The Fountainhead: Part 4: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

Roark and Wynand are on vacation aboard Wynand’s yacht in the South Pacific and have been away from New York for several months. Roark had finished all the sketches for Cortlandt before he left. Dominique seemed jealous when Wynand told her he would go away for months with Roark, and this pleased Wynand.

Wynand tells Roark he is “a miser about two things on earth: [Roark] and Dominique.” He says that until he met them, he had been living a completely selfless life, the kind that Toohey advocates. He didn’t care deeply about anything and his work gave “the greatest pleasure to the greatest number.” His papers represent everyone but himself—he has “erased [his] ego.” He “wanted power over a collective soul and [he] got it.” However, he says that Toohey would say he isn’t a true altruist because he must decide for the people rather than letting them decide what they want. A true altruist will decide what is best for people and “then ram it down their throats.”

Roark says he has been thinking about actual selflessness, and that, although people say it doesn’t exist, it in fact does because some people “have no self.” Like Keating, they live “within others,” or “second-hand.” Keating’s aim was greatness in other people’s eyes—“fame, admiration, envy. […] He didn’t want to be great, but to be thought great. […] He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others.” While this is true selflessness, Roark is amazed that the world calls people like Keating selfish.

Roark says that this kind of selflessness is at “the root of every despicable action.” “Second-handers” are hypocrites and cheats who “preserve a respectable front” and those who want money just for ostentation. They want to be liked and admired by others, and in the process, they sacrifice their self-respect. On the other hand, “A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn’t need it.” 

Roark says second-handers “have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people.” The ones who actually work and create are the egotists because you can’t “think through another’s brain.” Second handers “have no sense of reality” because their reality is not within them but is “anchored to nothing.” This is why Roark cannot reason with a committee—they are “Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process.”

Wynand says that second-handers “accept anything except a man who stands alone” because “they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know.” Roark says that second-handers also reproach the independent person because they are still human beings and retain “some sense of dignity.” No person can achieve absolute humility and survive. People seek happiness and never find it, not realizing that their desires are “motivated by other men” rather than being “truly personal.” Roark believes “the cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men.”

Roark says that the only quality he seeks in his friends is a “self-sufficient ego.” He tells Wynand that Wynand wasn’t “born to be a second-hander,” which makes Wynand happy. Roark doesn’t tell him that “the worst second-hander of all” is “the man who goes after power.”