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.
