, and acts; didn’t this girl replace her “self” or “ego” or “I” (and Ayn used these terms interchangeably) with that of other people? If she acted in order to please or trick others, weren’t those others the motive of her actions?—if she did this to gain from them what she judged valuable because others valued it, weren’t those others the source of her goals?—if she then felt pleasure because others praised, admired, or envied her for it, weren’t those others the cause of her emotions?—and if she thought all this normal, proper, and natural because others thought so too, weren’t those others the source of her beliefs? If “selfishness” or “egoism” meant putting one’s own self above others, Ayn concluded, then this girl was the exact opposite of selfish: not “unselfish,” but “selfless”—in the very literal sense of having no self. This girl wasn’t an egoist, but a second-hander; and “from the beginning,” Ayn recalled, the psychology of Peter Keating was based on “my idea of [that] girl in Hollywood.”[v]

“Peter Keating [is] the exact opposite of Howard Roark,” she wrote in her Fountainhead journals. “A perfect example of a selfless man who is a ruthless, unprincipled egotist [sic]—in the accepted meaning of the word.”[vi]

He is as dishonest with himself as he is with others. His great motto: “If anyone has a car, I want two cars. If anyone has two cars, I want three cars. And I want to be sure they know it.” [He] has selected architecture merely because he thinks it will give him a great chance at his kind of “success.”[vii]
Outwardly his life follows a course conventionally considered as that of a selfish man. . . . He struggles for fame, admiration, prominence, money. He has no scruples in the struggle and he does not hesitate to sacrifice other men who stand in his way. But, fundamentally, he does all this for the spiritual sake of others—or, rather, for the satisfaction of his own spirit which depends on others so completely. He needs the fame and the admiration in order to have the judgment of others grant him his own value; he needs the money in order to impress others with a tangible evidence of his value; he needs the prominence in order to establish his superiority over others. The quest for superiority is his obsession. . . . Since he has no objective, independent standard by which to establish his own dignity, his pride and his self-respect, he can establish them only by comparison.[viii]

That this is what people called egoism, Ayn realized, was a grotesque inversion. And so “as a contrast, [and] as the moral . . . of [this] book,” Ayn intended to depict in Howard Roark “a man who is a true egoist, [a] man who really ‘lives for himself.’”[ix]

But Ayn’s identification of the nature of second-handedness led her to another important insight: this time, a political one. In writing We the Living, Ayn had found the words that named the moral and political principle she had lived by since childhood—Individualism—and the opposite principle that had been her eternal enemy, and that led to all the horrors she experienced in Soviet Russia—Collectivism.

“If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has,” Ayn Rand wrote for a press release intended to promote We the Living,

mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism. I was born with that obsession and have never seen and do not know now a cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless and more tragically needed. Call it fate or irony, but I was born, of all countries on earth, in the one least suitable for a fanatic of individualism, Russia.[x]

Around that same time, in mid-1936, she wrote that We the Living was “not merely an argument against Communism, but against all forms of collectivism, against any manner of sacrilege toward the Individual.”[xi]

The basic principle of “Individualism,” Ayn would clarify, is “that man has inalienable rights which cannot be taken away from him by any other man, nor by any number, group or collective of other men.” It therefore means that “each man exists by his own right and for his own sake, not for the sake of the group.” The basic principle of “Collectivism,” on the other hand, is “that man has no rights; that his work, his body and his personality belong to the group; that the group can do with him as it pleases, in any manner it pleases, for the sake of whatever it decides to be its own welfare.” It therefore means that “each man exists only by the permission of the group and for the sake of the group,” whether that group be his community, his country, his tribe, his race, or the abstract society as a whole.[xii]

Although Ayn apparently never inquired about her coworker’s political views, she said that the moment she identified the nature of her second-handedness, the political implications of it became clear as well. “The question of what makes a person an individualist or collectivist politically, what is the principle, had interested me,” Ayn recalled. “The conversation with that girl gave me not just the key to personal motivation, but to political motivation as well.”[xiii]

“It is not a question of individualism versus collectivism,” Ayn would write in her notes for The Fountainhead; “it is a question of egoism [versus] selflessness. The latter [alternative] is the psychological basis of the former.”

