AKMA says that an asocial person is questionably human. Shelley Powers claims "nothing is more limiting than a friend" and coined the phrase "tyranny of the commons" over at Burningbird.

Which contrast uncovers in my memory the burning crater of the figure of Howard Roark, that (in)famous "ideal man" who shunned all human contact except what sexual conquest he could take by force. His tragedy (sic) demonstrated resolutely for me:

• the importance of independence (the freedom to get loose of a community's wants), and
• the fundamentally social character of humanity (the thrill in sharing a grain of sand with another fleshy warm body).

The former quality is documented well enough. The latter quality is, you may or may not see, present in Roark. We are told by the Big Rand that Roark makes his buildings purely for his own pleasure, and I accept that; but I suspect that the pleasure may well come from a (missing, but imaginatively present) construction of social desire: the sense of sharing his buildings with his forebears (now dead) or his intellectual descendents, who may live after his death. It is easy enough to see rich community working to inspire people toward their best. But loners, too, I am starting to believe, are driven by a hope of contact with a hard-to-catch appreciative other. We continually imagine our ideal readers, ideal users, listeners, architecture-subjects, &c.

In the (gallingly arrogant) preface to the 25th-anniversary edition [not the one linked!], Rand mentions a succession of great men (sic-sic) throughout history: the ones who purportedly move it along with their sole powers—the spine, as it were, of humanity, the sparse ridge which supports the rest of that skeleton. (We'll get into that simplistic historiography some other time—the present question is that of loners). Is it that succession, projected into the psyche of a Roark-figure, that spawns our rage of creativity? A desire, then, to share with your mentor a piece of that sublime thing—a piece of music, a piece of film, a piece of mathematics—that you pursue? Or if that mentor be no longer with you, then the spirit of that teacher, that lives on in the student—a desire to commune with said mentor through that "piece," and see the mentor's grin: the sense of a membrane separating two people broken open, letting their innards flow?