Just as Roark’s success relative to Keating’s failure shows the virtue of selfishness and the evils of selflessness—so Roark’s triumph over Toohey’s machinations demonstrates another moral truth. Toohey is a highly intelligent, possibly brilliant individual, who, though lacking the creative abilities of Roark and Wynand, could have been an outstanding scholar had he made other choices. But for all the ingenious cunning of his schemes, Toohey fails utterly in his attempts to stop Roark and to take control of Wynand’s newspaper. The reasons for Toohey’s defeat go to the heart of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Every activity of Toohey’s life is oriented toward other people. He critiques the work of others by reference to moral and aesthetic theories developed by still others in order to control and enslave others still. Not a single act of Toohey’s life is creative. In other words, nothing he does is directed toward building or constructing something. He does not even hammer nails into wood to make a chair or paint the walls of his living room. Such creative activities as carpentry and house-painting are utterly alien to him. Toohey is helpless to deal directly with nature, with physical reality; his distinctive orientation is social. He seeks no mastery over nature but exclusively over men.
It is the very parasitism of Toohey’s functioning that makes him dangerous. It is also what leaves him helpless. If he cannot perform constructive tasks, how is he to survive in a physical world? Only by insinuating himself into the souls of others and controlling them can he survive. Roark states in his courtroom address that the creator seeks to conquer nature and the parasite to conquer men. Toohey’s helplessness in the face of reality drives him toward spiritual and social conquest. He must hold dominion over others in order to ensure his own survival. The larger Toohey’s cult following, the more powerful the buffer between him and the physical world of which he is terrified. Victims like Keating and Catherine Halsey are not weaker—like antelopes devoured by a lion—but essentially stronger in their capacity to deal efficaciously with physical reality. Toohey must control them, for their very ability to perform at least some types of productive work is the lifeline he craves. Keating and Catherine are his sole source of survival, and so, like a vampire of the spirit, he sucks their lifeblood.
But Toohey is even worse than this. His power-seeking is not fundamentally motivated by a quest for survival, but by something significantly more evil. He doesn’t merely fear the men capable of independent existence; he hates and desires to destroy them. In his childhood, he knew Johnny Stokes, “a bright kid with dimples and curls,” whom people always turned to see. Because no one ever turned to look at Ellsworth Toohey, he turns the hose on Johnny. Years later, part of his scheming to involve Dominique first with Keating, then with Wynand, is a plainly stated intention to destroy this brilliant and beautiful woman. He openly seeks to ruin Roark’s career and, in a confession speech at the end of the novel, Toohey answers Keating’s question regarding a desire to kill Roark by stating that he wants Roark alive—but utterly broken. The question of the fate to befall the independent men of the world if and when Toohey reaches his goal of intellectual advisor to a Fascist or Communist dictator is clear: Just as he intends to imprison and break Roark, so he intends the same for Roark’s comrades-in-spirit. Only two kinds of power exist in life: the power to create and the power to destroy. Toohey neither seeks nor attains the power to create. He possesses only the power to destroy—and he is particularly concerned with using it against the able and successful individuals whom he envies.
Toohey is a spiritual killer looking for an opportunity to become a physical one. He has the power to destroy. This power is limited, however, to conformists like Keating, who are looking for a master to follow—and to a panderer like Wynand, who allows Toohey a foothold in his organization because of the columnist’s popularity. But over an independent man like Roark, who has no need of him—who does not even think of him—Toohey has no power. His power is limited to those victims who voluntarily grant him their souls or, at least, a beachhead in their lives. Those who grant Toohey nothing, like Roark and Dominique, are in no danger from him.
That Toohey’s destructive capacity is limited is true—but it is a relatively minor point. The major point is that Toohey has no power to create. Ayn Rand’s claim is that evil is irrational; it does not focus on reality, seeking to build, create, or grow; it focuses only on other men, seeking to enslave, control, and destroy. She calls this point the impotence of evil. Evil men are capable only of destruction, never of construction. They can tear down; they cannot build up. Toohey succeeds in destroying The New York Banner, but is incapable of recreating it after Wynand closes it. Any “victory” won by evil men is empty. They are incapable of creativity and—despite the number of souls they conquer, innocent lives they destroy, or dollars they loot—their lives are miserable. As Toohey tells Keating, “Enjoyment is not my destiny.” Happiness comes from achieving values, from building and producing, not from desecrating and destroying.
