Why pro-abortion campaigners failed to convince the Home Secretary
In a celebrated scene from Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, the dissident John Galt makes a ludicrous but eloquent speech about the pioneers of human history. “The great creators – the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors – stood alone against the men of their time,” Galt claims.
The speech is individualistic and anti-Christian: Rand’s idealised creator serves “nothing and no one” and pursues “his own truth”, putting “selfishness” over the “orgy of self-sacrificing”. But it does at least assert that crowds can be mistaken.
