Highly successful individuals, industries or institutions suddenly come in limelight for a lame reason and their character or credentials take a severe beating. Among innumerable instances, current ones are Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt for their marital issues, Volkswagen for emission scandal and past ones are golf legend Tiger Woods, soccer star Diego Maradona, iconic companies like Dell and BlackBerry. In all of these cases, success brought successes and fame bought more feathers in their caps, but only to fall or fly apart.
Why is such story is so sacrosanct is every case?
When going is good, everyone has natural urge to have more of it. You see your success as vindication or validation of what you do. There is nothing wrong in this but slowly your mind abstains to see adverse implications of blind pursuit of good. I call this as “addiction to good”.
Why addiction to bad is a lesser evil
If you get addicted to anything that is bad, you would get early warning signals. Your bad behavior would raise eyebrows of your boss and buddies alike. Your bad habits would show up on your health and happiness. So, you receive lot of alarms when you do something that is not good and get opportunity to correct. If you don’t correct, you would end up with bigger crisis. That gives you last opportunity to resurrect or else ruin.
Why addiction to good is an enormous evil
When you do it right, everyone around you is there to endorse and enamor what you do. You start to get results. It turns into your passion. When you keep pursuing, it potentially turns into your obsession. Two things happen at this stage – (1) you build a blind belief on the approach that gave you success. Often there are errors in interpreting the parameters of this successful approach like picking emotions in place of inspiration, hard work instead of smart work and like and (2) you see your stakes soaring high socially and professionally.
You start to firmly believe, once right, you would always be right. You refuse to see incoming arrogance and overconfidence. Unsuccessful or unaware colleagues or masses start to idolize you, fueling your obsession further. This is the stage, you begin to inflict severe damage to social or corporate fabric with intelligence and resources that you have gathered. Your blessings turn into banes and you become victim of your own victories. Unless you face a severe setback, you are actually at a point of no return.
Are advanced societies becoming victim of addiction to good?
It very much seems so.
Advanced societies or countries in our world have had good run for substantial time, during which knowingly or unknowingly, they seem to taken decisions, adopted practices and policies, which helped them earlier but hurting them now. They are failing to fathom developing scenario. Addiction to good does give rise to right wing individuals, leaders and parties, if Brexit or US presidential election is any indication!
So, it is great to be good but gruesome to get addicted to it.
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