Selfishness and Damnation on a Subway

Imagine, if you will, a crowded, standing-room only subway car during rush hour. Even though people are standing, a seated passenger keeps his backpack on the seat next to his. It would be difficult upon seeing such a sordid display of selfishness not to reflect on the person’s values and character. The flipside of selfishness would be obvious: an indifference towards other people, including that which might benefit them. Instead, selfishness, which is self-love that is oriented teleologically to the person’s own benefit (i.e., private benefit) at the expense of benefits to other people and even a society as a whole. The shift from the ethical domain to that of religion may seem easily done—people of bad character are likely to go to hell rather than heaven—but not so fast, lest we presume to be omniscient (i.e., all-knowing) and capable of promulgating divine justice. It is indeed very tempting to relegate selfish people to hell.

John Calvin, a Protestant reformer in the sixteenth century, held that by absolute sovereignty, God has predestined an elect who are saved. Although he viewed wealth as a sign of God’s approval of the elect, it was not until the next century that Calvinists considered industriousness to be a Christian virtue.[1] All this contradicts Jesus’s statement in the Gospels to the rich man that unless he gives up his fortune, he would not enter the kingdom of God; it would be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Furthermore, wealth as a sign of divine favor leaves out the divine favor that could be supposed to be lavished on monks such as Cuthbert and Godric of Finchale, who lived intentionally impoverished lives so to be worthy of being saved. Wealth as a sign of divine favor also flies in the face of the preachments of such religious notables as St. Francis of Assisi and Luther, both of whom can be interpreted as attempting to apply brakes to the emerging and maturating Christian pro-wealth paradigm of their respective times.[2]

Much less problematic is the attribution by observing selfishness of someone not being among the elect saved by the shedding of blood by the Son of God, for, as Paul and Augustine both claimed, God is love and it emanates not only in a person’s love directed to God, but also to one’s neighbors in benevolentia universalis. Intentionally depriving another subway passenger on a crowded train of a seat by taking one up with one’s backpack is antipodal to benevolence, which manifests divine love according to Christianity.

In fact, Samuel Hopkins, who was a protégé of the New England theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, claims in his book on holiness that the essence of the kingdom of God is kindness and acts of compassion oriented to the humanity of people who dislike one or whom one dislikes.[3] Literally “rubbing shoulders” with another passenger on a subway car is much less inconvenient than being charitable towards adversaries. The root of the word charity is love rather than philanthropy.

In his book on virtue, Edwards himself distinguishes selfishness from “compounded self-love,” which differs from simple self-love because benefits are intentionally extended to other people rather than limited to oneself.[4] Similarly, Pierre Nicole, a seventeenth-century Jansenist Catholic priest and theologian, claims that the inherently sinful self-love can nonetheless be cleverly manifested as courtesy—but not interior kindness!—to other people because more can be gotten from laying out honey than from the stinginess of selfishness. Had the subway passenger moved his backpack, who knows, perhaps a person who might have been useful might have sat in the suddenly empty seat? 

Nevertheless, Hopkins, Edwards, and Nicole were all very clear in that even if self-love can have intentional beneficial consequences, which are in a person's self-interest, the root is still a sin. Needless to say, this point applies to the naked underlying narrow selfishness of the baker and the consumer in Adam Smith's theory of a competitive market, where not even moral sentiments can be assumed to be in the calculus of either participant. In relying on market-level unintended beneficial consequences of selfish economic pursuits by the crucially price-based impersonal mechanism of the proverbial "invisible hand," Smith does not even acknowledge or rely on intentional benefits for others from the enlightened or "compound" self-interest of market participants. Smith's view of human nature in the economic domain is thus relatively pessimistic. I submit that the business world empirically bears this out, as evinced, for example, by how corporations market their marketing under the subterfuge of "corporate social responsibility." Even attempts to reconcile organizational and societal norms are not ethical in nature, given Hume's notion of the naturalistic fallacy, which states that ethical principles are necessary to get from "is" to "ought." I submit that still another fallacy is instantiated by conflating the ethical and theological domains. In short, God transcends and thus is not limited to "ought." The profane world of business greed is oceans of time from the realm of godliness. 

