It is the secret power of Ambition that it makes us all both charlatans and fools.
And I am a charlatan and a fool.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Stand back children, there's enough heaven to go around!
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About Me
- Michael Hoag
- Manager/director at Lillie House Permaculture and the Transformative Adventures Cooperative for supporting Community Transformation Leadership. Former market manager, program manager for a food sovereignty organization, co-organizer of Van-Kal Permaculture, former principle organizer for the So-mi Permamixer, farm loan officer, family farmer, adjunct at McHenry County College.
6 comments:
It is the secret power of complacency that it makes us more easily manipulated by the charlatans and fools. ;)
Thought I might find a post here after all the commenting. Glad to see you back on the wagon again.
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Is the wagon good or bad? I can never figure that out. When a recovering alcoholic starts drinking, he "fell off the wagon." But when an opportunist tries to leech off of something trendy, he "jumps on the bandwagon."
Anyway... you, I mean to say, are one of the good wagon guys.
So let me ask you this. Do you think that ambition is a man made thing or something that is hardwired into us from the start?
Seems to me it should be hardwired in. After all, the lion who says "Hmm, that gazelle looks tasty. But screw that, I'm cooooommmfy" won't be passing on its genes, right?
But, then again, the gazelle who builds up the guts to try making friends with the lion won't, either.
And, the survey says:
Hunger pangs are enough to force even my sorry ass off the couch to grab a burrito and a pibb. But, that's different than ambition. If you go back to the 1960's or before, kids used to say their "top goals" were things like: be happy, have a good family, better life for my family, find a job I enjoy and so on.
Surveys today show that the top goals for most people in our age bracket are things like: be famous, be rich, have lots of money, cars, supermodel wives etc. and even when we're idealistic our goals are things like: "be the successful CEO of an important not-for-profit."
I mean different people used to have different kinds of top goals, but one recent study I saw said over 60% of college students put "wealth and fame" at the top, and a good bunch of the others put other ambitious stuff on their list.
And that's different than wanting to cuddle up with nice book and a tasty gazelle carcass.
And unless radical mass mutation is occurring in our population, this one is nurture over nature.
Well, if we're going to differentiate between hunger and ambition, we also need to see the difference between ambition and greed. Or ambition and materialism.
Personally, I don't see any problem in dreaming big and working down from there as long as you can be realistic at some point (some of us really have it in us to be rock stars or create a fortune 500 company fron the ground up, but most don't). As long as we don't stop working on being happy, having a good family, and having a better life for that family, why shouldn't we work on being rich as well?
When those priorities get out of whack, or when we don't know when enough is enough, then we've moved from ambition to greed, and I agree with you 100%.
Scott, of course my instinct is to agree with you. I just can't see why I agree with you, so I play devils advocate.
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