The Fountainhead

This book tortured me: hundreds of pages of empty conversations, pages slapping my face and offending me of mediocrity. I still could not stop, it kept me going for two nights. But I feel now I conquered Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’.

It tells a bitter story of architects, a story of the pursuit of perfection, a story of mediocrity.

I know the feeling when you walk into a building/public space and …it’s impossible to express it…everything is just right. It is just like I fit in the building and building fits with me. The looks are one thing — make it striking enough so it certainly will make for a good instagram picture. But if you actually want to use the place. Perhaps I want to go to the toilet and the toilet is right there, just in front of me. Perhaps I am hungry and hey, there is a bar. And people recognize this, they love to hang out in these places. Being an engineer I am most impressed when an architect can pull this off. It’s like playing an orchestra, everything must play together. I don’t even know where one starts.

The book maybe speaks of architects but effectively it is not a book about architecture. It is about humans and it touches so many ideas seemingly unconnected. It just exploit architects as a profession riddled with incompetency.

Conquering the nature

I like to climb the mountain peaks. I have never been sure why. It seemed natural until I met a person who did not like it — he told me “I like the valleys between the peeks, there is life!”

What gives me more pleasure? Is it the view from the top, or is it the achievement itself? The book gave me the answer. Getting to the top of Mount Everest with clear view would feel as awesome as if the peak was submerged in a bleak cloud. At the end, you can take a picture to see the view.

“Have you heard with what delight people quote some great celebrity who’s proclaimed that he’s not so great when he looks at Niagara Falls? It’s as if they were smacking their lips in sheer glee that their best is dust before the brute force of an earthquake. As if they were sprawling on all fours, rubbing their foreheads in the mud to the majesty of a hurricane. But that’s not the spirit that leashed fire, steam, electricity, that crossed oceans in sailing sloops, that built airplanes and dams…and skyscrapers.”

“I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them because I love this earth.”

Personal dignity

I had danced to music I absolutely hated, I praised articles which I did not understand, I spent hours sitting at an opera absolutely hating it (it was some Verdi), I drunk liters of beer which I hated. Only to tell my friends how much I enjoyed myself doing this or that. That would not be the worst, I was actually convincing myself how much I enjoyed doing this.

Am I the sheep? Am I the person without an opinion? Perhaps. But do people like me for it? Or hate me for it? Or am I just another of them? Do I want to know? Do they want to know?

“It’s so hard to stand on one’s own record. There is no substitute for personal dignity.”

We spend our lives making others to like us. We forget to like ourselves…

Yet, I still keep some of my dignity. Others’ dignity was being broken from early age.

Century of humiliation

The evil character in a moment of his weakness identifies “methods” he uses to control people:

• “Kill man’s self respect.
• Kill the capacity to recognize greatness.
• Kill the joy of living.
• Use big vague words. ‘Universal Harmony’ — ‘Eternal Spirit’ — ‘Divine Purpose’ — ‘Nirvana’ — ‘Paradise’ — ‘Racial Supremacy’ — ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ ”

It feels very prophetic given this was written around 1940 and defined how various regimes came to power all around the world.

Maybe some of the leaders read the Rand’s book. In People’s Republic of China (PRC) they coined the term “century of humiliation”. PRC Chinese became slaves of the collective through the feeling of shame, slaves in the factories in the pursuit to get back their dignity. They do not want to talk about it with us westerners; they think we would not understand. But they probably do not understand themselves; I assume the lack of dignity is the reason.

As much as white colonizers broken the dignity of the colonized people before. As much as Americans broke the dignity of the blacks.

What’s scary is that similar things are happening nowadays through social media, only on much bigger scale. And only few people seem to understand it. They will, if they don’t already, rule the world!

Conclusion

I was somewhat disappointed with the finale: the celebration of individuality over the collectivism. Yes, it seems somewhat outdated nowadays. I think we know better. No single person could claim the landing on the Moon, no single person could claim the invention of a processor, no single person can claim invention of the atomic bomb, no single person was responsible for the Internet. Cooperation turned out to be more crucial than ever in past years. Scientific teams are now ran by hundreds, engineering teams building autonomous cars count in thousands. But those things happened after the book was written, in the period preceding 2nd world war. In fact the century preceding the book was lined with names like Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, or Nicola Tesla — sole inventors.

Also the nature showed us more surprises since 1940. While we perhaps are able to raise buildings resisting an earthquake or a hurricane, while we can conquer mountains with tunnels, oceans with ships, while we can start a hell on Earth with a nuclear explosion, we still do not know how to preserve the Earth in the state we like it in. And with dimensions of the universe, our abilities seem so minute.

I am slightly hesitant to recommend this read. It put some of my thoughts into profound sentences, and sharpen them. It might have opened my eyes about something I knew. Read it, but think about it!