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.
