Second-handing Your Way to the Top
This is what happens in a mystical culture that places too high a value on degrees, social status and fame and too little value on knowledge and truth.
Mysticism worships the rejection of truth and finds “real” value in self-serving fantasy. Religion is the most glaring example of this but it can take many other forms.
For those who aren’t familiar with it already, I introduce you to Ayn Rand’s concept of the “second-hander”:
Isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison…. They’re second-handers….
They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: “Is this true?” They ask: “Is this what others think is true?” Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, and produce? Those are the egoists. You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation–anchoring to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people. That’s what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It’s everywhere and nowhere and you can’t reason with him. He’s not open to reason. [”The Nature of the Second-Hander”, Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, 78: pb 69, quoted in Binswanger, Harry, The Ayn Rand Lexicon: New York, Meridian, 1988, pp 438-439]
But Harvard admits them and keeps them.
Kaavya Viswanathan fits the definition of a second-hander. Both her actions and the subject matter of her book reflect this. And she says her theft of another writer’s words was unconscious.
Other Harvard students are disillusioned — and even sympathetic — to the plight of the 19-year-old author. Most agree, however, that there are too many similarities between Viswanathan’s book and two works by novelist Megan McCafferty to be a coincidence.
“I just feel bad for her, even if it was totally intentional,” said Katherine Mims, 20, a freshman from Sterling, Va. “I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, like most students. But when you lay the passages next to each other, it’s hard to deny.”
Viswanathan did not return phone messages and e-mails seeking comment. She has said that she unintentionally “internalized Ms. McCafferty’s words” and that “any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious.”
Before the Harvard Crimson broke the story about the similarities between Viswanathan’s novel and the other books, staff writer Elizabeth W. Green opined in the student paper about the “soul-burning jealousy” of Harvard students when others get ahead.
The splash from the sophomore’s novel brought that envy to a new level, Green wrote. “Almost as soon as her success became public knowledge, Viswanathan became the target of an inspired private butchering,” she wrote.
In an interview with The Associated Press before the controversy, Viswanathan talked about the pressures of her new fame and described the first time she saw her novel in print. One Saturday in March in the Harvard bookstore, she happened upon a prominent display of her books, each slapped with a head shot that took up most of the back cover.
“I started to hyperventilate, and I burst into tears,” Viswanathan said at the time.
At noon Friday, the bookstore pulled the book with its fuchsia binding out of its front display window and off the local best-seller list. Just last Sunday, the novel hit No. 32 on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list.
Viswanathan’s book tells the story of Opal, a hard-driving teen who earns all A’s in high school but gets rejected from Harvard because she forgot to have a social life. The heroine bears superficial similarities to the author, including Indian heritage, a New Jersey upbringing and Harvard.
McCafferty’s book is also set in New Jersey; it follows a protagonist named Jessica Darling who excels in high school but struggles with her identity and longs for a boyfriend.
The Crown Publishing Group, McCafferty’s publisher, alleges that at least 40 passages in Viswanathan’s book are similar to their author’s novels “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings.”
At Harvard, most student agree.
“I think we have all accepted that she plagiarized parts of it,” said Jessica Lin, 19, a freshman from Warren, N.J.
The school has largely stayed out of the controversy. Robert Mitchell, spokesman for the undergraduate segment, said plagiarism policies do not relate to work performed outside class.
It’s all about being accepted by others and being popular and the social “power” that comes with it.
The vast majority of people in our extroverted, popularity-driven culture meet the definition of the second-hander.
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