Tradition and the Entrepreneur

Traditional Society

The fact that traditional society was upheld by force and involuntary standards is no secret. This is often portrayed as grey, drab, grim, impoverished, and generally uncomfortable by all sorts of media ranging from movies to pop-history videos to college textbooks. Traditional society, so the story goes, was when we were all peasants, enslaved under feudal lords and forced to adhere to backwards Christianity and pointless other customs and restrictions. Disease was rampant. Famines abounded. People were mean and unpleasant.

An Objective Look

So, that is the story, sure, but very rarely do we analyze what was merely a lack of technology and knowledge and what was Traditional Society. Famine, disease, plumbing, medicine, dentistry, sanitation, clothing, and industry, as they are always portrayed in this context, were incidental to the social policies of the time period. The organization of the population under feudalism and the predominance of the Roman Catholic church had no bearing on the methods of sanitation commonly used or on best medical practice. In fact, traditional Roman Catholic feudal societies still existed at the advent of modern sanitation and medicine, and the innovations were easily adopted. Given this fact, that the societal organization is separate from technological level, we can analyze The Fountainhead in a much less ideological lens.

Source

The Moral of the Story

As with all things involving Ayn Rand, the moral of this story is very simple. Our ruggedly individual, intrepid protagonist encounters dirty collectivists that seek to crush his dreams. Being a true individual, our protagonist can trust basically nobody but himself for most of the story. The love interest is faithless and, in Nietzschean fashion, swayed only who is the most socially powerful. His colleagues all betray him. The media slanders him. The socialists slander him. The traditional establishment tries to eliminate him. He is left on his own, and by the end of the movie, when he is put on trial, it is only by extolling the virtue of himself and humanity that he is able to win for himself

The Problem

This Nietzschean society, where the strongest rise to the top by their own strength, crushing their opposition and ruling those below, will not remain a Nietzschean society for more than a few generations, after which it will either stop being Nietzschean or stop being a society due to total dissolution and instability. This is a common, easily surmised criticism that I will not dwell on. Instead, I wish to address the underlying idea in the work that entrepreneurship is an end in and of itself, that traditional institutions must be shunned to bring about the triumph of man and ego.

Merchant Castes

Every society has a caste system whether explicit or implicit. In every society, warriors, priests, and merchants exist and will vie for influence for the eventual goal of dominance. None of these castes have to act as a collective entity, and oftentimes individuals from these castes will act alone and, sometimes, rule "alone." It is worth noting that oftentimes two castes will ally and rule, which we saw in Venice (merchants and warriors), the Holy Roman Empire (priests and warriors), or in the English Commonwealth (priests and merchants). The characters in the movie is a merchant through and through. There is no loyalty. Ideals exist, but ultimately money rules. By the end, however, where monuments are erected to the high ideals of willful triumph, our protagonist has become a priest, articulating great moral truths and imperatives.

Why is any of this relevant? Our merchants have no higher loyalty but to the infinitely shifting dictates of money. Our priest has grounded the new religious truth of the society from solely withing the whims and triumphs of man.

Merchants Must Be Curtailed

As a result, we are left with an atheistic society whose truths and ideals and morals will be in a constant state of flux. What is good? Whatever man and money determines, of course. There is no real, transcendent, metaphysical moral standard. Nothing is grounded in a constant, unalterable, never-changing truth. Everything is left carnal and vulgar, with puny man erecting monuments to his own glory, left with a life filled with the constant fulfilling of never-ending desires. To quote the ancient King Solomon, "this is vanity."

Having watched this movie, it is clear that if one desires a functioning, stable society, the merchants, the entrepreneurs, need to be curtailed.