MichaelIM, thanks for the detailed comments… Seeing your words gives me more insight into Rand’s ideas as presented in The Fountainhead. These ideas are all still fairly new to me so I need time to process them.

Re altruism, Rand’s ethics is grounded on the fact of our being living entities whose most fundamental purpose is to live — to survive and flourish as what we are (in accordance with our nature). That means that in all of the choices of the actions that constitute living, we must evaluate them in respect to their potential contribution to or denigration of our life. If our life is to be our standard of value, then the simple unavoidable ethical mandate is: never give up a higher value in exchange for a lower value. That is the meaning of egoism and selfishness *in principle*, and there is no human choice to which that principle cannot be applied.

Consequently as Ben correctly noted, many acts usually considered to be self-sacrificial are actually self-interested. An example would be donating money to a scholarship fund because you want to live in a well educated world. Altruism, on the other hand, establishes as a virtue giving up money you need for other more important purposes because you have bought into the idea that you are your brother’s keeper. Giving up a lower value of any kind to gain a higher one can never be altruism. Altruism requires that you act against your life and for the life of another. One of the great contradictions in this corrupt idea is the guilt laid on the receiver of altruism’s largesse.

Re extremes, Ben is also on the right track in saying that her extreme examples were intentional. But there is more to it than that. The attempt of previous philosophers to paint truth gray is the enemy she set out to destroy. Truth (the accurate identification of existence) is the source of life. Our actions in accordance with it are its implementation in the service of our life. The validity of philosophical ideas is inherently a life and death issue. What can be more black and white than that? Note also that “extreme” is merely a quantitative qualification. “Right and wrong” are qualitative. Why would you want to be any less thatn extremely right? Right has nothing to gain from a compromise with or cooperation with “wrong”.

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I just found it: If you go to http://www.aynrandinfo.com it says you can get a free CD of her speech to graduates of West Point.

I suggest picking up Atlas Shrugged now that you’ve finished The Fountainhead.

She is one of my favorites I have read every one of her books. I used a couple at West Point. She was still alive while we were there and she came to speak to the cadets.

I had guessed, from my reading of The Fountainhead, that he would like it.

What is interesting about that, to me, is that I was am not aware of any such large collectivist or socialist movement within the US at that time. Of course, I am not an historian, though. But it seems somewhat out of place. Again, though, I think it goes back to how black and white she is with her characters, and in this case with this theme. She is an adamant individualist and capitalist, both the polar extremes of collectivism and socialism.