[My] purpose [in this book] is to prove that the so-called “selfish” man of today is the true collectivist in spirit, the man who has [renounced] his own “I” for the dictates of others, who has accepted society as his absolute ruler in the realm of spiritual values—and paid the price.[xiv]

A parallel purpose, she added, was to show that her ideal man—Howard Roark—was the true individualist in spirit. And in order to do so, she said, she needed to formulate “a new code of ethics.”

Although “the idea of individualism is not new,” she explained, “nobody had defined a consistent and specific way to live by it in practice.” That is what her book would provide it: a statement of “individualism as a religion and a code,” a new and consistent “morality of individualism.”[xv]

Thus, “the [abstract] theme of The Fountainhead,” Ayn Rand wrote, “is individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but within a man’s soul.”[xvi]

But perhaps the most vivid dramatization of the way egoism and selflessness turn, respectively, into individualism and collectivism in politics, is to be found in the absolutely fascinating little novella titled Anthem, which Ayn Rand wrote in about three months “as a break” from planning The Fountainhead, and which she described as having “the same theme, spirit and intention” as The Fountainhead, “although in a quite different form.”[xvii]

“In relation to The Fountainhead,” Ayn clarified, “Anthem is like one of those preliminary sketches that artists draw for their future large canvases”—it was, she would say, “an ancestor” of The Fountainhead, and The Fountainhead was “its child.”[xviii]

Anthem

Ayn had conceived the story back in Soviet Russia, while her ears were being drummed full of collectivist propaganda to the effect that the individual was nothing and the society everything; and it led her to wonder “what the world would be like if men lost the word ‘I.’”[xix]

The story of Anthem takes place in precisely that world: a totally collectivist society of the future in which the very concept of “I” has been erased from human consciousness, where each individual thinks of and refers to himself only as “we,” and to any other individual only as “they.” An all-powerful, all-pervasive State prescribes every last aspect of every person’s life: a government “Council of Vocations” assigns the life-long job every man will do from the age of fifteen—a “Council of Eugenics” determines the one time a year they will have sex, and with whom. The resultant children never see their parents; they are raised by the State in collective nurseries. From their earliest schooldays, they are forced to raise their right hands and chant:

“We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives.”

They are taught that “the will of all men together is good for all”—that “things which are not known by all do not exist”—that men’s only happiness is to “live for their brothers”—that men have no purpose “save in useful toil for the good of all [men].”

Although the laws forbid men to be unhappy, they all instead feel an unadmitted fear—“a fear without name, a fear without shape.” Their heads are all “bowed,” their shoulders “hunched,” their muscles “drawn,” and “never do they look one another in the eyes.” They all think it, but they remain silent, “for they dare not speak the thoughts of their minds. For all must agree with all, and they cannot know if their thoughts are the thoughts of all, and so they [all] fear to speak.” They do not speak, but some of them “cry suddenly, without reason, in the midst of day or night,” shaking with uncontrollable sobs; while others, fine in the day, “scream in their sleep,” shouting: “Help us! Help us! Help us!”

The novella is written in the form of a diary of one of the members of this society. “It is a sin to write this,” begins both the diary and the novel. “It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. . . . It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.” Unlike Howard Roark, who is already an unshakable egoist from the very start of The Fountainhead, who easily sees through all the false notions of the society around him, and is therefore “in conflict with the world in every possible way—and at complete peace with himself;” the hero of Anthem, named Equality 7-2521, has from the start accepted all the teachings of the society he lives in—has internalized them into his superego—and as a result is in complete conflict with himself. “We were born with a curse,” he writes of himself. “It has always driven us to thoughts which are forbidden. It has always given us wishes which men may not wish.”

From his earliest youth, he was fascinated by “all the things which make the earth around us” and yearned to explore what he believed to be the undiscovered “mysteries in the sky and under the water and in the plants which grow.” “But the Council of Scholars has said that there are no mysteries,” he reflects solemnly, “and the Council of Scholars knows all things.” He too wanted to be a Scholar, but felt guilty of his desire, “for men may wish nothing for themselves.” When at the age of fifteen, he was assigned instead to be a Street Sweeper, he accepted it without question as “the will of our brothers” and as his way “to atone for” his terrible “sin against them”—the sin of a personal desire. For the rest of his days, he is condemned to sweep the streets of the city in which he was born, a city surrounded by the Uncharted Forest, “about which men must not think,” and where they are told never to go, or else they will “perish from hunger and from the claws of the wild beasts.”[xx]

