The Second Handers....

"Most People are other people" -Oscar Wilde

I look at people around me , or what is left of them...and wonder..What is our aim in life? “Greatness”... In other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration , envy--all that which comes from others. Others dictate our convictions. Others are our motive power and our prime concern. We don’t want to be great, but rather to be thought great. We borrow from others in order to make an impression on others. Only that is when is that we are truely selfish, or rather i prefer calling it selfless(negetive)....when there is an absence of self. We know ourselves to be dishonest, but others think that we are honest and we derive our 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. The man whose sole aim is to make money. Now I don’t see anything evil in a desire to make money. But money is only a means to some end. If a man wants it for a personal purpose--to invest in his industry, to create, to study, to travel, to enjoy luxury--he’s completely moral. But the men who place money first go much beyond that. Personal luxury is a limited endeavor. What they want is ostentation: to show, to stun, to entertain, to impress others. They’re second-handers. Look at our so-called cultural endeavors. A lecturer who spouts some borrowed rehash of nothing at all that means nothing at all to him--and the people who listen and don’t give a damn, but sit there in order to tell their friends that they have attended a lecture by a famous name. All second-handers." A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn’t need it."
You can fake virtue for an audience. But how can you fake it in your own eyes. They run from it. They spend their lives running. That, precisely, is the deadliness of 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. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. 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--anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people. 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. You can’t speak to him--he can’t hear.
I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I’ve always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I’ve always recognized it at once--and it’s the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.