His "bad guys" tend to be the best possible representatives of an idea he strongly disagrees with, too. She probably learned that from Dostoevsky, btw. She wanted the best possible version of the world's idea of a hero, set against her idea of a hero. It would've been very easy to compare Roark to a random, villainous, unremarkable weasel like Campbell. Ayn Rand urging us to compare Peter Keating, the kind of person humanity genuinely looks up to (not through any kind of swindle: he REALLY is an exceptional individual) to Howard Roark. In a story not written by Rand, Keating would be the hero: poor kid makes good, better at his job than everyone around him, charismatic, good looking, ambitious, hard working, a leader, in love with a girl and desperately trying to be faithful to her, with his only apparent fault that he lets himself be corrupted by his mother and Toohey (a father figure he longs for, who exploits that weakness to manipulate him). Keating isn't the worst of what humanity has to offer, he's one of the best. The revolutionary literary vision that sowed the seeds of Objectivism, Ayn Rands groundbreaking philosophy, and brought her immediate worldwide acclaim. I've only seen a few episodes of Mad Men, but that guy is an incompetent, lazy weasel with psychopathic tendencies, isn't he?
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