No breeding in Ayn Rand

It's said "truth is stranger than fiction." If this means that stranger things happen in the real world than anyone can make up, then read The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand). With tributes to individualism and the human spirit I have no problem but do people really communicate like this and have such singularly little need of human company? The main characters are surely extremely talented souls but inter-communication is so perverse as to be utterly implausible. Many conversations are confrontational and often just plain obdurate. A keynote in the story is Dominique Francon's trial testimony where she insists that maverick architect, Howard Roark's temple be pulled down because it was 'casting pearls before swine' (swine being the human race, not capable of self-respect and exaltation). So she trashes all the other architects in the the courtroom. These are the leading architects of the day, all apparently living in the past and set up as straw men to be ridiculed. No matter that the book was published in 1936 and that some of the most iconic city pictures ever are of the New York skyline of the 1930s. Empire State and Chrysler were already up by 1931. When Rand arrived in Manhattan for the first time in 1925 she claimed to have wept 'tears of splendour' on seeing the silhouette. Is the human race really composed only of 'moles that object to mountain peaks'? I don't think so. The development of cities itself, all over the planet, is tribute to human ingenuity and creativity. Indeed, it's been a major catalyst for developing those traits. Leading characters, Roark, Francon, Gail Wynand (newspaper owner) and Ellsworth Toohey (humanist) are incapable of empathy. They pursue individualism at all costs. Wynand is particularly odious, as he destroys some people for no apparent reason at all. If society were truly composed of such dysfunctional characters it would, for one thing, find it very hard to propagate. Humans would simply die off for lack of breeding. No surprise then that Rand chose herself not to have children. Her view was that an individual's primary obligation is to achieve his own well-being. Shades of Adam Smith - society benefits from the individual's enlightened self-interest. No problem there. But Smith in the Theory of Moral Sentiments also talked of the happiness of others giving pleasure even though one derives nothing from it. That's balance. So The Fountainhead is a good read, full of archetypes but fiction that is stranger than truth. The QSL is from WNYW, New York, a popular station heard in Cape Town on short-wave way back in 1967.