The Fountainhead: Part 4: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Mrs. Keating is worried about Peter Keating, who hasn’t left his room in days, and she invites Toohey to their house to cheer him up. Toohey arrives and taunts Keating about his loyalty to Roark and asks him to tell him the full story. Keating insists that he designed Cortlandt himself, and Toohey says he wouldn’t be believed if he said that in court because he is shaking as he says it. Toohey says he wants Roark’s neck and Keating must help him get it. He says he knows that Keating has loved Roark all his life though he has destroyed him, while he has hated Toohey and followed him.

Keating says that what Toohey is doing to him is even worse than what Keating did to Lucius Heyer—because he at least let Heyer die. Keating wants to know why Toohey wants to kill Roark, and Toohey says he doesn’t want him to die. He wants him in jail where “He’ll take orders!” Keating is unable to take any more and gives Toohey the contract he’d signed with Roark. Toohey says he ought to be pleased to see it, but his very human nature makes him sick to see how a person like Roark will be broken. Toohey says he wants to burn the paper, though what he’ll actually do is send the contract to the district attorney.

Toohey says people like Keating—all the “hypocritical sentimentalists”—make him sick, since they profit by what Toohey tells them but don’t want to admit that their actions are harmful. Toohey has had to put on an act all his life, in order to protect Keating’s “conscience” and “posturing.” At least, Toohey says, he himself is honest and acknowledges that it is the price he must pay in order to get what he really wants, which is power. He says his “spiritual predecessors” paved the way for him, and now he will rule the world. He says if one discovers “how to rule one single man’s soul, [one] can get the rest of mankind.”

Toohey says the way to get a man’s soul is to “Make man feel small. Make man feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity.” One way to kill integrity is to “Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others.” It is impossible to achieve, and “Man realizes that he is incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue,” which highlights his “basic unworthiness.” This leads to him slowly giving up on “all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value.” Once he gives up his self-respect, “He’ll obey.”

Toohey says another way to destroy man’s integrity is to “Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled.” To do this, “Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept.” And yet another way to destroy integrity is to use laughter “as a weapon of destruction”—tell people to “laugh at everything” because when one “Kill[s] reverence” one kills “the hero in man.” He goes on to say that the most important way to destroy integrity is to not allow men to be happy since “Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. […] Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. […] Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil.”

Toohey says that this is the oldest teaching in “any great system of ethics,” that “You must tell people that they’ll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy,” though you don’t have to be too clear about how that might happen. One can use words like “‘Instinct’—‘Feeling’—‘Revelation’—‘Divine Intuition’—‘Dialectic Materialism.’” If anyone contests, “You tell him there’s something above sense” and stress feelings and belief. He says a thinking man can’t be ruled. Toohey says Keating has no right to look disgusted since he is in on it, too, and has profited from these ideas.

Toohey says he wants a “world of obedience and of unity” where no one will have original thoughts or desires. Men will work for prestige, and “no individuality will be permitted.” It will be the “rule of the bromide.” Since “even the trite has to be originated by someone at some time,” Toohey will do it and “enjoy unlimited submission.” He will ultimately “achieve no more” than people like Keating will, and is “the most selfless man.” He will have even “less independence than [Keating], whom [he] just forced to sell his soul.” He has no “private purpose” and wants only “power.” He says that collectivism is already taking over the world, with “Europe swallowed already” and America “stumbling to follow.”