Roark is a happy man. He creates value by bringing into the world new designs and structures. He is a builder and looks out at nature joyously: “He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters.” His life is filled exclusively with plans to build; even during the times with no clients, he studies the new materials and technologies, learning how to use them, working toward the day when he can apply this knowledge to build a Cortlandt Homes and other new buildings. Even working in a granite quarry is a means toward that end, for Roark saves money so that he can reopen his office and return to architecture. Roark, the independent thinker, is rational (focused on facts, on nature, on reality). This rationality is what enables him to build. Roark is an exemplar of the man who conquers nature, not other men. His rational functioning, like that of a scientist, is what enables him to achieve, build, and produce. Here is the positive side of the issue—the potency of the good. Only the good can achieve values. Only the good can deal effectively with reality. Only the good can create and build. In consequence, only the good can reach a state of flourishing life and experience joy.
Roark’s triumph and Toohey’s failure—the potency of the good and the impotence of the evil—explain another point in the story: the nature of Dominique’s error. Dominique, for all her brilliance and idealism, is tormented by her pessimism—by her belief that the good and the noble have no chance in a corrupt world. While still young, Dominique sees her father wine and dine his way to the top of his profession, even though he is a mediocre architect. Dominique realizes that Henry Cameron is the world’s greatest designer but sees that he is a commercial failure. In her twenties, Dominique finds Peter Keating on the fast track to success and Howard Roark consigned to a granite quarry. She observes that Ellsworth Toohey, the most evil creature imaginable, is hailed as a moral saint by millions of people. Her conclusion is that evil is a dominant force in man’s life; that the good are weak and ultimately doomed. Ayn Rand terms such pessimism the malevolent universe premise. Its optimistic contrary, held by Roark, that the world is open to the achievement of values by the good, she calls the benevolent universe premise.
Dominique’s view is mistaken, though given her experiences, understandable. The events of the story clearly dramatize Ayn Rand’s benevolent universe theory. Dominique, an honest and acute observer, witnesses Roark’s steady, if tortuous climb, Toohey’s inability to reach either of his goals, Keating’s decline and eventual exposure, Wynand’s inability to succeed by the method of pandering—and she changes her mind. An early note of Dominique’s transition is her warning to Wynand regarding Toohey. This warning signals more than a growing respect for Wynand’s virtues; it indicates her shifting view regarding the world’s moral nature. She no longer believes that the world deserves Toohey. She now sees that the world is better than that—and that it deserves better than the Fascist/Communist dictatorship Toohey seeks to impose. Her willingness to help Roark dynamite Cortlandt, though the action could well bring him imprisonment, shows her final liberation from the grip of her malevolent premise. Before the trial, Dominique says, “Howard . . . willingly, completely, and always . . . without reservations, without fear of anything they can do to you or me. . . . Howard, if you win the trial—even that won’t matter too much. You’ve won long ago. . . .” Dominique understands that, regardless of social rejection, it is the independent thinkers like Roark who understand nature’s laws, who make advances and who carry mankind forward. He is the creative man who gives life its meaning; he is the one who recognizes and lives up to man’s highest potential. She now understands to whom the earth belongs—and it is to the creators, not the parasites; to the virtuous, not the guilty.
Roark’s life, and its successful outcome, dramatizes the benevolent universe principle. The world is open to a thinking man’s achievement of values. Conformists, nonconformists, and power-seekers cannot achieve values and be happy, because all of them, in one form or another, give up their minds to the crowd—the Keatings to follow, the Lois Cooks to spit defiance, the Tooheys to rule. Men who surrender their judgment have no chance at success or happiness. But the thinkers learn to grow food, to make fire, to build homes, to cure disease. They can flourish, and by means of their creative work, make flourishing life possible for the rest of mankind. The world is open to those independent thinkers who refuse to renounce their minds.
The novel’s theme is expressed fully in the final section. The triumph of Roark, and the utter defeat of Keating and Toohey, represents the victory of the independent thinkers over the followers and parasites. Roark’s courtroom speech explains the issues that lie at the heart of the book’s meaning. He examines the contrast and conflict between those whom Ayn Rand terms first-handers and second-handers.
The first-handers are those who use their own minds. They do not accept ideas second-hand, merely because other people believe them. First-handers learn from others—like Roark learns from Cameron—but they do not copy or obey. Learning requires a thoughtful understanding, an autonomous recognition of an idea’s truth; it is made possible only by a thinking process and is the opposite of the unthinking acceptance of the Keating-style conformist. All innovators, inventors, and discoverers of new knowledge are first-handers. Individuals like Edison, Pasteur, Copernicus, and Darwin—first-handers—are original thinkers, not glorified draftsmen copying the work of previous minds.