Luckily, while sweeping the city, the hero chances upon an underground tunnel—the remains of a subway from “the Unmentionable Times”—and in this tunnel, where he starts sneaking away every evening unbeknownst to his brother men, he conducts his own scientific experiments, writes in his diary, and begins to question the things he’s been taught. All science, all technology, all advanced knowledge from the Unmentionable Times has been lost in the world of Anthem. In contrast to practically every other anti-utopian novel written before it, where a dismal collectivist future in which all men have been totally enslaved is presented alongside an incredible growth of new technologies and scientific achievements—such as in Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, H.G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakens, and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We—Ayn Rand knew that all gains in science and technology are the fruits of the free-functioning minds of individual men and that when a society forbids independent thought, it can neither continue the creations of the mind nor maintain them.[xxi] The society of Anthem has regressed to the intellectual level of the Dark Ages: Men are taught to bleed others to cure them of disease, that the Earth is flat, and that the sun revolves around it. Their most sophisticated technology is the candle, allegedly invented by “twenty illustrious men” one hundred years ago.

In such a world, the hero—experimenting for two years with the wires and materials he finds from the Unmentionable Times—rediscovers electricity. “We made it. We created it. We brought it forth from the night of the ages,” he writes, still using “we” to refer to his own singular achievement. “We had touched no flint, made no fire. Yet here was light, light that came from nowhere, light from the heart of metal.” Immediately, and in perfect accordance with everything he’s been taught, he grandiosely imagines all the great benefits his discovery will have for mankind. “We thought of the meaning of that which lay before us,” he writes:

We can light our tunnel, and the City, and all the Cities of the world with nothing save metal and wires. We can give our brothers a new light, cleaner and brighter than any they have ever known. The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might.

Motivated by the beneficent vision before him and by the promise of unlimited progress, he now knows what he must do. “Our discovery is too great for us to waste our time in sweeping the streets,” he says:

We must not keep our secret to ourselves, nor buried under the ground. We must bring it into the sight of all men. We need all our time, we need the work rooms of the Home of the Scholars, we want the help of our brother Scholars and their wisdom joined to ours. There is so much work ahead for all of us, for all the Scholars of the world.

Still believing that the Council of Scholars, as he’s heard all his life, consists of the wisest of all men; and implicitly assuming (although he’s never seen them) that they are indeed wise and reasonable people, he decides to appear before them and present them with his invention. “In a month, the World Council of Scholars is to meet in our City,” he continues.

It is a great Council, to which the wisest of all lands are elected, and it meets once a year in the different Cities of the earth. We shall go to this Council and we shall lay before them, as our gift, this glass box with the power of the sky. We shall confess everything to them. They will see, understand and forgive. For our gift is greater than our transgression. They will explain it to the Council of Vocations, and we shall be assigned to the Home of the Scholars. This has never been done before, but neither has a gift such as ours ever been offered to men.

He goes before the Council, shows them his invention, and the Scholars are flung into a hysterical rage. “How dared you think that your mind held greater wisdom than the minds of your brothers?” snarled the wisest Scholar. “And if this should lighten the toil of men,” cried another, “then it is a great evil, for men have no cause to exist save in toiling for other men.” But “this would wreck the Plans of the World Council,” superstitiously muttered a third, “and without the Plans of the World Council the sun cannot rise.” “You shall be burned at the stake.” “No, they shall be lashed . . . , till there is nothing left under the lashes,” two others chimed in.

Astonished by such a response, the hero is forced to grab his invention and run for his life, escaping into the Uncharted Forest—the terrifying forest where certain death awaits him at the claws of the wild beasts.

But, to his amazement, the forest is nothing like what he’s been told. In a stunning literary contrast between the bleak, wretched, suffocating society described in the book’s previous chapters, the forest turns out to be a beautiful, exhilarating, life-giving place. “It has been a day of wonder, this, our first day in the forest,” begins the next diary entry, with the hero bursting into a jubilant peak-experience.

Waking up with “a ray of sunlight” on his face, he realizes that he is free, free to continue to lie on the soft moss and gaze at the sky, or free to get up and meet the new day, with no alarm bell forcing him out of his bed and into a routine of thankless toil. The leaves above him tremble and ripple “like a river of green and fire.” He rises, darts through the forest, whirls with arms outstretched through its soft brush. He swings himself into a tree just to test the strength of his own body, and falls to the ground again, “dry leaves in our tunic, in our hair, in our face.” Suddenly, he realizes that he is “laughing, laughing aloud, laughing as if there were no power in us save laughter.”

Walking through the forest, and “bless[ing] the earth under our feet,” the hero begins to wonder: “If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, then what is good and what is evil?”

Everything which comes from the many is good. Everything which comes from one is evil. This have we been taught with our first breath. We have broken the law, but we have never doubted it. Yet now, as we walk through the forest, we are learning to doubt.
There is no life for men, save in useful toil for the good of all their brothers. But we lived not, when we toiled for our brothers, we were only weary. There is no joy for men, save the joy shared with all their brothers. But the only things which taught us joy . . . belong to us alone, they come from us alone, they bear no relation to all our brothers. . . . Thus do we wonder.
There is some error, one frightful error, in the thinking of men. What is that error? We do not know, but the knowledge struggles within us, struggles to be born.

After several weeks of wandering the forest, alongside the woman who he loves and who followed him into the forest after hearing of his escape, the hero and his bride come upon an abandoned house from the Unmentionable Times. Erected upon the side of a mountain, and built of fully intact glass and concrete, the couple likes the house; and they promptly take up residence within it.

Inside the house, the hero finds rows upon rows of books. He looks “upon the earth and the sky.” “This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight,” he thinks, “is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment.” And in the very first book he opens, the hero finds his answer. He breaks into tears for the first time in his life, and in a moment of profound deliverance, he sings out what Ayn Rand called “the actual anthem:”

“I am. I think. I will,” begins the penultimate chapter:

My hands. . . . . My spirit. . . . My sky. . . . My forest. . . . This earth of mine. . . . What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.
I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgement of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect.
Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: "I will it!" . . .
I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars.
I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before!
I do not surrender my treasures, nor do I share them. The fortune of my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom. . . .
But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

Having rediscovered the word “I,” the hero is now “done with this creed of corruption . . . , done with the monster of ‘We,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame.”

For the word "We" must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all the evils on earth, the root of man’s torture by men, and of an unspeakable lie.

What the hero has thus discovered—together with the word “I” and everything it entails—is egoism; a discovery no less important, no less valuable, and no less difficult to unearth in the psychological realm, than his discovery of electricity was in the physical one. And once again, except this time correctly and properly, he manically envisions the implications his discovery has for himself, for the world, and for the good of the whole of mankind. “My future,” he writes in the novella’s last chapter, “is clear before me.”

I shall live here, in my own house. I shall take my food from the earth by the toil of my own hands. I shall learn many secrets from my books. Through the years ahead, I shall rebuild the achievements of the past, and open the way to carry them further. . . .
Then here, on this mountaintop, with the world below me and nothing above me but the sun, I shall live my own truth. [My bride] is pregnant with my child. Our son will be raised as a man. He will be taught to say “I” and to bear the pride of it. . . . He will be taught reverence for his own spirit.
When I shall have read all the books and learned my new way, when my home will be ready and my earth tilled, I shall steal one day, for the last time, into the cursed City of my birth. I shall call to me my friend who has no name save International 4-8818, and all those like him, Fraternity 2-5503, who cries without reason, and Solidarity 9-6347 who calls for help in the night, and a few others. I shall call to me all the men and the women whose spirit has not been killed within them and who suffer under the yoke of their brothers. They will follow me and I shall lead them to my fortress. And here, in this uncharted wilderness, I and they, my chosen friends, my fellow-builders, shall write the first chapter in the new history of man.

The hero, however, doesn’t stop there. At the end, in a brilliant dramatization of the way egoism leads to individualism in politics, he announces the kind of world he is going to build, a world that is founded on the principle of man’s rights: to his own life, his own liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness—“for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.”

