Ayn Rand’s sui generis movie still stirs the heart of passionate individualists

If I had to describe the A-list movie production of The Fountainhead in one word that word would be ‘unbelievable:’ it is literally beyond comprehension that such a stark silver screen portrayal of important ideas—with world class acting, directing, score, production design, costumes, and of course writing—could ever be made… much less a movie about the epochal conflict between the individual and the collective (and the parallel ethical conflict between reason-based egoism and faith-based altruism). The second word I would use is ‘moving.’

Lately, The Fountainhead is a DVD I’ve been watching with regularity, simply to recharge my emotional batteries and reaffirm my sense of life. As the astute reader knows, we live in a world where the collectivists of the Toxocracy are hammering the individualists right and left… trying to close in for the kill. [I believe the individualists—full humans—will win, however, and relatively soon, due to a powerful cosmic jujitsu maneuver that I’m happy to be a part of. Ref. esp. Thrive. More on that in my novel soon to be released, The Truman Prophecy.]

And elsewhere, of course: 2016 is the Year of Conscious Evolution, which necessitates psychological independence, which necessitates the full flowering of the individual human conceptual faculty, which necessitates the wholesale adherence of humanity to the nonaggression principle. No this isn’t a dream, it’s real and it’s going to happen. Because of bold creative acts of people like Ayn Rand and those who live by her ideals—not as mere abstractions, but as real people struggling to create a benevolent world that makes sense.

The Movie

The Fountainhead, the book, was published in 1943, a couple of years before the end of WWII. Through the 1930s around the world, and especially among the Western intellectual elites, collectivism in the form of socialism and state socialism—notably the Soviet Union—was held in increasingly high regard. Many Americans felt that US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s socialistic New Deal was what liberated them from the misery of the (capitalism-caused) Great Depression… plus he was such a good, caring man, with his handicap and all, that everyone loved him without reservation.  .AND. he boldly led us to victory in war; that cuddly superpower ally, the Soviet Union, then helped to finish the task of defeating the Nazis. Continue reading →