Second Handers

 

Somebody recently asked in The Gas Spanner livechat what was the biggest challenge of being as HP, see: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-gas-spanner-programme-174.html. That's a difficult question to answer because hospital portering has so many challenges. I replied that probably it was that a HP's self-esteem must come completely from within and from facts. You cannot find it in other people and conventional social eminence. The fact of the matter is that we are essential members of a lifesaving team doing one of the most important jobs in the entire world, but very few people appreciate that. The knowledge of that fact is all we have to draw on. Life experience is very different if you are a high status individual doing a glamorous and prestigious job; such as solider, airline pilot, stockbroker etc. In social situations people will automatically and instinctively treat you with reverence and respect. You'll find it much easier to make friends, to flirt and find romantic partners. You don't need internal validation because you receive so much of it from outside of yourself from others. That, I would say, is one of our toughest problems and the quest to overcome it is the very essence of the HPWA and all my HP welfare activism. The Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand, whom I have talked about before, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/03/he-loved-his-work.html and: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/11/all-labour-requires-intelligence.html, called people who draw too much of their self-justification from others "second handers". The term is coined in her second novel The Fountainhead which is about two young men who are aspiring to become architects. One is very conformist and conventional; he just goes along to get along, "climbing the ladder" as Jack Shaw would say, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2023/05/i-lied-to-jack.html. The other has his own ideals and values that he has discovered personally and he lives his life according to his own moral principles. Ayn Rand died a long time ago, in 1982; but, as I have said before, I think she would have understood me and the HPWA in a way few others ever could. See here for my review of the book: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-fountainhead-by-ayn-rand_29.html.

I've actually had a few experiences that taught me something I hadn't expected. High status people's lack of internal validation comes with a price, and I discovered this for the first time on a trip to Manchester. I travelled with a brother porter called Andy to visit a friend of ours who used to be an ODP in main theatres. She had married a man in Manchester and had got a job there. Her husband was a big-shot young executive in some mobile phone company. They had bought a big house in the Cheshire suburbs and he drove a Mercedez Benz, very dangerously to show off. Although I was a perfect guest the three days Andy and I stayed with them and I was always polite and respectful, I never really got on with her husband. He obviously felt subtly but very distinctly threatened by my presence. I had to think about it for a long time afterwards to work out why. I thought at first that he envied my internally generated self-esteem, but I'm not totally sure about that. It could be that because I did not consider myself beneath him, the way a lowly HP should, that he interpreted this as hostility. He was used to lesser men looking up at him with awe and envy. I didn't do that. This demonstrates that high status people can be hurt very badly when their external validation is suddenly taken away, even by just a single person. They have nothing inside them to fall back on and so mentally collapse in a heap. There are other similar experiences like his I could relate and may do so in future posts. It's never my intention to cause other people distress, but in this case the distress the husband suffered as a result of my existence was inevitable. The only way to avoid it would be for me to put on an act, pretend to be a conventional man for a few days, and I won't do that.  
See here for more background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/04/dont-tell-em-were-porters.html.