For Goodness’ Sake

They say we live in an age of narcissism. It can be easy to get sucked into that current, especially when you see it in heroes like Howard Roark and Achilles. Yet it is the little actions that people commit, out of compassion or kindness and without any expectation of reward, that helped me regain a certain faith in mankind this past winter.

While reading The Fountainhead in Florida this past winter vacation, I was pretty sure that Howard Roark, the hero of the novel, was a good model for an ambitious student. Roark, an uncompromising architect who finds greatness by meeting his own high expectations, seemed to display the same qualities as the Greek heroes, from strength to self-conceit. Ayn Rand’s novel made me believe that pursuing individual greatness or kleos was not only a good thing, but was the only thing that led to human progress. A few weeks later, in an abandoned K-Mart parking lot in the frozen depths of Pennsylvania, I found out that the virtue of selfishness might not be as great as Rand led me to believe.

It was right before spring semester was to start. I was in Pennsylvania, driving to a friend’s wedding in Toronto with a car that had 90,000 miles on it. With me were two other guys; the first drove while the second discussed his job. Rand sat in the back of my mind as I looked out the window at the snow-covered woods beside the road. Soon, I felt a draft. The heater was spewing cold air. I asked the driver about it, and he said the engine was overheating. We decided to pull over.

Steam poured out from under the hood at the Sheetz gas station that we pulled into. The driver, it turned out, didn’t have a AAA card in his own name, so we’d need to fix the car on our own. When we asked a man at the gas station what the problem might be, he guessed that the antifreeze might be low (he was really looking at the windshield wiper fluid reservoir). We drove to a K-Mart parking lot up a hill in Scranton as the engine coughed fitfully. Though the K-Mart was closing up, one high school employee agreed to drive us to the local Walmart, a ten minute walk from our car, for $20. We got to Walmart, bought the antifreeze, and went back to the K-Mart parking lot, at which point the high school kid took off.

Stranded at an empty K-Mart parking lot, we were totally screwed. The driver didn’t know how to open the antifreeze, and tried biting it off with his teeth. Then, after realizing that it was not a twist-off top, we opened it and found that we had no idea which reservoir to put the antifreeze in. The entire time, the wind was blowing harshly on our exposed faces, and hypothermia was all I could think about. Nobody would be able to find us in that K-Mart parking lot, I thought. We were atop a hill, in the middle of nowhere. I hated the other passengers more and more as one tried to liken our situation to Harold and Kumar’s.

Just then, as we were ready to pour the antifreeze into some unknown container under the hood, a car pulled up. It was a high school boy named Chad with a friend in the car, and he asked if we needed help. He got out and checked our engine, telling us he worked in a mechanic’s shop. After figuring out that our busted engine was the problem, he offered to drive us to a nearby hotel. We agreed, though I was wary of help from strangers. Chad then drove us away from our abandoned car. He passed the Motel 6 and the Best Western, saying he knew of a nicer hotel. Damn it, I thought, he’s not taking us to any hotel. He’s going to steal all of our stuff and leave us on top of an even colder hill. And then, surprisingly, he stopped at a nice hotel. He walked out, helping us take our stuff out, and even bargained with the concierge for a large reduction in the price of the room.

It was an act of goodness that I didn’t understand right away. Chad and the concierge would not hear from us again. Rand would argue that the concierge had little to benefit from reducing the price. Chad had no idea who we were, and though many might have picked up stranded college kids on a freezing night, few would have haggled for a deal at a nice hotel on behalf of those kids. The practical heroism of Chad was maybe not like the idyllic heroism of Achilles, but I preferred it that night. Though he risked nothing by picking us up, Chad had done something special by helping us, and I was grateful for that.

Chad helped loosen Rand’s grip on my psyche. Rand made me believe that humans were isolated beings, and value was given according to a formula: those who achieved the most were the greatest. But Chad helped me understand that humanity shines when we forget about those formulas and neat equations, and act without expectation of reward. It was something Rand was not ready to concede, but it was simple and sweet, and it was able to make me want to do good more than any book by Ayn Rand.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore.