We hate the one who does what he really loves || Acharya Prashant, on ‘The Fountainhead’

Henry Cameron said to Roark,

“You love your work. God help you, you love it. And that’s the curse. That’s the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That’s the only kind they fear. I don’t know why.”

“You’re opening yourself up, Roark, for each and every one of them.”

~ The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand.

All of us live lives of hidden, quiet, silent indignation, humiliation. Internally all of us know that we are not living rightly, internally all of us know that we have surrendered to the wrong forces. Internally we are all ashamed of ourselves.

When somebody like Roark (the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’) comes across us, then he rubs salt on our wounds. Our usual consolation is — “You know I went down, I compromised, I gave up because it is not possible to win. I didn’t fight because it makes no sense to fight. I went down, I laid down my arms, I started crawling on my knees. And that’s alright because everybody else is doing it.”

That’s our usual alibi. That’s what keeps us alive. Otherwise the humiliation of an abject surrender would have not allowed us to live. But we find a convenient…