The second-handers are those who abdicate the responsibility of independent judgment. In one form or another, they allow the thinking of others to dominate their lives. They are unwilling to accept the arduous effort of thinking, and instead, exist as cognitive puppets of society, ruled by the ideas popular in their cultural milieu. They accept ideas second-hand—as hand-me-downs from others. All conformists, nonconformists, and power-seekers—the Keatings, Lois Cooks, and Tooheys—function in this manner. They are not thinkers, they are not focused on reality, they cannot and do not build. Their existence is entirely social; they accomplish nothing creative or innovative; they merely accept and copy.
The fundamental issue in life is survival. Roark spells out the life-and-death stakes in his courtroom speech. He points out that man comes onto earth with none of the goods necessary for his survival. Everything required for human life is a product of his own effort. According to Roark, man faces a constant alternative: He can survive by means of his own effort or as a leech fed by the productive work of others. “The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.”
Jacob Bronowski, the American scientist and cultural historian, tells the story of the agricultural revolution, an example that bears out Roark’s distinction. To the best of our knowledge, human beings first learned to grow crops and domesticate livestock in ancient Mesopotamia, in the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Prior to this, human societies had existed by means of hunting, a method dependent on weather conditions and limiting man to a subsistence level. But then some innovative thinkers figured out how to cultivate the soil—how to grow crops, fertilize the ground, irrigate during times of drought, and domesticate livestock. These farmers had a much higher standard of living than did the hunters living in the hills surrounding them. When drought struck, the farmers irrigated, but the hunters starved as the game migrated or died. The hunters then swept out of the hills with their spears and other weapons, murdered the peaceful farmers, stole the food, and gorged themselves. When the food ran out, they starved. Unable to grow the food, they too died.
The farmers are first-handers. They are Howard Roark-type innovators who deal directly with nature. By use of their own minds, they identify the means by which to create abundance. The hunters are second-handers. Unable or unwilling to perform the creative work necessary, they instead steal from those whose effort has produced the goods. They survive (briefly) as leeches. They are one type of parasite of whom Roark speaks.
Many other types of parasites exist. The Keating-style conformists can be found in many organizations and corporations, seeking to rise by manipulation, on the premise of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know that counts.” These individuals are “gravy train riders,” performing no productive work themselves, but instead attempting to cash in on the work of others. Real life provides a multitude of second-handers, some barely touched upon in The Fountainhead. Family bums, welfare recipients, criminals, psychological manipulators, spiritual power seekers, political dictators, and military conquerors are all examples of those seeking a second-handed form of survival. All exist as leeches off the thoughts and work of more productive people.
Roark’s courtroom speech is an impassioned defense of the first-handers—of their creative nature, their life-giving abilities, and their historical and present persecution. He speaks about the struggles of the great original thinkers—not merely of the effort spent to invent products or create new methods, but of the battles waged to get the new ideas a hearing. Roark points out that those battles were waged by the inventors against the very men who stood to benefit most from the innovations. “Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed.” But the creative thinkers, on fire with the truth of their visions, persevered; sometimes they were executed or otherwise silenced, but they refused to surrender, and, in the end, they triumphed. Though a myriad of second-handers may oppose and/or exist parasitically off of the creative thinkers, the first-handers are the great men who ultimately are responsible for human progress.
The distinction drawn between first- and second-handers is the answer to the question Roark poses in the book’s opening pages. Roark wonders about “the principle behind the Dean.” He understands men such as himself but is puzzled by those like the Dean. By the end of the novel, Roark is no longer puzzled. He understands that the key difference among human beings is not one of gender, race, nationality, or even intelligence—but of the method with which they use their minds. A man like the Dean, despite his intelligence and erudition, is a follower because his orientation is toward society; other people are the Dean’s fundamental reality, so he necessarily seeks truth by looking to their beliefs. He is a good example of second-handedness, because his ideas, his standards, his values are borrowed from others. But Roark himself, he realizes, is oriented toward nature or physical reality; here, not in society, is where Roark looks in his search for truth. Roark embodies the essence of first-handedness, because his ideas, standards, and values are unborrowed; they are derived independently from reality.