[Together], I and my sons and my chosen friends shall build our new land and our fort. And it will become as the heart of the earth, lost and hidden at first, but beating, beating louder each day. . . . And the roads of the world will become as veins which will carry the best of the world’s blood to my threshold. And all my brothers, and the Councils of my brothers, will hear of it, but they will be impotent against me. And the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and raze the cities of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake.
For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. . . .
And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.
The sacred word: EGO.[xxii]^[1]

Shortly after she wrote it, in the summer of 1937, Ayn Rand wrote in a letter that Anthem was “more precious to me than anything I have ever considered writing. It is so very personally mine.” It was, she said, “my manifesto, my profession of faith, the essence of my entire philosophy.”^[xxiii] Satisfied with the work, she gave the book to her literary agent, and went back to plotting The Fountainhead.

Second-Hand Lives: A Moral Life in a Corrupt Society

In the fall of 1937, about a month after finishing Anthem, Ayn got a secretarial job at the New York architecture firm of Ely Jacques Kahn: a famous New York architect on whom she would later base Fountainhead character Guy Francon.[xxiv] Ayn and her husband had moved from Hollywood to New York back in 1934, partly because it was the publishing capital of the world (which Ayn hoped would help her with finding a publisher for We the Living) and partly because her play Woman on Trial (soon to be renamed Night of January 16^th) was bought by the legendary theatrical producer Al Woods (the same man who had made such a phenomenal success out of The Trial of Mary Dugan) and was now set to appear on Broadway.[xxv] Although We the Living, which did find a publisher in late 1935, sold very poorly; and Ayn’s husband, in the middle of the Great Depression, was unable to find work; her play became a smashing success (at least commercially) and would earn her as much as $1,200 in royalties on good weeks.[xxvi] She therefore could well afford, in 1937, to work for Ely Jacques Kahn without pay. Over the course of six months, while working as a filing clerk, typist, and general assistant in Khan’s offices, she would learn the ins-and-outs of the architectural profession. Kahn alone knew that she wasn’t just a regular employee, but a fiction writer doing research for her next novel.[xxvii]

Ayn had begun planning The Fountainhead “in small glances” back in 1933, after she had identified the nature of second-handedness from those fateful remarks of her neighbor.[xxviii] She wanted to show, as a contrast to the second-handedness of Peter Keating, what is the “real meaning” of selfishness, of actually placing one’s own self—the self that thinks, feels, judges, and acts—above all other considerations. As she would write in some of her earliest notes on Howard Roark:

His main policy in life is to refuse, completely and uncompromisingly, any surrender to the thoughts and desires of others. He wants to be an architect. He knows what he thinks of his work and what and how he will create. . . .
If he cannot get the right to do the work as he wants it done—well, then, he’ll take a fifteen-dollar [a week] job as a common worker, and wait and work for his chance. Because the rewards of success as such—money, ease and fame—mean nothing whatever to him; his life has to be real, his life is his work, he will do his work as he wants it done, the only way he can enjoy it—or not at all. . . . Because the second-hand consolations most people get out of life have no meaning for him, he will not compromise by building inferior buildings, nor by pretending adherence to the prejudices of those in power to gain their favors and their jobs. He will be himself at any cost—the only thing he really wants of life. And, deep inside of him, he knows that he has the ability to win the right to be himself. Consequently, his life is clear, simple, satisfying and joyous—even if very hard outwardly.[xxix]

The Fountainhead, Ayn would say, demonstrates how a moral man can live in a corrupt society.[xxx] It reveals the way one can stick to one’s principles—formed by one’s own independent judgment—under an onslaught of social and economic pressures to conform.

This was something Ayn had experienced personally, primarily during the “hell” she had to go through in producing her play with Al Woods. The entire process of putting on the play, she said, “was a sickening struggle between Woods and me.” The contract she signed with him was so vaguely worded that, despite her lawyer’s assurances, it gave Woods the full power to make whatever script changes he deemed necessary. Thus, “to liven it up,” Ayn recalled, “[Woods] introduced, in small touches, a junk heap of worn, irrelevant melodramatic devices that clashed with the style, did not advance the action and served only to confuse the audience—such as a gun, a heat test to determine its erased serial number, [and] a flashy gun moll. . . . Woods actually believed that only guns, fingerprints and police matters could hold an audience’s attention, but ‘speeches’ could not.” She remembered heated arguments with Woods, and him saying: “How can you be so stubborn? How can you argue with me? This is your first play and I’ve been in the theater for forty years!” Ayn tried to explain “that it was not a matter of personalities, age or experience, not a matter of who said it, but of what was said, and that I would give in to his office boy, if the boy happened to be right.” But “Woods did not answer,” Ayn recalled wearily; “I knew even then that he did not hear me.” In the end, Ayn said, “I managed to prevent the worst of the changes he wanted to introduce, and I managed to preserve the best of the passages he wanted to eliminate, but that was all I could do. So the play became an incongruous mongrel slapdashed out of contradictory elements.” “By the time the play opened on Broadway (in September of 1935), it was dead, as far as I was concerned. I could feel nothing for it or about it except revulsion and indignation.”[xxxi] And yet the play was a massive commercial success.

“I am trying to look at the whole thing philosophically,” she wrote in a November 1935 letter, “[to] consider it a necessary sacrifice to make a beginning and forget about it, while I try to write something better.”[xxxii] Yet when she did think about it philosophically, she reached precisely the opposite conclusion. Like Howard Roark, she solemnly swore not to compromise the integrity of her creative work ever again. “But don't let anyone ever approach me about making changes in my work,” was her main takeaway from her Broadway experience: “I learned my lesson the hard way.”[xxxiii]

This is what she wanted to portray in the character of Howard Roark; but by late 1935, she had not yet decided upon Roark’s profession. When, about a month later, she came upon the idea of architecture, she was positively thrilled. Because architecture combines science, business, and art, it would enable her to demonstrate that same principle in all the three fields.[xxxiv] It would also enable her to express, in the best way possible to her, her lifelong reverence for the American skyscraper.[xxxv] But although “I like architecture as an art,” she later explained, “what I actually did was translate into architecture what I felt about writing . . . , [of] how I feel about my profession.”[xxxvi]

In any case, having chosen for Roark the profession of architecture, Ayn started on a diligent program of research into the subject. She began by reading a large variety of books and architectural magazines, where she soon found parallels, in real life, to both Keating and Roark. The real-life Roark that she found was Frank Lloyd Wright, the free-thinking, trail-blazing modern architect—although Ayn would later comment that Wright was “a Roark in his professional life, [but] a Keating in his private life.”[xxxvii] And the real-life Keating that she found (or at least the primary one, because she found many) was Thomas Hastings: the utterly unoriginal, perfectly mediocre popular architect who designed (among other things) the New York Public Library. “If I take [Hasting’s biography] and Wright’s autobiography,” Ayn wrote at one point in her notes, then “there is practically the entire story of ‘Second-Hand Lives.’”[xxxviii]

In the actual novel, Keating and Roark live together just off the campus of the Stanton Institute of Technology, where they are both studying architecture. For the past three years, Roark has been renting a room in the house of Keating’s mother. On the day Roark is expelled from the University, Peter Keating graduates with honors, the very first among his graduating class—which is due, in no small part, to the extensive help he received with his homework assignments from Howard Roark. After the graduation ceremony, Keating comes home to find Roark sitting on the steps of his porch. He sits down beside him, sincerely asking his advice. Keating has just been offered a job at an architectural firm owned by Guy Francon, and a four-year scholarship to the most prestigious architectural graduate school in Paris. He isn’t sure which to take. “If you want my advice, Peter,” answers Roark, “you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?” “That’s what I admire about you, Howard,” replies Keating. “You always know. . . . How do you always manage to decide?” “How can you let others decide for you?” replies Roark. In this way, their careers start out in parallel: Keating goes off to New York to accept the job with Guy Francon; and Roark heads to New York too to find his own way.

In addition to Keating and Roark, Ayn created three other major characters for the novel: Gail Wynand, Ellsworth Toohey, and Dominique Francon.

Gail Wynand, modeled loosely on William Randolph Hearst, is the free-thinking, multi-millionaire owner of a nation-wide newspaper empire. As the publisher of the most popular newspaper in New York, the New York Banner, he is the preeminent source of public opinion. In the streets, in homes, and in drawing rooms, people are mouthing the slogans, catchphrases, and opinions of his newspapers almost verbatim. He has, however, never expressed in his newspapers a single opinion of his own. The foremost policy of his papers is to print only the things that the public wants to hear—in other words, to cater to the prejudices, desires, and tastes of the majority. He has grown fabulously rich in the process, but he doesn’t realize that he has “sold his [own] soul.”[xxxix]

