Some people seem born to do some particular activity. They’re naturally attracted to certain situations and participate in that situation for the intrinsic pleasure of the activity.

These activities can involve objects or people or ideas. Some people love to craft physical materials into artifacts of various kinds and function; others love to care for or organize or inspire or galvanize people; still others loves words or images or concepts or feelings or sounds or movements. The attractions to activities can be as peculiarly specific and nuanced as a man’s attraction to very particular women.* (See sexist note below.)

People like this are sometimes inclined to speak of destinies, or obsessions, or passions. For whatever reason, this quality is seen by many people as admirable, and for that reason, sometimes people who are not possessed by this quality will pretend that they do possess it.

Other people seem born to find their best advantage. They look out on the world and sense opportunities. They are attracted to situations where their actions can benefit themselves and people to whom they are loyal. The situations these people seek are far more variable than those sought by people of destiny.

When the people of opportunity encounter people of destiny, often they sense opportunity in harnessing their passions to particular collective ends, and wind up benefiting all involved. When this is pulled off well and the full potential of the situation is realized, the opportunity and individual destinies are fulfilled together, in a shared organizational destiny.

This situation is beyond wonderful and borders on magical. It is the true promise of the Free Market. I am not suggesting that there is no pain or strain or angst involved, but when all interests are aligned, all the many and intensely unpleasant elements of the effort are experienced as worthwhile. The suffering is tragic and affirming, not depressing and regrettable.

Often people will qualify or apologize for a worthwhile thing with “Well, it’s not perfect.” But really: who cares about flawlessness? Flawlessness is only decisive in the absence of overwhelming value. What matters is not absence of flaws, but the presence of something worth suffering for.

This brings me to my next point.I do not believe the promise of the Free Market can be fulfilled until a greater understanding is reached between opportunity and destiny. Mutual misunderstandings exist that have estranged the two groups, and that misunderstanding can be seen in the answers given to the question “What is worth suffering for?”

The person of destiny and the person of opportunity will give radically divergent answers to this question, and very often fails to grasp the fact that the answer that persuades and galvanizes him to action is perfectly unpersuasive and impractical or unclear or unspecific or uninspiring or depressing to the one he is attempting to reach. So the person of opportunity will paint a picture of future organizational success for its own sake, playing up the degree of that success, the quantity of opportunity fulfilled and he won’t understand that in framing things this way he has lost the passion of those whose passions are the instrument of his success. Or the person of destiny will speak of meaning and values and inspiration and try to raise up from within the souls of his colleagues the hopes of their destinies, to make it a matter of unconditional faith to press forward through the pain, and become so intoxicated with his vision that he fails to see the eyes of the opportunists glazing over at what seems to them a bunch of idealistic poetic mythologizing, or to put it less kindly, bullshit.

Another major problem: People of opportunity find it hard to believe a person of destiny might actually work against his own advantage. They tend to assume that it is the profit motive that moves the world. They are wrong. That is like claiming that what moves a car is the engine, but to forget that it is the burning fuel that moves the engine to move the car. No, it is the profit motive that gives structure to the forces of passion, which are the burning fuel of the engine that really gives it force to move. Or to think of it more organically, the profit motive is the bone structure that organizes into motion the spasms and extensions of destiny’s musculature. If your pursuit of opportunity harms the pursuit of destiny that directs and drives passions, the muscles will atrophy and the skeleton, however well-segmented and firmly joined it is will have tremendous trouble making its bones move. The car will sit motionless and pristine and only potentially operable on the side of the road.

Anyone who says everyone is motivated by material self-interest or profit has not stated a truth, but their own truth and identified themselves as a type. But that does not mean the statement is devoid of validity. Humankind cannot exist without the profit motive, nor can it live by the profit motive alone.

To put it in mythical language, Hades is only one god, and as necessary a god as he is, he is not Zeus.

*

Are there born doctors? Assuming there are, what effect does the profit motive have on the medical industry? What if it is so profitable that people with little interest in medicine are attracted to the medical industry? Will they practice medicine the same way as the born doctor? What if the attraction to money is so great that the medical industry is dominated by people who are not born doctors? What if the entirety of medical training distorts around training profit-motivated doctors, and what if way of training doctors is not as amenable to the born doctor? What if the dominance of the profit-motivated medical industry is such that barriers of entry are placed that discourage precisely those who would practice medicine whether it made them rich or not?

We look after our own kind. Every industry is a sort of self-selecting community..

Doctors were not always filthy rich, yet there have always been doctors.

*

Heaven is where:

The police are British,
The mechanics are German,
The cooks are French,
The lovers are Italian,
And the whole thing is organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where:

The police are German,
The mechanics are French,
The cooks are British,
The lovers are Swiss,
And the whole thing is organized by the Italians.

*

(* SEXIST NOTE: Are men shallow for their visual attractions, or are such attractions compressed depth, like a landscape collapsed into the depth of a layer of paint on a canvas or a life concentrated within the depth of ink on a page? Where does depth reside, anyway? If it is true that “nature loves to hide”, where is she hidden and what is she hiding behind?)