As preferable as damning selfishness is to reckoning a rich person as being favored by God, distinguishing the ethical domain from that of salvation is important because the two domains are, I submit, qualitatively different even though they do interrelate. Hence Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling distinguishes the universally-accessible moral domain from that of the divine command that only Abraham receives.  What is attempted murder (of Abraham’s son, Isaac) in moral (and legal) terms is a sacrifice in religious terms. Both domains are valid in themselves and their respective meanings, and they relate to each other, as in the story of Abraham, but attempted murder and religious sacrifice are qualitatively different. This point is also clear in the Book of Job, as Job is a righteous man and thus does not deserve to be made to suffer by the devil even as a test sanctioned by the Old Testament deity. Abstractly stated, divine omnipotence (i.e., all-powerful) means that divine command cannot be constrained by human ethical principles. Regarding the five Commandments that have ethical conduct, it is explicitly based on divine command, and thus on divine will, and thus is not a constraint on the deity. This does not mean that the ethical itself is theological in nature.

So while it is tempting to relegate a selfish person to hell as a sordid reprobate, especially as selfishness is antithetical to benevolentia universalis, which is a manifestation of “God is love” in Christianity, both our own finite nature as judges and the distinction between acting unethically and being saved or damned mitigate against making such a hasty and wholly convenient category mistake as superimposes stuff of our realm onto God. It could be, for example, that the man on the subway suffers from PTSD and thus God has mercy on such a trifling thing as the man taking up an extra seat. Furthermore, it could be that the man was on his way to care for his sick grandmother and triggering his social anxiety on the train would compromise the care he could give.

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1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth. See also the author’s related academic treatise, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). The first text is of the non-fiction genre for the general educated reader, whereas the second text is of the academic genre. Ironically, God’s Gold not only contains additional chapters, but is also an ideational improvement on God’s Gold, especially concerning the concluding chapter of both books. A Christian apologist, for instance, would prefer the conclusion of God’s Gold, which hinges on the Logos in answering a critique of anthropomorphism from David Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Sometimes better ideas reach a general readership rather than cloistered, over-specialized academia.

2. Ibid.

3. Samuel Hopkins, An Eenquiry into the Nature of Holiness (New York: William Durell, 1710).

4. Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1960).

Pope Leo: Poised against Plutocracy?

Poised as the “new Leonine era,” worded as if gilding the proverbial lily as if a golden ring, the installation of Pope Leo XIV reinvigorated Pope Francis’s preachments on the poor and economic inequality because Robert Prevost chose Leo in large part because of Pope Leo XIII of the late nineteenth century, whose “historic encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”[1] Due to “his choice of pontifical name and his mathematical and legal training, Pope Leo XIV has awakened hope and curiosity among the faithful and the more secular world about the influence the Catholic Church could exert on the economic world during his pontificate.”[2] In the exuberance of a new pontificate, it is easy to get carried away with excitement as to possibilities. Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s crime against humanity in Gaza, no one could be blamed for seeking out hope wherever it could be found. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind just how marginal the calls of conscience can be, given the onslaught of greed not only in the present day represented by powerful corporate (and related) governmental interests, but also in greed’s institutional accretions built up over time that have a force of their own in protecting the economic (and political) status quo.

The practical impact of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, promulgated in 1891, should not be overstated. To be sure, it “laid the foundations of the social doctrine of the Church that inspired Catholic trade unionism, and, some 30 years later, the creation of the Christian Democratic parties that contributed decisively to the civil and material reconstruction of Europe after World War II.”[3] Calling “for workers’ rights without resorting to the class struggle promoted by Marxist doctrine” by instead focusing on “the balance of fair wages and equal economic relations,” Rerum Novarum can be said to have been prudent and eminently practical.[4] Even so, a focus on microeconomics can only do so much when the macro political-economy structure is left intact, and that structure, specifically in its huge concentrations of private capital in modern corporations and their economic-turned-political power in the halls of government amid elected representatives seeking campaign-reelection donations and lucrative jobs in the future, plays a crucial role in perpetuating and even aggravating huge economic disparities and the corruption of democracy by plutocracy.