Ellsworth Monkton Toohey is the main, giddily sinister, larger-than-life villain of the book. He is a scholar, columnist, and head architectural critic for the Banner. In an extremely short amount of time, he has become America’s foremost authority on architecture—but he aspires still further. He thoroughly understands and “knows everything about” the nature of second-handers. And for some sinister purpose of his own, which he keeps skillfully hidden until the end of the book, he acts to transform men into second-handers and to destroy “the exceptional man.” He has selected “the field of art” as the most effective means to that goal. By praising the mediocre and slandering the sublime, he destroys men’s ability to judge. “Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect,” he exclaims, “[and] you’ve destroyed architecture.”[xl]

Dominique is the lone heroine and main romantic interest in the novel. She is the daughter of Guy Francon, a woman of exquisite beauty, and a columnist for the New York Banner. The most enigmatic character in the book, Ayn Rand created her out of two contradictory elements in her own psychology. The first of these was an intense hero-worship, which makes her fall in love with Roark totally and instantly, from a single look at his face. She becomes, as Ayn Rand wrote in her notes, Roark’s “priestess.”[xli] The second was “the malevolent universe premise”—or, as Ayn put it, “myself in a bad mood.”[xlii] Dominique accepts, as a conscious conviction, the way Ayn Rand felt in moments of despair over her obstructed goals, of indignation at human irrationality, of rage against the triumphs of evil. Dominique, Rand said, “really believed that that is all there is in life”—that evil would always triumph, that there was no escape from human irrationality, that one’s highest goals, aspirations, and values “had no chance in the world” as it is.[xliii] Convinced, therefore, that Roark’s struggle to do his own work his own way is doomed to failure, and that he will ultimately be destroyed by the corrupt society around him, Dominique leaves Roark and instead marries Peter Keating and then Gail Wynand, in an effort to destroy herself before society destroys her one true love.

This corrupt society, as much as its five central characters, is an integral part of The Fountainhead. It is a fictionalized version of the American society Ayn observed all around her, a society pervaded by doctrines of selflessness and collectivism, and a society deluged with second-handers. The root cause of this, Ayn concluded, was the Christian morality of selflessness almost everybody was taught; which was, incidentally, the same basic morality propagandized by Communism. What she called “the old Christian-communist denial of ‘self,’” she already knew, led to collectivism politically; and, as she could now see, it led to second-handedness psychologically.

In the course of writing The Fountainhead, Ayn found the word that simultaneously named the selflessness preached by Christianity, the selflessness preached by Communism, and that same kind of ethical selflessness preached by any other religion or theory on Earth: altruism. “Altruism,” says Howard Roark, “is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self.”[xliv] “The basic principle of altruism,” Ayn later elaborated in an essay, “is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.”[xlv] But “no man can achieve the kind of absolute humility that [altruism demands],” says Howard Roark:

“He wouldn’t survive. So after centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand. And it has opened the way for every kind of horror. It has become the dreadful form of selfishness which a truly selfish man couldn’t have conceived.”[xlvi]

This is the society Ayn observed all around her and the society she portrayed in The Fountainhead. “No one has shown [today’s] life, as it really is, with its real meaning and its reasons,” she wrote in her very first notes for the novel. “I’m going to show it. [And] if it’s not a pretty picture—well, what is the [alternative]?”[xlvii]

Dictatorship of the Second-Handers

It is Ellsworth Monkton Toohey who preys on the blind senselessness of this society, perpetuates it, and leads it down an increasingly sinister path. At the start of the book, the mass of second-handers appears to be nothing worse than a bunch of petty, irrational incompetents; but as the novel progresses, under Toohey’s intellectual and moral leadership, the second-handers begin to take on a distinctively vicious role. Toohey has grasped the ultimate absurdity of second-handers accepting their beliefs from other second-handers, who accept their beliefs from still other second-handers, in an infinite loop where no independent thought ever existed. So he wedges himself into that cycle; he becomes the source of those beliefs; he preaches altruism and collectivism; he elevates second-handedness into a virtue and denigrates independence as a horrible vice—all in order to achieve his ultimate goal: a totalitarian collectivist dictatorship (similar to the one in Anthem) in which he will be the ruler. “You’re afraid to see where it’s leading,” he tells a psychologically shattered Peter Keating toward the end of the book. “I’m not. I’ll tell you.”

