Paul Farmer throws Fireballs and Gets a Standing O

Every now and then, even social entrepreneurs need a voice of conscience and moral clarity. At the closing plenary, that voice was Paul Farmer’s.

With a rare combination of fervent righteousness and playful exuberance, Farmer forced us to reflect on the perils and limitations of the business thinking that has come to dominate the social entrepreneurship discourse: The quote below is long but I think it bears quoting in full. Farmer said:

“Our social entrepreneurs and all its supporters are obsessed with something called scale. The fetishization of scaling up our work is a source of both anxiety and hope. Bringing a new innovative project to scale often feels like the only way to leave a footprint of a good kind in an afflicted world in need of good ideas. .. . . .What’s been shocking to me over the past 25 years is the lightning speed at which policy makers, themselves shielded from the risks [that the poor face], decide that a complex intervention is too difficult or not cost-effective in Haiti or Africa, or not sustainable. In microfinance parlance, many of my patients are “poor credit risks.” But aren’t they the very people we claim to serve in the first place?

This is why I termed my speech a “Loyalist’s critique” of our movement.

We need to be aware that each of the terms and concepts and tools we’ve developed can be used to deny the destitute access to goods and services that sometimes should be rights, not commodities. Does anyone really believe that a mother loves her newborn more if she had to pay some sort of users fee for prenatal or obstetrics care? Such claims are “piffle” as you say in your country. But they are also reflective of an ideology that has crept into our entrepreneur movement. This way of seeing the world has deep, deep roots. It’s been remarked upon already but it’s our culture that is hard to see. It’s our culture that needs to change. Look around you and you’ll see people of every hue but there are not poor people here. It’s not that they need an invitation to Oxford. It’s that they need us to include them in our movement and allow them to be social entrepreneurs.”

I felt Farmer’s critique simultaneously in my gut, heart, and mind. To me, he was reminding us not to swallow the ideology and framework of business wholesale. He was asking us to remember that the same ideological sword we have wielded to attack the world’s problems—the one that treats people as customers and access to decent health care, food, and housing as commodities—is also the sword that got us into so many of these problems in the first place!

Instead, Farmer offered us a different ideology: One based on the belief that every individual has the right to a dignified life. Farmer acknowledged the importance of scaling, but I think he was asking us not to forget that all acts of compassion (even the smallest), and all efforts to alleviate suffering (even those difficult to scale) are worthwhile and valuable, even sacred.

The bottom line? Business is a tool for change, not a comprehensive way of looking at the world or treating other human beings.