BITS Pilani: The right intention can have no bad results

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

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 of 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…