subject: Doing Your Own Thing [print this page] Rand does try to humanize her heroesRand does try to humanize her heroes. Even with Shoes Online the right values, Rand's noble characters are capable of honest error, as Roark admits while discarding draft after draft of "awful stuff to perfect his designs.
Yet, when requested to design on the spur of the moment, he produces swift masterpieces, at least according to those who recognize quality. And, although he humbly concedes his lack of "people skills", this is only Rand's way of ennobling himthose with such skills are invariably portrayed as manipulators. He is clearly a task-oriented person, not a "people" person; he ignores people in their presence, making them uncomfortable by his utter disregard of them: "His face was closed like the door of a safely vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that".
More than disregard, Rand endows him with "a contemptuous mouth the mouth of an executioner or a saint". Rand's Cheap Shoes favorite line in the book (which she uncharacteristically admitted was her husband's suggestion) is Roark's response to the villainous Ellsworth Toohey's query, "Why don't you tell me what you think of me" Roark replies, "But I don't think of you".
Because most of the students in my class were from Asian-Pacific backgrounds in which family, community solidarity, and "Aloha" are respected as much as or more than individualism, many felt uncomfortable about Roark's unsociability, even empathizing more with the discomfort of those whom Roark ignores than with him. Cultural "face-saving" is an equal-opportunity contract, modified only by status codes, as in deferring to elders, not by ad hoc individualists.
Most of my students admired Roark, however, for his single-minded tenacity in pursuing his career, even though his bitter, alcoholic old mentor tries to discourage him from enduring a fate similar to his own. However, some were skeptical of Roark's refusing a tempting contract that merely requires him to include some traditional detail in his design: the refusal forces him out of business and temporarily into common hard labor.
They could not identify with someone so idealistic that he can't compromise on details. My suggestion that Roark is a conscientious artist whose work requires the same integrity as his own self did not convince them.
This issue raised questions of how compromise may not be a violation of one's integrity and of how far one is willing to go to protect that integrity, which depends on one's priorities. Rand is right, I think, to insist that only the person who consciously works out values is qualified to determine when basic principles are non-negotiable and when mere bargaining chips can be negotiated (Virtue 85-88).
When students had other priorities than Roark's, most could not explain them, so I pressed them to make their hierarchy of values clear. For me, negotiating with one another their responses was part of their own dialogic self-process. Many maintained that whatever they may say or do is valid because it is honestly felt, regardless of reasoning.
Identifying the values behind their feelings was harder than conforming to "anything goes." Rand's position is that the more people take the easy road of undisciplined self-interest through mindless conformity or nonconformity, the more they become stereotypes and not genuine self-advocates. The students who struggled between conforming to the spurious equality of "doing your own thing" and to reasoning the merits of their views such as a student who was coming to terms with his homosexuality seem to grow in genuine self-esteem during the term.
