In the words of 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy, “Ambition is the willingness to kill the things you love and eat them in order to stay alive.” This type of cut-throat ambition is celebrated throughout America, and especially here at Georgetown. Part of the egocentric American dream, ambition is prized as the motivation to help you climb the social ladder. But with this objective comes the betrayal of those around us. Our society is prizing the wrong qualities, encouraging people to become psychopaths who lack not only regard for their fellow human beings, but the drive and passion that we need more of in America.
Ambition is not simply the will to be the best; it’s the will to crush all competition without pause or concern for those who fall underneath you. It is the desperation for success, power, prestige, or money. Ambition is the animalistic instinct of kill or be killed. It’s the product of this capitalistic meritocracy in which we live.
The problem with ambition is that it directly corresponds with a disregard for others. Ambition is an unrestrained ruthlessness that destroys compassion and ignores any duty to help those in need, or those with less. In other words, ambition is contributing to the destruction of America’s humanity.
And yet, we continue to betray that humanity. The halls of government and the boardrooms of America are filled with these animalistic sociopaths because our economy—and, by extension, our larger culture—is devoid of empathy. Ambition is a capitalistic institution designed to keep men at each other’s throats, blinding them to the true impacts of their actions. In the business world and in politics, the only way to get ahead is through egocentricity and cold-heartedness. This specific “intelligence” has been bred and encouraged for years, selected for in individuals, thereby creating a race have no respect for civilization.
In this time, when corporations are crushing their employees in an unrelenting cycle for higher profits and the government is slashing programs that benefit the disenfranchised, we need to change the way people see their success and see others. Rather than enshrining ambition, we need to mold this country and this world into one that is centered upon human need instead of greed.
In my mind, there is an important distinction between ambition and drive. Drive still implies the will to succeed and the desire to be great, but in place of the ruthless nature of ambition, drive is accompanied by compassion. Drive is a combination of will and reflection on what that will is doing to both yourself and those around you. A driven person is conscious of the needs of the people, not just his peers or family, but also of the downtrodden. Drive is the will to succeed without inhuman parasitism. The passion to attain your desires makes you human, as does the willingness to sacrifice for others; the willingness to extinguish those around you is not.
As for me, I’ve never been an ambitious person. It’s always been a characteristic that I’ve lacked, so much so that I shied away from competitions and groups that emphasized trying to the best at something. And then I discovered the concept of drive, and realized that success doesn’t preclude empathy.
Take my grandfather as an example. A staunch conservative and capitalist who spied on communists during the Cold War, my grandfather is the most driven person I know. I could not call him ambitious, for even when he was reaching for success, he concerned himself with those around him. He grew up in a family where he was the sole provider. Against his family’s wishes, he went to college. He paid for his education and sent money back to those he left. When he was a manager of his company, he drove one of his employees to a far away hospital to visit his sick son instead of heading straight home.
This compassion for the people around him and for those who were in worse situations than his did not impede his success or make him less of a businessman. Drive is essential for the human condition, as is compassion; ambition is not.
Surely, the current global political climate rife with rebellions, uprisings, and riots led by those who are fed up by a culture predicated on ambition should teach us that to create a harmonious world, we need to care about the people around us. Georgetown prides itself on its ambitious students, who go off to become the future leaders in finance and politics. However, the University should not be encouraging this behavior.
If our university and our country produce individuals who are driven advocates for humanity, then we can change the status quo of socioeconomic disparity. I think all can agree that we cannot continue along the path we are on, and something must change in our culture. And that change starts when our society finally eradicates the myth that ambition is a virtue, and recognizes it for what it is—a vice.
