Programmed to Follow

Henrique Vasconcellos

Having read as much as 40 pages of The Fountainhead had showed us that Ayn Rand has a peculiar view on how people should behave and what should one pursue in life. As we know the book has been a success for many years, and the audience could be anyone willing to read and understand the message behind it. Considering we all had a common existential question of what we would choose in life, being a Roark or a Keating, I think the book does a good job to address this question to the readers. However, what I am curious about is: why are we all like Keating?

To answer this question, I came up with a couple of theories, and the one that seems to be the most acceptable is the fact that humans are programmed to follow. Our ability to decide the easiest ways to solve problems leads to our tendency to follow orders, it is easier not to think on our own.

Doing some further research on how that could be proven without a genetic/neuroscience/or philosophical explanations, I came up with a comparison between animals and humans. Humans over time have artificially selected some species of animals that stablished a mutualistic relation with us. The grey wolves became dogs, the European Aurochs, already extinct for many years, became today’s cattle, and many other examples. These selections were all due to our ability to domesticate these species, and through an economic symbiosis, coexist. To domesticate animals there are three criteria that must be met:

1.       The animal must be docile. It cannot be unpredictable or aggressive to humans (overall).
2.       The animal must be able to reproduce in captivity, otherwise they will die without leaving offspring.
3.       The animal must have in their instinctive behavior the “genetic programming” to be able to follow a leader, or, the “alpha male”.
(The reason we were able to domesticate horses but not zebras, is that horses organize themselves with a horde leader, the Alpha Horse, while zebras lack this level of organization in their groups)

Knowing these criteria, it makes me question: are we domesticated? Do people need to follow the Alpha? After having read Shiller and Chang, both who regardless of their opinion agreed on top-down decision making, I believe these are questions worth considering while reading Rand. In my opinion, in her first 40 pages what Ayn Rand is trying to do is directly criticize this behavior, and through the character of Howard Roark show that we have the power to overcome our natural instinct.

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