It is a memory that keep popping up. After my sophomore year in college in 1971, I signed on to be a door-to-door book salesman with the Southwestern Company based in Nashville Tennessee. Originally a company that sold bibles, it had recently evolved into selling educational materials.The books were inexpensive, and residents who bought them were not drawn into other financial obligations.Southwestern recruited hundreds of college kids across the country to sell them over the summer. o me it was an ethical enterprise.
I went to sales school in Nashville. From dawn to past dusk we practiced sales techniques, interspersed with various lectures from senior leaders in the company. One presentation stood out. “Because General Motors is the largest company in the country,” (which it was at the time), the Executive Vice President said, “it provides the most service to the American people.” That didn’t sit right with me. After his presentation I went up to him and mentioned that Ralph Nader had recently published a book, “Unsafe at Any Speed”, which outlined how a General Motors product, the Corvair, was a dangerous vehicle. He smiled at me and said, “Mark, I don’t think Ralph Nader has a positive attitude.” For him, General Motors’ financial strength outstripped and indeed overruled any production failures.
I wanted to cry. I almost quit, but stuck with it, filtering out what were to me inaccurate observations and holding on to the guidance and instructions that made sense. I was dispatched to Indianapolis, where I spent a difficult but rewarding summer selling books in various residential neighborhoods.
These days it is becoming harder to filter out inaccurate financial observations, partly because they are coming at us at warp speed, and often are being made with blatant prejudice. But for many it doesn’t matter, because the adage I heard over fifty years ago still reigns: those who have more money have more wisdom, more leadership – and provide the most service.They need to be listened to, and followed. By this logic, Elon Musk, who by most accounts is the world’s wealthiest person, is providing the most service. I would not call his DOGE debacle a commitment to service.
And the converse of it holds true: those who have little don’t matter, and are a drain not just on the economy but on the national soul. his growing perspective gives Donald Trump tacit permission to refer to Somalis as “garbage”. Not worth anything; and by inference they come from “shithole countries” – and need to be turned away.
Capitalism is built on the premise and the promise of financial gain.The shadow side of this is “filthy lucre”, a term found in several verses in the King James Version of the New Testament. (1 Timothy 3:8, Titus 1:11, 1 Peter 5:2) Lucre is a Latin word which means profit; and is the root for lucrative. Filthy lucre is profit achieved by ill-gotten gains. Unethical behavior. It is identified as a moral failing. What is so twisted and dangerous these days is that for so many the sole focus is on lucre – and a willful ignoring of any practice or process that gathers it.
And these days there is a lot that is filthy about self-dealing, corruption, and wanton disregard of consequences. Financial gain is the prime value. We are seeing that played out in the current impasse over health care, and in the idea embedded in the recently released National Security Strategy document that successful (meaning fantastically lucrative) businesses should take more of a lead in dealing with foreign policy. Making money has become the north star, and everything should line up behind that. How one achieves that profit, and who is exploited in the process is not considered. It is irrelevant. If people are exploited in the process, so be it. Reverence over the accumulation of wealth should take precedence over everything else.
No religious tradition or ethical framework that I know of posits profit as the North Star. And every ethical and religious practice issues guidelines about how financial gain needs to be shared and not hoarded. That we can never turn a blind eye to corruption, which we are regularly being asked to do now. And that we need to be on the lookout for filthy lucre.
To do that we need to start with ourselves. It is important to take an inventory of our own financial hygiene: how much money do we really need — and why; how much do we hoard – and why; what are the consequences of what we spend and where we invest?
And how much do we give? I have discovered that giving money away does at least two things: it provides service to those persons or organizations that are receiving it, and – perhaps more importantly – it is an antidote to the temptation to gain and horde more, and it serves as a concrete corrective to the fiction that having more money automatically provides the most service. And a deeper commitment to giving helps us engage with soul work, which our psyches and our country desperately need.
