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Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead is not about political activism. It's about a guy who builds buildings for a living. A fairly laconic guy, most of the time. One who tends to be much more interested in what he's doing than in anybody else's opinion of what he's doing.
Howard Roark has his ideas but he doesn't make any great effort to pitch them. He doesn't try to buttonhole you at parties. He doesn't go door-to-door with copies of Watchtower or Free to Choose. He doesn't chant at rallies and he doesn't even have any bumper stickers on his car. He is no salesman in the glad-hand sense, although he will certainly take the time to explain the benefits of his new design proposal...if you care to listen.
Yet Howard Roark is one of the most powerful purveyors of the ideas and principles of Howard Roark that you will ever meet.
It helps that he has a good press agent, Ayn Rand, who has written up his life story in a best-selling novel. But set that aside. What The Fountainhead dramatizes is the dictum that "character counts." It counts not only in private life but in public life. Not only when you are holed up in your study, alone with the sketches, but also when you are explaining those sketches to a client, or your choices in life to a friend, or the rights of the creative ego to a packed courtroom. You cannot say and do things without revealing your self, your character, in what you say and do and how you say and do it. And these manifestations influence people.
True, a person can be positively affected by a bumper sticker even if the driver of the car is a lout. But what would be the end result of the driver's effort in the case of a prospect who walks over and says, "Hey, that's an interesting bumper sticker, but I don't agree"...and gets as payment the snarling response, "Well then, you're either stupid, ignorant, or evil, and I have nothing to say to you"?
Persuasion is more than an art and more than a science. At some point, clever attention-getting and daring provocation-of-thought and even the most inspired "positioning" must give way to leisurely and serious human interaction. And that is when the rubber meets the road.
In his Rhetoric, Aristotle distinguishes three main "modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word....The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided....It is not true, as some writers assume in their treatises on rhetoric, that the personal goodness revealed by the speaker contributes nothing to his power of persuasion; on the contrary, his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses."
Now, if The Fountainhead is not about Roark making himself credible to various people--including a woman who seeks to destroy him yet is the love of his life, and a man who seeks to destroy him yet supplies the greatest architectural assignment of Roark's career--the novel is not about anything.
Let's consider a single small incident: Roark's demonstration of ability--and willingness to stick to his guns--to one Mike Donnigan, an electrician who expresses contempt when Roark instructs him to burn a hole through a beam in order to lay down pipe. Roark grabs the torch and does the job himself. Mike, happy to be proven wrong, learns that "Red" worked in all kinds of building trades while he was growing up. Later the two share a drink and it emerges that Roark was once employed by the only architect Mike respects: Henry Cameron. The ugly bulldog electrician and the gaunt red-headed architect become fast friends.
Now let's suppose that one day Mike happens to complain about how his neighborhood is going to hell in a hand-basket. He says something like, "The cops have got to do more to crack down on all these damn drug dealers." Roark replies, "Well, I see your point. But I actually think the neighborhood would be better off, in the long run, if all drugs were legalized."
Who is Mike more likely to listen to, vis-à-vis the controversial policy question of drug legalization? Roark, a man of established integrity, a straight shooter, who always seems to know what he's doing and what he's talking about?
Or Joe Drug Addict, man of self-destructive drift, never sure about what he's doing, who always seems to be either babbling or staring into space?
--David M. Brown, 8/5/03
(Article originally published by Bureaucrash.com.)
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The Fountainhead is the story of a man who does it his way. GET IT
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