“Pope Leo XIII questioned the concentrations of economic industrial power and was immediately attacked,” says Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, a banker and former president of the Institute for Religious Works, the corrupt Vatican financial institution.[5] Tedeschi attributed the anti-trust legislation in the United States to the encyclical, but he left out the ensuing fecklessness with which the U.S. Justice Department has used the Sherman Act to break up oligopolies and monopolies (e.g., Facebook, Amazon, General Motors, etc) undoubtedly because of “political pressure.” Even though the Sherman Act was passed “to curb the power of cartels that had created a near-monopoly regime with serious social repercussions” does not mean that much curbing actually took place.[6] Because “serious social repercussions” stem from anti-competitive economic industries, the staying power of the latter even decades into the twenty-first century means that even prior efforts to fortify labor unions fell short of the aims of Rerum Novarum. The proof, in order words, is in the pudding.

That Pope Leo XIV sought to build on established Catholic social teaching such as Rerum Novarum “to respond to another industrial revolution and to developments in artificial intelligence that bring new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and work” may have been putting the cart before the horse, given the social repercussions still occurring in 2025 from the gigantic economic and political power of the mega multinational corporations.[7] Indeed, “economic data” showed “growing crises and imbalances between average incomes and the cost of living” in the E.U. and U.S., which a focus on AI would not address.[8]

In the U.S., the pope’s home country, for example, the federal House of Representatives was in the midst of cutting the budget of Medicaid, which funds healthcare for the poor and disabled. Just days before the inaugural Mass of the new pope, a group of conservative Republican lawmakers blocked a bill with cuts to the program because they were not large enough, given the president’s proposed tax-cut (amid a federal budget debt at the time of $36.21 trillion). That any tax cut would even be proposed amid such a debt (with Moody’s recently having reduced the U.S.’s credit rating) defies fiscal logic and prudence. Cutting health-care for the poor without cutting military spending conjures up “social repercussions” in terms of values that presumably violate those of Rerum Novarum and thus Popes Leo XIII and XIV.

I submit that the Roman Catholic Church still had work to do on the question of human dignity, well-being, and justice in the context of human nature’s incompatibility with holding so much economic and political power in such concentrations that human nature itself may be warped as in the case of an addiction. The incarnation of billionaires who could not possibly spend such wealth in their respective lifetimes (and their survival from want is virtually assured) is something that Pope Leo XIII could not have dealt with, as businessmen such as JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were the millionaire “titans” of the Gilded Age. Having broken up Standard Oil in 1913 (without changing the ownership) does not mean much as the U.S. Justice Department stood by through the rest of the twentieth century as more and more American industries turned into oligopolies and even de facto monopolies. The practical impact of Rerum Novarum hardly justifies moving on the AI without taking another stab at the political-economic regime that has perpetuated and even extenuated massive economic inequality and price-setting “inflation” by companies.

Just days before Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate officially began, Walmart’s chief financial manager told the media that the company “had no choice” in raising prices due to new tariffs. Were Walmart’s industry competitive rather than oligopolistic, Walmart would be a price-taker, such that market discipline (i.e., choices by consumers) could mean that Walmart would “have no choice” but to accept lower profit by absorbing some of the supply-cost increases rather than passing them all on to the consumers. As U.S. President Trump said, Walmart had made billions of dollars in 2024, and thus could afford to absorb some of the impact of the tariffs. Put another way, we have no choice but pass on the increases onto the consumer is itself not only a lie, but also an indication of the company’s perception of its industry as less than subject to competitive forces wherein consumers can vote with their wallets and purses by buying elsewhere rather than being forced to pay more at Walmart.

