By Patricia McCarthy, AMERICAN THINKER
Fountainhead – noun as in principal source; person who originates – administrator, builder, creator, originator, leader….
Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, published in 1943, has been read by millions of people over the years (37 million books sold). The truncated film version, released in 1949, has been seen by millions of people as well.
Of course, the left has always hated Rand, her books and the films based on them. Her philosophy is a celebration of individualism, a testament to gifted and talented men and women who are able to remain true to themselves in a world that reveres and celebrates mediocrity. Ayn Rand was born in Russia in 1905, and educated there; she was twelve years old during the Bolshevik Revolution. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1926.
Her play of 1935, The Night of January 16th, was produced in Hollywood first, then on Broadway. It was a courtroom drama in which members of the audience were chosen as jurors. The play’s intent was to demonstrate the conflict between individualism and conformity, which seems to be the primary conflict between and among Americans today. The left always comes down on the side of submission and conformity — to their agenda.
Donald Trump is a larger-than-life individual. Rand might have created him for a novel, or based a novel on him had she known him. She profoundly respected people who remained true to themselves when all around them are those striving only for approval for being conventional. Her books and plays were about the tension between individualism and the collectivist mindset of the left.
No wonder the left hates Trump with a blinding obsession to destroy him; his success, his essential happiness and personal fulfillment and his failure to capitulate to their demands enrages them beyond all reason.
Rand’s heroes are engineers, mathematicians, builders and businessmen, not journalists, writers and the professors who believe themselves far superior to the likes of men such as Trump.
The Fountainhead is particularly famous for its representation of newspapermen who relish in creating mob actions, especially against anything new and creative.
Just as when Stravinsky debuted his The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, riots ensued, fights in the aisles of the theater; it was new and different. People were stunned by its departure from what they were used to hearing.
If Rand were alive today, she would invent DEI, ESG and CRT in order to mock how such social experiments destroy excellence, creativity and subvert merit. Each of these alphabet enemies of our civil society require self-sacrifice. Rand wrote: “Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.” The talking heads at the aforementioned new outlets sold their souls long ago in order to remain conventional.
Today, as the left goes to hellish, unconstitutional lengths to prevent Trump from regaining the presidency, we must admit that there is no longer a Democrat party as formerly constituted in the days of JFK. Today the Democrat party is decidedly Marxist/communist/socialist. Like Rand’s antagonists who set out to destroy her hero, architect Howard Roark, this Democrat party has only contempt for the American people. If they support Trump, they are in need of forced “re-education,” as in camps.
The Democrat left today, the party that fraudulently installed Joe Biden in the presidency knowing full well that he was and remains the most mediocre politician of the last fifty years, hates our nation and the men who founded it. Biden has proven to be the worst president in American history by any measure – economic, demographic (open border), militarily (weak, now a trans/LGBT experiment), re: energy (cutting us off), he’s fostered the war in Ukraine and Israel; he wants the war in Ukraine to go on for ten years. As for Israel, he is rooting for Hamas.
Biden is everything Ayn Rand railed against, weak, evil, and corrupt. He wants to be thought great by all sides and has not the brains nor the guts to do what is right, no matter the seriousness of the situation. He has brought the country low indeed.
What can one say about the people who continue to support Biden given his painfully obvious dementia, his inability to perform his job? Do they hate Trump so much they are willing to turn the country over to some man-behind-the-curtain? We can ask: Who is calling the shots?
His cabinet is chock full of equally incompetent know-nothings beyond their love of power and money or their status as a revered minority – racial, sexual or otherwise.
How can the usual talking heads in the media continue to pretend he is a viable man, let alone qualified to be president? We all know that the debate will be rigged to favor Biden no matter what; Tapper and Bash are simply tools of the left. They will do what is expected of them, not what is fair.
The tragedy is that, like Rand’s Ellsworth Toohey, they will be proud of themselves for doing the collectivists’ bidding. Again, in the words of Ayn Rand, “The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.”
The American left today fears another Trump presidency like the wicked witch feared water, for it signals the end of their deep state, bureaucratic, authoritarian rule.
“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.” –Ayn Rand
@Adam
I fully agree with your critique of Rand. I was never fond of her heroes, while still finding value in her books, but your short analysis is quite jolly spot on, IMO. I can’t count the number of arguments which I have had with people over this topic over the years.
Unlike Rand, Trump, despite many personal shortcomings, has never been a selfish person. He has always contributed a large part of his income to charity. He also has frequently visited hospital patients without families to visit them, and more or less adopted them as parr of his family. Yes, he deserted several of his ex-wivwas, and that was wrong. But he also insured that they all were well-provided for, as well as all his children. All of his exes have positive things to say about him. Some have even worked as volunteers in his political campaigns. A morally flawed human being like all of us. But definitely not a selfish man. Not like Ayn Rand’s heroes.
I like Trump. But I strongly disagree with Rand’s celebration of “se;fishness.” He not only praised selfishness in principal, but she demonstrated it in her private life when she ditched her husband of many years and seduced the husband of one of her best friends and supporters, persuading him to leave his wife for her. Selfishness in deed as well as word. Her lover in her later years, a man much younger than her, outlived her and opened his own office as a psychologist. Although still influenced to some extent by Rand’s ideas, he now counsel’s his clients, not to be selfish, but to idevelop “self-esteem.” This is a major improvement over Rand’s glorification and practice of selfishness.
e Ayn Rand:
she was not a businesswoman and did not know which businesses would make good investiments.
Reminds me of a fun Korean Drama from 2022.
Synopsis
The series tells the story of Yoon Hyun-woo (Song Joong-ki), a loyal higher-up employee working for chaebol Soonyang Group, who was betrayed and murdered by a member of the Soonyang family to cover up a tax evasion scheme. Hyun-woo later wakes up in 1987 discovering that he has been reincarnated into the body of Jin Do-jun, youngest grandson of the Soonyang family. Using these circumstances to his advantage, he starts his revenge by plotting a hostile takeover of Soonyang Group. The background to the story is the power of the chaebols and the 1997 Asian Financial crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborn_Rich
Marry My Husband is 2024, Twinkling Watermelon is 2023 and Reborn Rich is 2022. I think they all are or were on Netflix among other platforms. With English subtitles, of course. All have time travel knowing future events and trying to take advantage of that knowledge.
In real life, I’ll take the safety net that every democracy and every developed country has in place, thank you very much, including Israel, Russia, and Hungary, every European country, Canada, Australia, Brazil, South Korea, Japan,Taiwan, except the U.S. and Belgium ? the capital of the EU. Ironically, the Communist countries don’t provide universal health care either. So much for the slippery slope argument. ? Some do it better than others but they all have it. And vicious radicals like the Squad take at advantage of the fact that we don’t to win constituencies that otherwise wouldn’t give them the time of day. And that’s socialism then “I’m not a cab driver, I’m a coffee pot.”
Arsenic and Old Lace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In_UKcRXzHs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_and_Old_Lace_(film)
Wikipedia.
I doubt she paid anything for her education, though.
The metaphor fits. He is like an Ayn Rand character despite not exactly being the avatar of a rags to riches story. (In fact, one of the things, I learned in studying U.S. history in college, was that while, yes, the U.S. has had a history of unprecedented class mobility, going from poverty to riches was always rare. People usually went from lower to middle, or from middle to Upper. Trump went from moderate wealth and built upon it instead of pissing it away.) . However, Ayn Rand’s politics were much more extreme than his and she wound up not being able to afford them, herself. 😀
From Quora: