How “the Greatest of All Plagues” Became Our God

Jag Bhalla

4 January 2025

Greed is now often seen as a force for good, but it was once feared as “the greatest of all plagues.” The surprising source of that quote is Plato, who diagnosed greed as politically toxic. A new book by philosopher David Lay Williams traces this transformation of greed from a dangerous political pathogen to a core organizing principle of our collective life. In The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx, Williams revives the history of warnings against greed in Western political thought using seven revered thinkers. Despite the prestige these thinkers enjoy, their warnings are so now little known that we live in a “greedocracy.” Williams corrects these politically ominous omissions, and his chosen sages include other surprises. Most will already know that Jesus, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx decried greed. Yet few are aware that Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill also argued against the pernicious political and moral ills that excessive economic inequality brings.   

I learned a lot from Williams’ corrections and suspect you will also. Here, I’ll cover selected arguments and quotes from the featured thinkers, then correct a significant misstep that Williams makes, before extending his critique to refute four influential talking points that greedophiles deploy. Their defenses are sonorous self-exonerating nonsense.

Many right-wing fans of Plato seem not to know that the rulers of his ideal political community were not allowed to own private property. Those driven by private gain rather than devotion to the collective good were deemed unfit for leadership. Plato argued that a self-interested and self-serving leadership inevitably led to tyranny (as described here). Plato was surely an elitist, but as Williams writes, his “desire for economic equality is fundamental and systematic.” For instance he proposed that no citizen’s wealth should exceed four times that of the poorest. Plato’s core concern was pleonexia, or insatiable greed (Nietzsche usefully translated pleonexia as having but still wanting more)—seeking disproportionate wealth was both unjust and politically corrosive.

Plato argued that the inability to restrain greedy impulses made people unfree and unfit for leadership. It turned them into “passion’s slave,” a fabulous phrase from Shakespeare. Most ancient Greek philosophers held that freedom required sufficient self-command to control unreasonable passions. To be worthy of respect or citizenship or leadership, you couldn’t be at the mercy of your emotions; you had to be passion’s master. This sort of self-command and passion mastery was of vital for leadership. Without it, leaders couldn’t be trusted to put the common good above private gain.

Williams says that Plato sought “to create a culture that shames” greed. The founder of formal Western philosophy put it this way: “In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues—not faction, but rather distraction—there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty, nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of both these evils.” Note that duality, Plato feared not only factional civil war but also the way that greed diverted elite attention away from essential public affairs (elite energies essential for the health of the commonwealth were misdirected towards competitive luxurious lifestyles). Importantly, Plato distinguished seeking reasonable and proportionate improvements in material conditions from ungovernable greed. The latter was irrational and inhuman and failure to curb elite greed created a “city of pigs.” Williams reminds us that that while Plato “ranks among the greatest elitists in Western civilization,” he was also “one of the greatest critics of wealth and [economic] inequality in the ancient world.” Williams rightly adds a considerable caveat: Plato’s concerns over economic or political equality only applied to free male citizens; women and the large slave population were excluded.

                Williams next covers Christian views of wealth as a barrier to salvation. Jesus famously said, “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

New Testament writers disparaged greed (also typically using the term pleonexia). They merged elements of Greek philosophy with a long-standing Jewish ethos of obligations to the poor. Greek influences included the “tentative universalism in Stoicism” (as Larry Siedentop writes in Inventing the Individual). This led St. Paul to proclaim the brotherhood of all mankind, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.” The Gospel writers incorporated ancient Jewish duties to the poor, for instance, Hebrew scriptures called for the freeing of slaves in their seventh year of service (to be sent away with liberal provisions). Jews were enjoined to forgive debts after a certain time had passed. In light of these scriptural principles, it surely can be argued that any truly Christian politics should side with the poorest, first and foremost. This is powerfully expressed in the words of the world’s most famous proto-socialist, Jesus: “As ye do unto the least of these ye do unto me.” As I’ve argued, a “politics of grace” should replace our prevailing politics of greed. Yet, despite Jesus’s clear warnings, certain kinds of Christianity now venerate wealth (somehow seeking to thread a caravan of camels through the proverbial needle).   

                Another unexpected anti-greed thinker is Thomas Hobbes. He is now mostly remembered as an advocate for monarchy (a mighty Leviathan, to keep the peace) and as a theorist of individualism (he called human life outside of society a “war of all against all”). Nevertheless, in Williams’s assessment, this monarchist saw greed as “an unfortunate tendency in human nature.” Hobbes wrote that “no king can be rich nor glorious nor secure whose subjects are poor or contemptible or too weak through want” (the purchasing power of wage laborers dropped by about two-thirds in the decades before those words were written). Hobbes saw that poverty hastened sedition and rebellion. Like many Christian thinkers, he argued that robbery by the poor to secure life’s necessities was morally permissible whenever “the rich … fail in their duty of benevolence.” Such failures were a frequent risk since the rich tended to become vain, arrogant, selfish, lacking in self-control making them “unsuited … [to] a society of equitable law.” Thus, for Hobbes, greed was a collective disease that required political remedies.  

                The most startling of Williams’s anti-greed writers is Adam Smith. Those who have studied economics, or who have osmotically absorbed its ambient doctrines, typically admire Smith; however, those who only have a superficial exposure to Smith’s work might be shocked to discover that he strongly discouraged greed. He cataloged the “vices which are apt to arise from great prosperity.” Smith was a moral philosopher and found the “selfishness and rapacity” of the rich to be repulsive. Great wealth weakened the sympathetic bonds essential for a healthy commonwealth. Conversely, Smith praised those citizens who were “at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest.” He supported luxury taxes under which “the indolence and vanity of the rich is made to contribute in a very easy manner to the relief of the poor.”

                A similar cherry-picked pattern applies to John Stuart Mill. Although mostly known now as the patron saint of  liberalism, Mill, in his later work called himself a socialist. He lamented that “all the privileged and powerful classes have … used their power in the interests of their own selfishness.” He found the rich were often guilty of “gross immorality” or “downright knavery.” He called oligarchy “the monster evil.” Mill wrote that British capitalism was born of “conquest and violence.” (He was very well placed to know, since he developed his influential ideas about liberalism during the three decades he spent working for the ruthlessly rapacious and mass-murdering East India Company). Meanwhile the poor in England suffered conditions “more wretched than that of most of the tribes of savages who are known to us.” Despite the temptations of self-interest, Mill found that there were “multitudes in whom the motives of conscience and moral obligation have been … paramount.” Humans rather than being irredeemably selfish, were misled by “the whole course of institutions [which now] tends to foster” selfishness. Better institutions would facilitate our more pro-social inclinations. In Mill’s view “selfishness … is the principal cause of that which makes life unsatisfactory,” and large inequalities of wealth had “a pernicious effect on those whom they seem to benefit.” The corrosive psychological effects of greed meant that the rich in effect conspired against their own happiness. (For this reason, Williams concludes that it easily becomes counterproductive and indeed “irrational to be rich.”) In Mill’s worldview, justice requires that everyone has “an equal claim to all the means of happiness.”

As we will see, we are neither near that condition nor heading toward it.

The Rise of Greedocracy

Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville was a pivotal evangelist for the gospel of greed. In 1714, he published an influential scripture of selfishness called Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits. The Fable preached a values-inverting ethical alchemy that claimed to transmute the base metal of greed into the gold of collective good. Mandeville argued that when the rich indulged their vices it led to greater economic activity. Virtuous moderation did the opposite. Mandeville said that “society does not require virtue.” Instead “Man’s vilest and most hateful qualities are the most necessary … for the happiest and most flourishing of societies.”

Williams calls Mandeville’s alchemical argument a decisive break from the traditional Western opposition to selfishness. Until then, the virulent contagions of egoism and greed had typically been vigorously countered by cultural antibodies (such as republican or Christian virtues or by fears of next-worldly judgement). Mandeville’s open advocacy of vice shocked many, including the now much-misrepresented Adam Smith, who condemned “the system of Dr Mandeville” as “wholly pernicious.” Despite its appeal to self-centered elites as a justification of organized greed and vice, the demonic Dutchman’s logic was decidedly incomplete. Private vices can, of course, also cause public harm, and many public benefits have no relationship to private vices at all.

Heavyweights like Plato, Jesus, Hobbes, Smith, and Mill have failed to prevent Mandeville’s promotion of vice and valorization of greed from rising to rule us. Today’s political class largely adheres to a “greed is good” creed, if not overtly and directly, then tacitly through deference to mainstream economics (where unrealistic assumptions of cartoon self-maximizing behavior are mathematically convenient). Democratic politics is largely premised on ever-increasing consumption (our collective life is organized around a de facto “greatest good” of systemic greed).  

In a certain sense it is puzzling that greed-based economics remains so influential, given that the list of its failures is long. As a Wharton Business School analysis of the 2008 financial crisis concludes, the central fault was the economics “profession’s insistence on constructing models that, by design, disregard the key elements driving outcomes in real world markets.” The solution to this riddle lies in the fact that the flaws of mainstream economics haven’t failed to further enrich elites. This gist of this explanation is usefully caught in the spiciest Federal Reserve footnote ever, in which long-time Fed economist Jeremy Rudd wrote that “the primary role of mainstream economics… is to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order.”

Economic models typically presume that it is natural and rational and good to be greedy. But this exclusively selfish homo economicus paints a very poor picture of the rich variety of empirical human motives. Mill had a great way of expressing this: “He who has studied no science but political economy, if he attempt to apply his science to practice, will fail,” adding that economics focuses far too narrowly on the pursuit of wealth. “It makes an entire abstraction of every other human passion or motive.” The same point was well made earlier by philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury. To challenge the view that “interest governs the world,” the Earl said, “passion, humor, caprice, zeal, faction and a thousand other springs which are counter to self-interest have as considerable a part in” human behavior.

                The contest and confusion over whether greed is a dominant or essential human trait continues today. The curious thing about this is that it is of course an easily studied empirical question (not to mention that we each have much experience to draw on). Researchers in fields outside economics, for instance anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists have amassed mountainous evidence to show that most humans are not primarily greedy or exclusively selfish. Instead, psychologically healthy humans harbor deep-seated pro-social and other-oriented interests and inclinations. For instance, business scholar Yochai Benkler, in The Unselfish Gene, wrote that “in no society examined under controlled conditions have the majority of people consistently behaved selfishly.” As I’ve argued, self-centered individualism is “a WEIRD sampling error” of humanity. (The acronym stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.) Only 17% of humans live in WEIRD nations, 83% live in cultures that remain sociocentric (though this simple division is complicated since elites in sociocentric nations are increasingly trained to think in WEIRDo economic terms). Yet, even most WEIRDos have measurably “mixed motivations” beyond greed. Surely the psychological realism of fiction, TV, and film, in addition to much of your own everyday experience, all testify to our richly complex motives. To downplay the Earl of Shaftesbury’s “thousand other springs” grossly misrepresents and gravely disrespects our humanity.   

                Adam Smith in the opening lines of The Theory of Moral Sentiments offered a psychologically astute observation. “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it…. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.”

Are today’s “greed is good” fans worse than the ruffians and most hardened violators of Smith’s time? Sadly elites have built systems under which even the unselfish majority are captive to institutions that vigorously enforce generalized greed — many decent people are employed by capitalist corporations that are systematically sociopathic (the measured occurrence of sociopathic individuals is 2% to 3% of the US population). We dismiss the ample evidence that economic models, and the politics they drive, misrepresent empirical humans at our collective peril.

                Williams singles out public intellectual and psychologist Steven Pinker as a key current greed evangelist who has “praised wealth and inequality. in his billionaire-beloved book Enlightenment Now, Pinker dismissed those “who unfairly demonize” the rich as simply suffering from “spiteful envy.” Williams counters that view as an act of wishful thinking. It makes little sense to discount traits that are well-documented by those who Williams calls the “most insightful moral psychologists” in the Western tradition. Pinker’s dismissal of this fact is particularly odd for a scientist who supposedly studies empirical human psychology (it’s like telling a diabetic to wish away their faulty and inconvenient insulin response). For more background on Pinker’s dodgy greed-is-good optimism see here. However inconvenient for the rich and their courtier defenders, envy is on the list of anthropological “human universals” (traits detected in every known culture). As each of the thinkers Williams covers knew, envy’s political effects can’t be wished away or ignored.

Correcting and Extending Williams’ Critique

In his concluding chapter, Williams says that greedophiles like Pinker “severely constrain the moral imagination.” Williams is correct but he uncritically repeats a central defense that greedophiles love to use, which is that greed in markets has “lifted 90 to 95% of the world’s population out of absolute poverty.” This kind of cheerleading for greed has some narrow diversionary truth in it. It is true in a deviously precise way that is designed to mislead. It is far from the whole relevant truth and thus would flagrantly fail the courtroom standard of testimony. That elite-excusing talking point deflects attention from an ugly and immensely immoral misallocation of resources. Using language like “win win” greedophiles hide the relative size and rates of gain and distract from overall warped material and moral priorities. As I’ll show, if alleviating poverty was a goal that greedophiles really sought, rather than a fig-leaf rationalization, redistribution would do a better, faster, and more decent job of advancing human flourishing—domestically and internationally.  

Consider this University of California, Berkeley data on US incomes per adult since the 1980s.

Over the past four decades, the average individual income for the bottom 50% went from $16,200 to $18,400. The top 10% from $169,700 to $427,500. And the top 1% from $516,000 to $1,900,000. The individual gains for each group were about $2,200, $260,000, and $1,300,000 respectively. So, the bottom half got about 1/590th of the top 1%’s increase, and about 1/118th of what the top 10% obtained. Redistributing a little more from the top could have greatly reduced severe economic stresses among the less well-off, which have contributed to an epidemic of “deaths of despair.” In 2022 over 200,000 such deaths occurred (only heart disease and cancer were greater medical causes of death). And under dire Dickensian conditions, poor American men live on average fifteen fewer years than the rich. Redirecting just 1/10th of the income gains of the top 10% could have tripled the gains in the bottom half. Specifically, bottom half increases could have gone from $2,200 to $7,400, while top decile gains would have gone from $260,000 to $234,000.  

Even this modest amount of redistribution could have altered a decades-long economic trajectory that contributed to Donald Trump’s victories. But Trump has at least been open about his motives. In 2016 he said, “My whole life I’ve been greedy…. Now I want to be greedy for the United States.” Leading neoliberal columnist Ezra Klein called that “a perfect distillation of Trump’s appeal…. He’s turned a suite of noxious qualities into a powerful presidential campaign.” But the core ingredients of neoliberal politics are greed and markets, a recipe Klein himself, along with most of the political class, routinely promotes. Trump is the “ultimate triumph of neoliberalism,” as Brank Milanovic, a noted scholar of poverty, has insightfully pointed out. In this perverse sense, Trump is actually being more honest than most of our political class. He does not hide behind evasive niceties that slicker neoliberals use to cover for their own noxious inclinations.

Internationally, the picture is bleaker. Under our present global greed-based systems, which Pinker, and Klein, lionize, the GDP-per-capita gap between rich and poor nations is not shrinking. As you can see the lines in this chart show no sign of converging.

Only 17% of humanity is above a typical rich nation’s poverty line, as Max Rosner, director of Our World in Data, has written (he uses $30 a day, or $11,000 a year). He’s morally correct to apply the same standard that we use for ourselves to the global poor, instead of the more typical extreme poverty level of $2.15 per day (or $785 per year). Putting all of us on an equal footing, as the notion of equal human dignity demands, reveals that around 7 billion people, or about five of every six humans, live in poverty today. And most of those people live very far below our poverty line. The current global median income is around $8 per day, which means that four billion people live on less than 1/4 of our poverty line. These gigantic financial disparities impose vast ramifying suffering. Roughly 4.5 billion humans lack basic healthcare services, around 3.5 billion people lack reliable electricity,” Roughly “one billion children worldwide experience multidimensional poverty, meaning they lack necessities like food, water, shelter.” In 2022 a third of a billion children lived in extreme poverty, again that’s $2.15 per day—less than many of us spend on a single cup of coffee. Overall, about 22% of children (148 million) are permanently stunted by malnutrition (in twenty-eight nations, stunting rates are even higher ranging from 30% to 54%).

Meanwhile, greed cheerleaders typically ignore the alarm raised by Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty. He said that it will take “two hundred years to eradicate poverty under the $5 a day line.” So, under our current “greed is good” global market system it will take eight generations to get the global poor up to just an eighth of the American poverty line. At the current “celebrated” rate of “improvement,” for the global poor to actually catch up to today’s American poverty line will take about 16 centuries or 60 generations. Yet during every year of those generations and centuries, vastly more resources will go to already well-resourced elites (helping them to buy nicer wines and fancier cars) while, as we’ll see, only a tiny fraction trickles down to address the grotesque injustices and harms of global poverty. Greed cheerleaders desperately want to divert attention from the fact that the standard of living enjoyed by most who are fortunate enough to live in rich nations is built on a vast international infrastructure of avoidable suffering. Plus, the distribution of these burdens largely follows a little-discussed racial resource hierarchy across the “global color line” as described here. This is how George Orwell made this point: “the ordinary man [in England] spends more on cigarettes than an Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood.” He also wrote that, “Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream.”

To expose the extent of this “evil state of affairs” today, here’s a chart comparing global annual income by decile in 2017 annotated with gains in the prior decade (using World Inequality Lab data).

The first thing to notice is the relative sizes of the leftmost and rightmost bars. The average bottom decile income of $206 is barely visible compared to the top decile earnings of $138,000. For context, most people reading this are in tallest bar, the global top decile begins at an annual income of about $60,000. In the decade analyzed people in the top decile grabbed 24% of the larger income pie while people in the bottom decile got only 0.16%. So, under today’s greed-driven regime, the world’s poorest people secure gains of only around 1/220th those of the top decile. The dollar figures are an average annual income gain of $1,300 for the top bar versus just $6 per year for those in the bottom bar.

I argue that the relative size of these top vs bottom gains clearly shows the need for a different approach, one that isn’t built to mainly benefit the already wealthy. For instance, if just one-tenth of gains going to the top-decile could be redistributed, people in the bottom decile would secure $130 per year. That $130 would help the global them escape poverty more than twenty times faster than by the current top-skewed system. Many readers might raise the issue of the practicalities of global distribution, which I don’t want in any way to minimize or dismiss, but my intent here is to show what could be done if we don’t limit ourselves to today’s supposedly “politically realistic” approaches (broadly speaking the phrase political realism is a synonym for the interests of the rich). To achieve those much greater gains in human flourishing, we in the global elite would only need to skip two or three fancy bottles of wine or miss out on one restaurant visit. Does the widely proclaimed support for equal human dignity not warrant incurring even such trifling costs?

Four Rickety Rationalizations

Let’s examine four influential but tricky talking points that greedophiles use. First, they argue that the best way to alleviate poverty is a combination of growing the pie and “trickle-down economics.” Proponents of this view cherry pick their metrics, while ignoring the kind of data shown above. This argument is a tiny fig leaf designed to hide the gargantuan and grotesque disparities. As shown above, under present trickle-down rates only $1 out of every $630 in global income gains reaches the poorest decile (again, notice that the top decile grabs $220 of that $630). The often paraded talking point that global markets are doing a good job of alleviating poverty must be forcefully countered. Far from being a situation that we should celebrate, our present approach mocks the idea of equal human dignity. Decency demands we find much faster ways to further the cause of human flourishing.

The second iffy talking point myth is based on the idea that high taxes on high earners will harm everyone by lowering economic growth. As a matter of historical record this view is false. As this chart shows, in the 1950s, America’s elite faced a tax rate of up to 90%, and growth rates were higher then than after Reagan’s cut to 40%.

But let’s drill further into the conveniently asymmetric logic. If we accept that the wealthy are insatiably greedy surely, they will strive to at least maintain if not to enhance their relative status under higher taxes. To retain their prestigious lifestyles (involving paying private school fees, or paying for shiny emotional-support Ferraris) while meeting higher tax obligations, wouldn’t they have incentives to work more? Free-market economists apply this argument to people lower down the income scale. Why would a different logic apply to the rich (especially given that economists presume that greed is natural)? Yet somehow, we are told that the greedy elite will decide to work less if they have to pay higher tax rates and that would be bad for the overall economy. That is neither true historically, nor is it plausible. 

These first two rickety talking points raise the question of whether today’s titans of industry are weaker or less capable than those of the past? Plus, even if their insatiable greed somehow did mysteriously disappear or became suddenly resistible, and these economic heroes did decide to work less, most of what they do isn’t unique. Very few are Einstein-like unique geniuses. In another instance of asymmetric logic, economists love to say there are no $20 bills lying around on sidewalks. Meaning that all evident gains are quickly gobbled up. Well, opportunities arising from lazy elites deciding to work less will be taken up by other more ambitious aspiring people. Overall, the rich are as replaceable as you or I.

The third tall-tale talking point asserts that we need greed for innovation. Well, even a moments reflection reveals that in many fields, remarkable innovations are in fact typically achieved with relatively little financial reward. Many people work in creative fields such as music and the arts. Most academics (including many greed-worshipping economists!) and scientists do amazing creative research for relatively low pay. One timely example is Dr. Katalin Kariko, the scientist whose work enabled the technology behind Covid-19 vaccine advances. In the decades of her crucial research she never earned more than $60,000 a year. In diabolically stark contrast several executives who subsequently leveraged her innovation during the recent pandemic have become billionaires. And let’s not forget these greed-driven ghouls weren’t serving humanity’s greater good, they presided over the horrific fiasco of “vaccine apartheid,” in which profits were put ahead of saving lives in poor nations. The fact is most true innovators are not mainly driven by greed (and those sociopaths who are should be prevented from holding positions where they can commit mass murder by markets, by putting profit over saving lives). As Silicon Valley insider Tim O’Reilly stated,  “The notion that entrepreneurs will stop innovating if they aren’t rewarded with billions is a pernicious fantasy.”

                The fourth talking point myth promoted by greedophiles is that leaders need astronomical incentives to shoulder enormous responsibilities. Here I call upon award-winning novelist and critic Kim Stanley Robinson who has argued that no civilian executive shoulders more responsibility than the US Navy admirals who oversee nuclear-armed vessels. These leaders hold the fate of the world in their hands, but they are paid no more than eight times what the lowest navy recruit earns (the Navy’s pay ranges from $25,000 to $200,000 per year). By contrast, America’s current CEO-to-worker pay ratio is around 300 to 1. (In the 1960s it was 21 to 1). So, a typical American worker would take “three centuries to make as much as their CEO makes in a year.”  It is also enlightening to compare against other advanced economies. That ratio in Japan is about 12 to 1 and in Norway its 20 to 1. In Robinson’s assessment US-style differentials beget “cynicism, defeatism, a feeling of alienation from the whole project of civilization,” whereas the Navy has a “real esprit de corps.”

It should be apparent by now that citizens have far greater reasons to trust leaders who are loyal to something beyond their own greed. As Williams’ book shows, this is not a new truth. The fear of self-serving and disloyal leaders harming collective interests was central to Plato’s logic. Two millennia later America’s Founders shared these fears of mercenary motives: an “avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth” (Federalist 75). Other-serving loyalty should be a litmus test for leadership.

Serving the God of Greed?

The title of this article implies that in effect greed operates as our god. That’s a big claim, but fortunately to justify it I can call upon the testimony of a supremely apt expert witness, a specialist in theology who can clearly see the competition that his God is up against. Pope Francis has attacked “a deified market” and the “sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.” He has decried the “idolatry, of having sold one’s soul to the god of money.” His Holiness has called out the ugly “economic theology” that creates an “economy that kills.” He knows that many of the 1.4 billion Catholics in his flock face dueling deities.

As noted above, the global economic system encourages most of us, even if unwittingly, or unwillingly, to serve an unholy trinity: greed, free markets, and self-centeredness. Regarding that last element, consider sociologist James Davison Hunter who describes a broad shift from a "concern for salvation to one of self-realization" in his recent book Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis. For more on the history of this “cult of the self” see here.

In a sense capitalist greed has become the most powerful religion ever to arise. It’s dominance among elites means it shapes the lives of even most of those who don’t believe in its god. As I’ve written, market providence has replaced the inscrutable divine kind.

                Regardless of our religious orientations, or lack thereof, we need to recognize that our current situation is if not an “evil state of affairs,” then at least an enormously inhumane quagmire. We must work to correct its most egregious faults as quickly as possible. Williams shows that thinkers in the Western tradition have long documented the copious political and moral problems arising from a greed-feeding culture. We can’t afford to let this shameful systemic worship of the god of greed to continue.