If anything, the economic (and related political) regime that supports excessive economic rents being paid by consumers as large corporations continue to profit greatly has endured and even prospered as the status quo since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891. Oligopolies came to populate even the high-tech industry, including social media, at the expense of competitive markets and thus consumers as well as workers. Restructuring the underlying political-economic regime lies beyond the purview of labor unions; even the voice of Catholic conscience may be insufficient, given how the regime is fed by and feeds greed. In shifting from a strict anti-wealth paradigm to a pro-wealth paradigm wherein wealth is decoupled from greed (i.e., liberality and munificence vindicating even fortunes as camels slip through narrow places), Christianity had arguably compromised itself with respect to being a normative obstacle to greed.[9]

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1. Sergio Cantone, “How the Pontificate of Pope Leo XIV Could Influence the World Economy,” Euronews.com, May 18, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. See Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon.

Bob Prevost as Pope Leo: The First American Pope

Referring to the former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost as “Bob Provost” reflects my Midwestern roots, which Pope Leo XIV (or “Pope Leo” amongst friends) has as well, even though the media missed this vital point as to the new pope’s native culture. As if a knee-jerk reaction, the international media almost immediately sought to circumscribe the new pope’s “Americanness” by referring to “the Chicago-born Augustinian missionary” as “history’s first U.S.-born pope” as if he had left the U.S. as a young boy and had become just as South American as “American.”[1] Perhaps this is what prompted U.S. President Trump to jump on social media to so profusely congratulate the first American pope even though as Cardinal, Bob Prevost had publicly criticized Trump’s immigration policies. The contest was on to define the new pope! Of course, never to be outdone by anything American, the very British BBC referred to the “first North American pope,” just as the BBC had stated many years earlier that Prince Harry and Magen were moving to North America (rather than to California after a visit in Canada).[2] The games people play. I contend that the bias behind portraying Bob Prevost erroneously as only originally from the U.S. represents something more than mere political and ideological resentment of one of the most powerful countries on Earth.

To be clear, the new pope was from the United States—in fact, from its heartland—and thus he can indeed be said to be the first American pope, even though he spent two decades in South America serving the Church. That he gained citizenship in Peru and the Vatican does not mean that he revoked or renounced his American citizenship or that he can be relegated as having been merely born in Illinois. In fact, in 1999, when he was 44 years-old, he returned to Chicago for fourteen years to lead the Augustinian Order, so even being characterized as “born and raised” in the United States is misleading.

At 69 years-old when he was elected, Pope Leo had lived about 40 years in the United States, and all of those years but four were in Chicagoland, which covers 200 square miles and includes the city of Chicago as well as the suburbs. He lived there for fourteen years well after he had graduated from seminary there, so it is incorrect to say that he was merely born and raised in Chicago. He served the Church in Peru for only 20 years, with only eight of which being when he had dual citizenship.[3] His church service in Peru occasioned (but did not condition) his citizenship there, rather than vice versa. Therefore, it is as misleading to characterize him as “U.S.-born,” as it is to say that he is the first Peruvian pope, or even that he is the first pope from both Illinois and Peru. The false-equivalence narrative, especially in Europe, was no accident. There had been an unwritten rule in the Vatican hierarchy that no American could be elected pope.

Leading involves the use of symbol, and words are symbols. Upon being announced to the world, it was no accident that Pope Leo spoke in Spanish (as well as Latin and Italian) and gave a “shout out” to Peru and did not speak a word of English or refer to people in his homeland. Speculating, I submit that he may have been sending a message to the Church hierarchy that he would not be coddling up to the Trump Administration or, moreover, doing the bidding of the country with perhaps the most geopolitical power in the world. Both theologically and ethically, religion should act on a check on the earthly powerful. The days of the Borgia popes were long gone, and the Roman Catholic Church had shifted to a role of speaking truth to power. That speaking Spanish and explicitly mentioning Peru can be construed as misleading, the pope may have judged that this cost was worth establishing himself as independent of the United States in terms of power.

