Follow your passion? Not so fast

"I believe the true "'gilded road' for any emerging adult is the one that suits and supports their individual passions and strengths," writes the Inquirer's ordinarily astute syndicated advice columnist Carolyn Hax (July 27).

Hax's advice appeared just seven days after James Holmes passionately opened fire on a midnight screening of a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, indiscriminately killing 12 people and wounding 58.

Yes, I know: Holmes wasn't passionate, he was nuts. And so was Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire on Palestinian worshippers in Hebron in 1994, killing 29 and wounding 125. So was Timothy McVeigh, the militia movement sympathizer who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168. So was Anders Breivik, the Norwegian right-wing militant who killed 69 people at a left-wing youth camp last summer.

But if you asked these folks and countless other mass murderers, I suspect they would describe themselves as men of passion, with a method to their madness:

Blaming Islam and Marx

—McVeigh sought revenge against the federal government for its handling of the Waco Siege of 1993, which ended in the deaths of 76 people.

—Breivik sought to publicize his ideology, a compendium of which he distributed the day of his massacres (he blames Islam and Marxism for the world's problems).

— Goldstein and his followers, passionate fellows all, saw themselves as freedom fighters defending Israel against the Arab menace. (A plaque near his grave reads: "To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah and the nation of Israel.")

Yes, I know: The people who put up that plaque, as well as the estimated 10,000 Israelis who have visited Goldstein's grave, are crazy too. But do you see where I'm going with this?

Just about everyone (aside from you and me) is a little bit crazy. And many people, while surely sane, are nevertheless selfish and/or cruel.

In that case, is "Follow your passion" really wise advice?

Rendell's manifesto

In his new book, A Nation of Wusses, Pennsylvania's own former Governor Ed Rendell contends that America's biggest current problem is gutlessness. "If we are to continue to lead the world, economically and in other ways," he argues, "we must regain that American spirit, that boldness and courage, that willingness to take on challenges no matter how hard or how great the risk, if the reward makes that risk worth taking. We need leaders with the courage to risk the thing that matters most to them: their own jobs!"

Presumably he's thinking of leaders with, say, the courage to invade Iraq before ascertaining that there's any valid reason to do so.

In an institutionalized age when most people are obsessed with physical and financial security, "Follow your passion" has become a popular and perhaps useful mantra, as any cursory Google search will confirm.

"Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures," said Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, writer and lecturer. Hey, it worked for Rasputin.

"'You'll end up boring'

"Chase your passion, not your pension," echoes the management consultant Dr. Denis Waitley.

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive," said the late author, theologian philosopher and civil rights leader Howard Thurman— advice apparently taken by the former Penn State coach and serial sex abuser Jerry Sandusky.

"There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life," said the Italian film director Federico Fellini.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars," said Jack Kerouac

"You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion," said Garrison Keillor.

"You are what you do," wrote Bob Black in The Abolition of Work & Other Essays. "If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances "¨are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous." So that's why Hitler gave up hanging wallpaper!

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood . . . Make big plans; aim high in hope and work," declared the American architect and city planner Daniel Burnham, not long before Kaiser Wilhelm invaded Belgium.

A comic book lesson

Of course it's useful to remind people that (as the Schlitz beer commercials used to put it) you only go around once in life, so grab for all the gusto you can get. But would it be churlish of me to point out that the aphorisms I've quoted above worked very well for Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Osama bin Ladin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Napoleon, Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great, and not so well for anyone who got in their way?

I'm all for following your passion. But will no one speak up in behalf of following your brain too?

When I was a kid, "Archie" Comics had an episode in which Mr. Wetherbee, the principal of Riverdale High, asked the school goody-goody to explain his perfect attendance record. The kid replied that he had pasted the phrase "Obey that impulse!" on his book bag to remind him to do the right thing whenever he contemplated playing hooky. Mr. Wetherbee, impressed, plastered the same phrase on signs and banners all hung over the school.

The result, of course, was that students and teachers alike obeyed their impulse to skip school altogether. Your passions and impulses may differ from mine.

"If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins," Benjamin Franklin advised. Added Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring."

But I know what Ed Rendell would say: What a pair of wusses!