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If you want to make a sensitive soul go mad, place one in an environment in which the easiest and most encouraged route to success and survival are at complete odds with basic moral precepts.

Several years ago, between jobs, I interviewed with a biotech supply company, thinking at the time that it might be a good pre-grad school occupation. During the interview the owner made a point to tell me that he was a practicing Christian, and at a different point in the conversation that, of course, the details we were discussing about the business were confidential. By this point I’d caught the drift that were I to be hired it would be as a lackey or delivery man, so I was tempted to ask if Jesus would really want us to keep secrets. Putting aside the cynical, admittedly immature attitude I had at the time, the idea that the underpinnings of capitalist economics include passive deceit, immediate self-interest, and the necessity of the “other” has stuck with me.

Our society is nominally not based on religious precepts or beliefs, but religious rules are ubiquitous and in large part respected and valued even among the non-religious. Those of us in the latter population might reject the idea of an ultimate authority from which religious precepts derive, but we respect their origin as pragmatic and necessary for the survival of a society of any appreciable size. A major precept comes from the Declaration of Independence (framed religiously, but again, not necessarily interpreted as such by modern readers): all men are created equal. If I really believe this, and I have something that someone else needs, how can I in good conscience withhold it until some superficial need of mine is met? If every man is my equal, if this is one of the underlying principles of my free society, how can this reconcile with an economy that requires as its most basic principle that any given individual’s interests not be equal in their own eyes, but necessarily unequal? The concept of universal individual superiority is, of course, logically impossible and, in combination with the requirements of our underlying moral foundations, poisonous to the psyche.