Matt Bloom’s Online Works

Hello, everyone. It’s Matt.

After a long hiatus, readmattbloom.com has returned with a new slant. There just isn’t enough of me to fill up a whole blog on a regular basis, so I thought I would start blogging about my responses to what others have written. Though I won’t always respond to comments, I welcome discussion.

I just finished The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand, 1943. Rand had some pretty lofty ideas to preach to us about the virtue of the ego – her own perspective on “selfishness” – and its importance as a foundation for human innovation. Conversely, utter selflessness is Rand’s great evil of modern times; she translates the word to mean lacking of self and finding one’s identity only in others.

Well, I love some of her more modest ideas. Howard Roark is the hero architect who stands by his convictions regardless of public opinion. His dedication to his work is admirable and the passion he has for it resonates with me as a creative person. Yes, have a strong enough sense of self that you can believe in your own work regardless of accolades. Beware the path of Peter Keating, who exists only as a parasite feeding off the approval of other characters - one of which seeks only to control him.

This character is the (initially) fascinating Ellsworth Toohey, who is the embodiment of Rand’s concept of societal evil. He espouses charity and the virtue of organization as the strength of the working class, but his not-so-hidden motive is to be the organizer and maintain power over men’s souls. If your sole motivation in life is to belong, Rand illustrates, then you are a potential victim of those who would abuse your sense of belonging. Toohey builds Keating up with empty words only to control him. Keating ends up even more an empty shell than he is at the beginning, in stark contrast to Roark, who stands firm.

Oh, but how far Rand goes! The way she glorifies man turns the concept of the importance of self into a religion. Her Superman - Roark, her god unto himself – is incredibly unrealistic and more than a little unsettling. He is obsessed with his work as a man in the act of worship, hardly stopping to sleep for the entire course of the book. He believes in the self so strongly that his initial expression of love for Dominique is to rape her, which she accepts as legitimate. She loves him all the more for taking her as he sees fit, and responds by being uncompromising in return. According to Rand’s heroes, love can only be adoration and ownership, while sacrifice for another is only pity, only a disservice to oneself and to the one pitied. I find this creepy and too extreme to be tenable.

Rand could have written a great novel about personal conviction, the creative drive and human passion in three hundred pages. However, she felt the need to expand the story another two hundred pages or so by throwing an unrealistic, disturbing love story into the mix. The novel, unfortunately, is around seven hundred pages – the last two hundred being the worst of all.

The proletariat feeds into the power of Gail Wynand’s New York Banner as the people buy up copy after copy of the pseudo-journalistic smut the paper produces. This is Rand’s picture of society, and she has a point. But the problem is that Rand begins to treat her readers just as Wynand does in the book: she rams ideas down our throats like we are idiots. After spending many chapters developing the intriguing characters of Toohey and Roark, and the ideas they represent, she makes the longest paragraphs of the book out of monologues from these characters that rehash everything you already know if you’ve been paying the least bit of attention. Character breaks down. Subtlety is out the window. It appears that she sees herself as a crusader - as she begins to preach even from the position of narrator, toward the end – like Roark, and yet she makes you feel like she has as little respect for you as Wynand or Toohey would. Listen! Acknowledge! Get this very extremely important stuff through your thick skulls! My ideas are so important, Rand seems to say, that I am going to articulate them with such long-winded exactness that there will be no room for you to extract any others from my work. She may have seen herself as Roark, but she apparently cared way more about what people thought of her than her hero did.

Her ideas of greater scale aren’t entirely without merit, however. I think we do have a growing problem in the United States of focusing on just getting people’s attention as a way of building wealth rather than through producing products according to need. This country is in economic peril because the perceived value of housing, stocks and even capital is plummeting, as is the value of most other existing goods and services with them. I myself make a living selling cell phones and building up the customer’s perception of the product’s value. I’m lucky that at this point in history, much of the public views cell phones as a necessity. Other workers suffer as the public views SUVs and light trucks as extravagant.

Rand wrote about innovation. One virtue of Roark’s I can get behind is that of producing according to necessity. The buildings he designs promote one ideal over any other: inherent practicality. They are unusual, but beautiful because Roark makes them at one with their environment, and in doing so enables the future tenant to be at one with it also. It takes a strong sense of self to create in this way. Our country does need to learn from Roark that the definition of practical has to be remade. To do something merely for profit, to sell that which is obsolete just to keep money flowing, is only practical on the small scale. We need innovators who will take chances on producing those goods and services which may not be immediately salable, but which now exist in response to tangible need. Not everyone at my company can be in sales, as I am. Some have the responsibility of producing technologies that actually enrich lives. I pray I get the opportunity to participate in such work at various points in my life, in whatever field suits me.

Rand was full of a little too much hot air, and I wish the writing had been better, but she at least understood this much: without Roarks, we die.

Here’s to the innovators. God bless.