Good intentions, bad results? || Acharya Prashant, with BITS Pilani (2022)

Questioner (Q): When we do a root cause analysis of mistakes, we find two major components, intent and action, and they seem to be in constant conflict with each other. For example, Robert Oppenheimer was one of the leading members on the founding team of nuclear bombs. His intent was good, which was to end the world war, but the consequences were drastically on the wrong side. So, my question is, how to go about the conflict resolution between intent and action? Is it even necessary to address them as two entities?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Vedanta is so lucid and eloquent about this: If you just have worldly knowledge without knowledge of the self, then you are inviting disaster. In fact, it is difficult to say who is in a worse position, the person who is in the worldly sense ignorant—who does not know too much about how things are in the world, science, medicine, mathematics, what is going on in the various countries, history, and such things—or a person who knows a great deal about worldly affairs but knows very little about himself.

So, when you set out to unravel the mysteries of the atom, when you set out to go deep into the nucleus and split it open, you simultaneously carry the responsibility to know the human mind. You might be finding this a bit unexpected because that is not how we look at science or scientists; we never oblige our scientists with the responsibility to be good knowers of the mind. But if you do not know who you are and you keep increasing your knowledge of what you see, what you deal with, then is it really surprising that what you come to know of by way of science, by way of discovery, will fall into just the wrong hands?

And when I say wrong hands, I do not mean the hands of a few particular persons, I do not mean a movie-like situation where a bunch of baddies are pitted against a few good men. We as humanity share a collective mind. Our thirsts, our desires are common, and so are our vices. When you are unleashing a colossal source of energy such as the nucleus, how is it that you do not know the collective mind of humanity? How will you do without it?