Anti-Social Behavior

I address the following to those who seek to improve the world. (How maddeningly absurd it is to imagine that I might have lost even one reader just now!) Today I want to express an impassioned plea for each of us to ask ourselves the following questions and to confront our answers earnestly: What would it take for me to unearth, scrutinize and grapple with my deepest motives in life? To reconsider those motives with the most sincere and penetrating will to critique and better myself? To emerge from this introspection with a more enlightened sense of what drives me to make my choices?

Observing Harvard seniors flocking to consulting and investment banking, I am devastatingly aware that our society suffers from acute self-hatred. How else can one reconcile the social valorization of these careers with the social stigmatization of so-called "socially responsible careers"? The predominant perceptions are clear enough: a stated intention to pursue a socially responsible career frequently elicits a "How come?" whereas the intention to pursue a consulting or investment banking career seldom requires justification. It is increasingly difficult for Harvard students entering socially responsible careers to wrest themselves from the unsettling inertia of the University's cultural norms.

The heart of the intensely moral matter of choosing a career lies in recognizing the tragedy that the phrase "socially responsible career" embodies--namely, that society is perverse enough to deny the term "career" an inherently socially responsible character. That society affixes the label "socially responsible" to only certain careers implies that some careers are socially irresponsible. As Eldridge Cleaver said, "You're either part of the solution or you're either part of the problem." There is no neutral ground between working for a better world and working against one.

So why does even one socially irresponsible career exist in a world where 1.3 billion human beings endure the inhumanity of absolute poverty? Where severe environmental degradation persists? Where war has claimed countless lives on every continent? Where cultural disintegration and pervasive personal meaninglessness become "inevitable" by-products of materialism's circular pointlessness? Must humanity dream up new crises to inflict upon itself?

We must alter the accepted, morally casual definition of the word "career" from "what one does throughout one's working life, which may or may not be socially responsible." to "what one does throughout one's working life, which is necessarily socially responsible." The career-seeker should seek to improve the world. This goal is not an unintended, incidental by-product, not even a secondary intention. Rather, one's primary intention is to improve the world both actively and directly--as unerringly as the word "seek" implies. All other intentions and by-products, though at times important, remain subordinate to it.

I cannot shirk my lingering suspicion that many at Harvard--those with the power to apply their talents to healing the world's many pathologies--are (mis) guided in their so-called "career" pursuits by the primary intention of selfishly accumulating inordinate wealth. Why is this misguided, if not morally grotesque? Because it represents a conscious decision to operate under the constraints of the profit motive, which is--by its very nature--socially irresponsible. The primary intention is always to maximize private gain--to conceive of the world selfishly, as if there were no "incentive" to look out for fellow human beings. It systematically corrodes one's conscientious obligation to pursue activities that benefit society as a whole, and especially those activities that benefit society's most disadvantaged members, whose destitution is the true symbol of our dysfunctional reality.

Subordinate intentions--such as those deriving from good conscience--may operate in any line of work, but the profit-making intention ultimately "prevails" over these weaker intentions at the level of decision and action. And since the profit motive dominates the conventional worldview of these unconscionable times, should it be at all surprising that we live in a world of extreme poverty, environmental destruction, war and spiritual emptiness?

Profiteers are sometimes inclined to invoke expost facto rationalizations for their selfish accumulation of inordinate wealth. They occasionally emphasize their desire to re-imagine selfishly procured wealth, upon their retirement, as wealth selflessly donated to charity. This ends-justify-the-means rationale is both a moral fiasco and a logical pretzelism. It feebly attempts to justify the convenient self-interestedness of a socially irresponsible "career" by miraculously spawning an altruistic intention to "direct funds toward" the world's betterment, after the fact. Why spend life canceling oneself out? Why imbue some corpulent, guilt-ridden check with the vicarious virtue that life itself could have epitomized?

When it comes time to choose a career, the majority of Harvard folk are unable to pose the crucial question to themselves: What can I do with my life that is existentially meaningful? The modern incarnation of Success (a frightfully narrow-minded and shortsighted beast, despite some superficial attractiveness) has seduced many, indoctrinating in them the deluded equation of material possession with existential significance. Hordes of people dedicate their lives to the ravenous chasing of money--a spiritually bankrupt plutolatry--as if money were anything other than a means to some end. Though earning money is necessary, especially in light of the considerable economic constraints that many face, the risk of buying into this money-as-God mentality is no less than the risk of stranding oneself in an ultimately groundless existence.

The quest for existential significance requires one to experience the interconnectedness of human lives within the larger world; it illustrates that our meanings, values and goals are necessarily formed and shared through our relationship with fellow human beings, rather than in some individualistic vacuum. Since existential significance is a formation of the human community, the question "What can I do with my life that is existentially meaningful?" becomes "What can I do with my life in order to improve the conditions of the human community?"

There is a test that determines whether we are spending our working lives doing the (individually defined) right thing. Explain what you have chosen to do with your working life to a victim of the world's problems--a malnourished Angolan girl, a homeless Bolivian man, a Tibetan political prisoner. Your career choice is valid only if you can justify it to that person in good conscience.

The world's problems are so vast and so profound that the efforts of all human beings are required to solve them. And if you're not working for the solution, then you're working for the problem. Are you ready to solve?

Jonathan T. Jacoby '99 is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House. He is a central co-chair of the House and Neighborhood Development program.