Rational Individualist

In the words of Joseph Rowlands

In Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Howard Roark was a man who didn't care what other people thought. Well, actually he did in some ways. He cared about his friends, and he was concerned about why some people were secondhanders.¹ But the fact that people thought things didn't matter to him in the sense that it wasn't a reason to believe or disbelieve that thing. An idea was either true or false, and he used his own mind to determine that.

Howard Roark was a true individualist, in that he made up his mind independent of what other people thought or felt. Those were not relevant to him. He never elevated the minds of others above his own. If he was in a position to understand something himself, he did it himself. He never ignored his own thoughts in order to accept someone else's views.

Roark was an individualist. But he was more than just an individualist. He didn't just make up his own mind any which way. Roark was a rational individualist. He let reality be his standard of the truth. For him, it wasn't about doing things his way, but about doing things the right way. His individualism was not a primary. It was a consequence of his orientation towards reality. It was his dedication to the facts of reality that made him impervious to the thoughts or feelings of other people. It's a lot like when a Christian tells an Objectivist that they're going to go to hell. It doesn't even show up on one's radar of rational thoughts.

Objectivism doesn't hold Individualism as a primary, just as Roark didn't. It's a consequence of our reality-based philosophy. We don't judge our views based on whether other people agree with them, or whether they disagree with them. We don't believe that our ideas must be different from other people, or that we have to act different from others. Neither of those are a concern. Rational, moral action is a concern. Individualism is a consequence...

¹ second-handers: in Ayn Rand Lexicon