Secondly, Pope Leo may have been sending the message that he would not be in the corner of the arch-conservative American Catholic hierarchy. Even though a few American bishops held a press conference on the next morning, differences from that ideologically-oriented moralistic enclave and the moderate pope could be anticipated. Cardinal Prevost had been instrumental, for example, in Pope Francis’s addition of three women in the Vatican office that the cardinal ran from 2023 that vets prospective bishops. That Pope Leo had two women serve as lectionaries reading scripture during his first mass as pope can be read as yet another use of symbol to send a message. That is, his choice was “perhaps an indication of Leo’s intention to follow Francis’ priority to expand women’s role in the church.”[4] If Pope Francis had groomed Prevost, the former may have taught the latter how to use symbols effectively in leadership. If so, symbolic actions in social justice, especially for the poor, could be a part of Pope Leo’s pontificate. That as a Cardinal Prevost had been “critical of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration” could also rankle some American bishops.[5] Lastly, he reportedly had a role in Pope Francis’s push-back against the ideologically-conservative orientation of the American clerical hierarchy in vetting clergy for possible bishoprics in the United States. Therefore, the American expression, “Be careful what you wish for; you might get it,” could come around to bite the American Catholic hierarchy in the proverbial “behind.”

There is, however, a “but.” Revisiting the intentional use of symbol, that Pope Leo wore full papal regalia for his first address to the world after being elected whereas Francis had not done so for his first address may signal that Leo was coming into the job with some conservative leanings that would keep him from being a full-blown progressive pope, if indeed Francis could be said to have been progressive. Whereas Francis had famously said, “Who am I to judge?” regarding a gay couple who are monogamous and love each other and God, and added that it is no crime to be gay, Robert Prevost had previously said in 2012 that a “homosexual lifestyle” evinces “beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel.”[vi] As a Cardinal, Prevost abstained from assenting or dissenting from Francis’s optional blessing on gay civil unions. Bob’s brother back in Illinois told journalists after the papal election had been announced that his brother is a “middle of the road” kind of guy.

Even being a moderate could be enough to annoy the most conservative ideologues in the American church on occasion, and Pope Leo may have wanted to make clear that he would be independent of that hierarchy rather than rubber-stamping its obsession on homosexuality and abortion. He may also have been wanting to tell the European church-hierarchy by not using his native tongue in his first address that he would not be biased in favor of the United States. That he could speak Italian and that his father had significant Italian ancestry were probably more vital than we know in swinging E.U. cardinals in favor of voting for an American cardinal. Both of Pope Francis’s parents had emigrated from Italy.

In short, the bias against having an American as pope can be viewed as superficial. Just as Americans exist who oppose the values supporting the excesses of American capitalism and those undergirding the Trump Administration even in matters of foreign policy, so too have there been Catholic priests who were (or are) American and yet have resisted (or resist) the ideological reductionism of the American Council of Catholic Bishops. Superficial, prejudicial assumptions can enjoy sustained unfounded legitimacy and longevity.  Such assumptions gloss over significant cultural differences between Americans.

The most important influence on Bob Prevost, culturally speaking, was utterly missed by both American and international journalists because the intra-American culture of which I am referring does not easily fit into the E.U.-U.S. basis of comparison. Like Bob Prevost, I was born and raised in northern Illinois, though his hometown is closer to the city-proper of Chicago than mine is. Whereas he doubtlessly identifies himself as a Chicagoan, I grew up beyond the farthest suburbs. He is a Chicago Sox fan whereas I am a Cubs fan. Yet I submit that we both identify primarily as Midwesterners. The Midwest includes, roughly speaking, fifteen U.S. member-states whose combined population is around 80 million and for which Chicago is the de facto capital, at least as far as commerce is concerned. The Midwest spans from Ohio to Nebraska, and up around Lake Michigan (or, Lake Illinois, which, I say in jest, is far north of the Gulf of America). Illinois is so diverse economically and culturally, such that the southern region, Egypt, has attempted five times to “IL-exit” (which is European-speak for “secede”) from Illinois (really from Chicagoland), that were the pope and I to chat informally, we would quickly and easily nod affirmatively that we are both Midwesterners at heart even though he picked the wrong baseball team (can a layperson absolve a pope?). Such informality may seem strange or even scandalous outside of the Midwest, but I submit that the distinctive culture resonates well with Christ’s emphasis on neighbor-love as benevolentia universalis, including speaking to the poor and other marginalized people in public without talking down to them or as if they were a special case. I submit that a Midwesterner would make an excellent pope, and that the superficial bias has thus impeded the historically European-centered Church.  

