Ambition Has Been a Greater Influence for Evil Than Good

Ambition Has Been a Greater Influence for Good than Evil (Against the Motion)

Good Morning. Respected Chairperson, judges and my worthy opponents. Today I stand before you to speak against the motion ‘Ambition has been a greater influence for good than evil’.

What is the foundation of ambition? It is man’s eternal quest for happiness that is self gratification. Our minds are rarely content with happiness that has turned it into a drug. Once we achieve a certain level of happiness, we are rarely satisfied with it. We think that we can achieve a higher level of happiness and we become more and more ambitious in order to achieve that level. It reaches a point where it factually kills a person from within. He becomes soul-less, blighted and greedy, he does anything to full fill his ambition. This is where ambition influences evil as it never has the good fortune to satisfy us and its extravagance inflames an unappeasable desire.

The evil that exists is the intense feeling that we must have something that you don’t have or don’t have enough of, whose domino effect is a pre-meditated decision that grows into ever escalating and harmful action. Thus the core of evil is the ‘want’ and not the thing. Money is not the root of evil. Undoubtedly being spoiled leads to evil and the conjecture that everything must be ours and ours and only. We try to blame outside influences like money, life or a host of other catalysts but the initial thought and final decision to act arises within us. It can be rightly said that ambitions truly leads to evil. They turn out to be so destructive because ambition is a lust that can never be quenched but grows more inflamed and madder by enjoyment.

History has a lot of instances to prove this fact. Over the past two thousand years, we have witnessed thousands of leaders. Apart from the great ones who are still looked up today, there are the infamous tyrants who had reigns of horror. What was their ultimate motive behind this? It was...