“The world of the future. The world I want. A world of obedience and of unity. A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought in the brain of his neighbor who’ll have no thought of his own but an attempt to guess the thought of the next neighbor who’ll have no thought—and so on, Peter, around the globe. Since all must agree with all. A world where no man will hold a desire for himself, but will direct all his efforts to satisfy the desires of his neighbor who’ll have no desires except to satisfy the desires of the next neighbor who’ll have no desires—around the globe, Peter. Since all must serve all. A world in which man will not work for so innocent an incentive as money, but for that headless monster—prestige. The approval of his fellows—their good opinion—the opinion of men who’ll be allowed to hold no opinion. An octopus, all tentacles and no brain. . . . An average drawn upon zeroes—since no individuality will be permitted. A world with its motor cut off and a single heart, pumped by hand. My hand—and the hands of a few, a very few other men like me. Those who know what makes you tick—you great, wonderful average, you who have not risen in fury when we called you the average, the little, the common, you who’ve liked and accepted those names.”

Just as in the world of Anthem (not to mention in Soviet Russia), a dictatorial State indoctrinates its citizens with a suffocating, all-pervading propaganda of altruism—that man exists only for the sake of his brothers, that every selfish desire is evil, that one’s purpose in life should be service to other men—and thus gets them to accept, together with these notions, the State’s moral right to rule over them; so too does Ellsworth Toohey, by propagating these notions in a free society, lay down the psychological groundwork for an oncoming dictatorship. In the same candid speech, he explains to Peter Keating the way that he does this. “Preach selflessness,” he says to him:

“Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue—and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. . . . His soul gives up its self-respect. [And] you’ve got him. He’ll obey. He’ll be glad to obey—because he can’t trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. . . .
“[And] here’s another way. This [one’s the] most important. Don’t allow men to be happy. . . . Kill their joy in living. . . . Never let them have what they want. Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying ‘I want’ is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s soul—and the space is yours to fill. I don’t see why you should look so shocked, Peter. This is the oldest one of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn’t they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven’t they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven’t you been able to catch their theme song—‘Give up, give up, give up, give up’? . . . Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men. Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell people that they’ll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy. You don’t have to be too clear about it. Use big vague words. ‘Universal Harmony’—‘Eternal Spirit’—‘Divine Purpose’ —‘Nirvana’—‘Paradise’—‘Racial Supremacy’—‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ Internal corruption, Peter. That’s the oldest one of all. The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it. Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice—run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”

The character of Toohey thus demonstrates, from a different angle than that of Anthem, the way selflessness in psychology leads to collectivism in politics. “Look around you,” he exclaims to a horrified Keating, in a scene Ayn Rand wrote in the middle of WWII:

“Pick up any newspaper and read the headlines. Isn’t it coming? Isn’t it here? Every single thing I told you? Isn’t Europe swallowed already and we’re stumbling on to follow? Everything I said is contained in a single word—collectivism. And isn’t that the god of our century? To act together. To think—together. To feel—together. To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. . . . We’ve found the magic word. Collectivism. Look at Europe, you fool. Can’t you see past the guff and recognize the essence? One country is dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the collective is all. The individual held as evil, the mass—as God. No motive and no virtue permitted—except that of service to the proletariat. That’s one version. Here’s another. A country dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the State is all. The individual held as evil, the race—as God. No motive and no virtue permitted—except that of service to the race. Am I raving or is this the cold reality of two continents already? Watch the pincer movement. If you’re sick of one version, we push you into the other. We get you coming and going. We’ve closed the doors. We’ve fixed the coin. Heads—collectivism, and tails—collectivism. Fight the doctrine which slaughters the individual with a doctrine which slaughters the individual. Give up your soul to a council—or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. My technique, Peter. Offer poison as food and poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main objective. Give the fools a choice, let them have their fun—but don’t forget the only purpose you have to accomplish. Kill the individual. Kill man’s soul. The rest will follow automatically.”

With early access for paid subscribers, I’ll be releasing this book as a serial, chapter by chapter, right here on my Substack! Get the exclusive opportunity to read Roman’s work as it comes out, share feedback, questions, and constructive criticism, and help contribute to the final manuscript. All paid subscribers who sign up before the book’s launch date will receive a free first-edition autographed copy when it’s first printed.

SELF-ACTUALIZE

Discussion about this post