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1. AP News, “Live Updates: Pope Leo XIV Calls His Election Both a Cross and a Blessing, Offers First Homily,” May 9, 2025.
2. Frances Mao, “Pope Leo XIV Calls Church ‘A Beacon to Illuminate Dark Nights’ in First Mass, BBC.com, May 9, 2025.
3. Stacy Meichtry et al, “First Pope from U.S. Elected,” The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2025.
4. AP News, “Live Updates: Pope Leo XIV Calls His Election Both a Cross and a Blessing, Offers First Homily,” May 9, 2025.
5. Stacy Meichtry et al, “First Pope from U.S. Elected,” The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2025.
6. Li Zhou, “The New Pope Faces Scrutiny on LGBTQ+ Rights,” The Huffington Post, May 8, 2025.

Spirituality in the Workplace: Hindu and Christian Strategies

Mohan Vilas, a Hindu monk at Govardha Ecovillage, spoke at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga Conference in 2025. He had gone from the world of financial derivatives to worshipping Krishna. Once he had fulfilled his “lower needs,” he looked for more. After obtaining a M.B.A. and while working in finance, he was hungry for knowledge beyond the world of business. So he studied ancient Vedic culture. His talk at the conference was on being an idealist surrounded by strategists. He addressed the question of whether the world allows individuals to practice virtue. Even when a person is not in a dysfunctional workplace or in a hostile society, the human mind struggles, Vilas said, to apply ethical virtues. Plato’s dictum that to know the good is enough do the good, and thus to be good, may be wildly optimistic, considering the instinctual force of urges in our nature to act immorally, even though other people are harmed as a result. It is even more difficult to get into a habit of doing good while “swimming upstream” in an ethically compromised workplace or an aggressive societal culture. An ethical Russian or Israeli soldier in the mid-2020s, for example, would have a lot of trouble refusing to bomb hospitals in Ukraine and Gaza, respectively, and, moreover, invading another country and withholding food so to starve an occupied group. Such a soldier would be intolerable to both Putin and Netanyahu, respectively. Vilas’s question is the following: What happens when a person who is good is put into a selfish society? Must an ethical person finally inevitably exit a culture that rewards narrow selfishness, passive-aggression and deception?

Dostoevsky wrote when Russia was in crisis. In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin is an idealist who refuses to corrupt himself. It comes with a price: isolation.  If a society rejects moral purity, then what is valued? Myshkin is surrounded by schemers, but he is good nonetheless. His mere existence exposes the hypocrisy of those who are around him. He is identified as a problem by the corrupt. He is upsetting the balance in the social setting. He is viewed an active disturbance to be destroyed. If this sounds familiar, Jesus in the Gospel narratives is in the same dynamic. The very presence of an idealist is intolerable to sordid people who are used to manipulating other people. Being good is not beneficial in a dysfunctional societal (or organizational) culture in which cunningness is valued. Those who play fairly have a disadvantage relative to the corrupt manipulators because the latter have made the rules.

