Continuing with Ayn Rand

Currently continuing to read 'The Fountainhead' by Ayn Rand, now being about 250 pages in.  Being very busy, I only really have time to read it while I'm skirting round Warsaw on the public transport.

From 'The Fountainhead' thus far, I can see that Howard Roark is the great Randian figure:  a talented, original-type architect whose individual brilliance is not allowed to flourish due to the mediocre world of architecture that surrounds him.  However, due to his own personal integrity, Roark will never compromise with communally constructed or negotiated mediocrity.  In other words, he never allows his own sense of self-esteem/self-worth to be compromised even if this means being blocked out of the limelight by the bigwigs of the architecture profession.  In contrast, Peter Keating seems to sacrifice his (potential) talent at architectural design for gaining more immediate success in this profession through social networking and devious backstabbing.  Thus, he appears to attain imminent success but at the expense of his own personal integrity and self-esteem which seem to desert him.

Really like this 'individual above society' aspect of Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy/ideology.  However, I'm less enamoured with her reduction of religion to 'faith based on whims'.  For me, religious search/exploration process is one of the most fascinating aspects of being human, irrespective of whether God exists or not, as reducing reality to a pure sensory affair (without metaphysical speculation) makes life significantly less colourful.  Also feel that rational self-interest needs to be tinged with some sacrifice/altruism towards others, to stop self-creation/self-esteem building becoming an obsessional, one-dimensional path in life. 

Still, last weekend, I found it fascinating listening to a middle-aged/old-aged Ayn Rand discussing her objectivist ideology on a variety of chat shows (on Youtube) from the late 1950s to the early 1980s (not long before her death), such as the one below (her first TV interview from 1959, I think):