Individualism and ownership

I watched the documentary "All watched over by the Machines of Loving Grace" before I saw "The Fountainhead". This documentary had segments of an interview with Ayn Rand and gave me better insight into the person who wrote "the Fountainhead".

Individualism was what Rand believed, preached, wanted and encouraged. It was believed that a hierarchy power in the form of a government was not needed and man could govern themselves. This would work in an economic, social and political system.

Rand has identified herself as the character Howard Roark in the film. An uncompromising, visionary architect that refuses to "give advice or take advice" and struggles to maintain his individualism in the form of his designs. It is only through sheer will (and sheer luck he is a brilliant architect that people come to him) that he is able to continue practising and he finds himself in the position to be sort after and thus targeted by others to keep him under control.

Before I saw the film, I couldn't really imagine blowing up a building of my design because it was altered along the way. I'm not saying I would do that post seeing the film, I am not a criminal after all (and let me be clear, blowing up a building is a criminal act, no matter the fancy speech of the creator and the parasite you can recite in a court) but there is certainly an understanding of why he did it. Ownership of ideas is what he himself argues, that they are created for the individual and that they can be offered up to society to benefit them but that is a secondary cause, his own benefit is first.

Roark is the presentation of freedom; the individual with free will, a man who has come up from the bottom and raised to the top - capitalism in an optimistic sense.

Ellsworth Toohey is the representation of the corruption of power, praising meritocracy and crushing geniuses to keep them with the status quo - communism in its most negative sense. (The bad guy played by an English actor - you don't get more Hollywood than that!)

This isn't surprising nor particularly controversial considering Rand was a Russian-American, escaping communist Russia , she feared the collective and was far keener on being the individual. That probably way Roark was portrayed as the good guy who wins the case, the architecture and the girl.