So, an idealist may be tempted to be a savvy Machiavellian strategist. Machiavelli wrote The Prince for rulers in a harsh international context. Not many people realize that his History of Florence includes the element of morality. Similarly, Adam Smith wrote not only The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the latter in which the professor of moral philosophy based his ethical theory founded on impartial sentiments in making moral judgments. However, Smith does not maintain that participants in a marketplace should be expected to act according to how others impartially feel about business conduct. Instead, the amoral and impersonal mechanism of “the invisible hand” gives aggregated self-interests of participants the unintended societal benefit of people working and obtaining goods and services. Smith accepts that market participants are self-seeking economic agents engaged in buying and selling rather than in being concerned for the economic welfare of others. That the invisible hand efficiently allocates goods and services in a competitive marketplace, which is a benefit of self-interests interacting, does not institute ethical business conduct by participants. In spite of the empirical studies claiming that acting ethically in business pays off financially, imperfect information can enable the unscrupulous to thrive.

Historically, Quakers in Europe and North America were known to be honest in business, and so they enjoyed trustworthy reputations.  This is not something that Smith counted on in writing about market competition in Wealth of Nations.

Even if Christianity had to some extend fostered ethical conduct, I submit that the advent of secularity in the West meant that the voluntary adoption of religious ethics in business could be less and less relied on. In India, I doubt that many Hindu merchants mimic the lack of concern for consequences in doing one’s caste’s duties that Krishna advocates to Arjuna concerning fighting in a military battle in the Bhagavad-Gita. A merchant could well protest that ignoring consequences in managing a business is a recipe for how to go out of business, in which case no one could get the goods or services provided by the business. It is more realistic to urge that the compassion enjoined by Krishna be practiced in the workplace, even if the workplace culture is toxic, and towards customers. Similarly, compassion to one’s detractors, as preached by Jesus in the Gospels, could gradually detoxify a dysfunctional organizational culture. Much stronger medicine, however, is expounded by Samuel Hopkins, who was a protégé of the Christian theologian of New England, Jonathan Edwards, in a book on holiness. Whereas Edwards, in his sermon, “The Portion of the Righteous,” maintains that the elect are to enter the kingdom of God only after the Last Judgment (i.e., Christ’s Second Coming), Hopkins interprets the kingdom of God as being accessible to a person before physical death in so far as one is kind and compassionately helpful to people who dislike one and whom one dislikes.  This version goes beyond the benevolentia universalis of generalized “neighbor-love,” and can be much more powerful spiritually in turning around a passive-aggressive organizational culture. Inconvenient compassion issuing out in acts of kindness takes much more effort, as the internal resistance is more, but, if done, the spiritual and psychological dynamic between two or more people can be utterly transformed.

Realistically, however, good-hearted idealists can be all-too-easily “eaten up” by sharks that thrive in hostile, back-stabbing organizational cultures. Sometimes it is best to vote with one’s feet kick off the dirt from one’s sandals, and find another workplace in which to work. Life is too short to stay where one is hated and otherwise where too many people are hateful. In this regard, I found Yale and New Haven, Connecticut to be beyond repair in 2025. That the university’s police chief, who was Christian minister and alumnus of Yale’s divinity school, had accepted the invitation of the FBI to show Yale’s private police unit how to use counter-terrorism tactics on students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty and presumably even alumni back auditing a course, and that security guards were regularly spying on students on campus was enough for me to pull the plug. I even asked if it was possible to refuse a degree already granted. This was greeted with a passive-aggressive refusal to reply to my email. So, I voted with my feet and returned to Harvard. Better to vote on principle than stay and be inflicted with passive-aggression sans organizational accountability.

Regarding employees of organizations, whether private, governmental, or non-profit, walking away, if done by more people in dysfunctional organizations, could have an “Adam Smith” kind of impact whereby organizations having toxic workplaces go under while healthy organizations prosper. Voting with one’s feet in employment is utilized too seldomly because of the financial uncertainty involved, especially in cases in which an employee quits one job before having secured another. Even if doing one’s duty by performing functions of one’s caste, including that of merchants, is valued, this does not mean that a Hindu is duty-bound to remain working in a dysfunctional company. A person need not choose between Shankara’s method of total renunciation and staying in a toxic organization. A person can both remain employed and exercise enough initiative to get out of a bad working situation and into a healthy organization.