Individualism In The Fountainhead

Ego. Is it virtuous to have an ego or is it better to be humble, modest, selfless? In today’s world, ego is an insult to plenty of humans, but ego has so much beauty behind it. Ego can create leaders, inventors, revolutionaries, so why is there such a stigma to ego? Prometheus found the advantage of ego. He realized that a society needs people to have a sense of self to contribute to his brothers and sisters. Another hero, Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, goes against the natural current of collectivism to stand up for individualism, “But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.” Men need to express ego to have a sense of oneself
Equality outgrew his brethren in height and in knowledge, which lead teachers to ridicule him for his advances. At a young age the Council of Vocations taught children that “I” does not exist, only “we” . Anyone who seems to become more like an “I” than a “we” is looked down upon, “It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them” (21). The Council of Vocations also diminishes any thought that a person would have about themselves and change the thoughts to think about the community, “For the Council of Vocations knows in its great wisdom where you are needed by your brother men, better than you can know it in your unworthy little mind” (22). The fact that the council uses the word “unworthy” to describe someone’s thoughts would cause many people lose their self-esteem, to lose their ego. But, Equality 7-2521 or Prometheus saw past this and he still conjured up thoughts to find his true importance in his world. Although Prometheus accepted Street Sweeper for his job happily, “So we were happy, and proud of ourselves… we spoke, and our voice was the clearest, the steadiest voice in the hall that day, and we said: ‘The will of our brothers be done.’, ” (26), he knew he deserved to be a Scholar to use his gifted intellect. Prometheus knowing his self-importance lead him to rediscover electricity and lead him to rethink the ideas forced into his mind at
There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts,”(Roark, The Fountainhead). Individualism requires new ideas from eccentric thinkers, not large groups of men that all think, act, and behave homogeneously. If all men thought alike, there would be no improvement in society. There would be no revolutionary inventions or ideas. The world would become plagued with the word “we”. Ego is necessary to have, so people and society can grow, without it, the world is stagnant. Egotistic inventors are needed due to their motivation to achieve greatness by their breakthrough discoveries, “The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated... The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself,” (Roark, The Fountainhead). Prometheus was one of those creators that saw their own self-importance and acted on using it for themselves and then the world,“We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us…’ (76). His ego leads him to believe he is a spark to recreate the unmentionable world, a world where individuality exist. Where leaders, inventors, revolutionaries can freely think and speak about problems and solutions. Where citizens