Word: fountainhead
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
...course, King was indeed a revolutionary in certain ways. He was not satisfied with the status quo. He was the fountainhead of a major change in American attitudes on race. Indeed, America's current awareness of its racial problems owes much to King; before his leadership of the civil rights movement, most white Americans gave little or no thought to issues of race. To be sure, King held views that could be called revolutionary...
...should become an artist, ignore the critics. Some precious few critics have an artist in them, but most are a desperate, shriveled lot who have found a way to touch art without making it. The half-nuts architect Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is confronted by the critic who tried to destroy him. "Why don't you tell me what you think of me," says the critic. To which Roark responds, "I don't think...
...respects others." He highlighted his otherwise vacuous talk with some select quotes from Rand's fiction and tossed in a few textbook points from Kant and Aquinas to make it all seem more legitimate, i.e. academic. Of course, the audience members, waving their well-thumbed copies of The Fountainhead, furiously shook their heads in hearty agreement...
First, objectivism has as many adherents as it does because Rand's fiction (We the Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) continues to influence high-school and college students, most of whom I suspect have had only a superficial exposure to philosophy. This privileges them to conclude rather wrongly that Ayn Rand is an original and deep thinker. Second, her books are accessible to the lay-reader while Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger are not. Third, objectivism is sexy because it has appropriated the term "selfishness" to mean everything heroic...