I could write a whole lot of words, but suffice it to say that, as someone who's never had belief, but who's always felt a need to do good work for its own sake (or out of a sense that doing good work serves a higher purpose than whatever immediate material benefits result), this resonated with me. I've long felt something was missing from the way we as a society go about our business, and that it was a moral rather than a technical lack.
I know of at least one very secular, yet very resonant, articulation of this moral lack. That is Richard Feynman's coda to his minority report on the Challenger disaster: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
The desire to feel "part of something larger than oneself" is a cliche, but Feynman (and Sagan, and other secular scientists who truly internalized viscerally what they had learned about the universe) clearly attained that feeling, and it formed them morally as well as intellectually.
I hadn't even thought of that quote, even though I've always felt strongly about Challenger and other similar disasters, and admired Feynman. I've actually got an image of the shuttle just beginning to detonate on the back wall of my cubicle, with Diane Vaughan's definition of "normalization of deviance" as the caption.
In a similar vein, the docudrama Chernobyl* has the line "Every lie we tell incurs debt to the truth. Sooner or later this debt is paid".
*which I highly recommend--I was expecting it to be anti-nuclear, but it's really not, and the technical accuracy is top-notch for something so approachable for the layperson. The last courtroom scene alone is a great primer for what happened.
Reading this helped me understand why I feel the work I do at my job is so important, despite the fact that I am a skilled laborer and not a great thinker or philanthropist. It is not only because of the impact my work has on others, but also because doing the job as best I can feels right in an irrational, transcendent way.
I used to be more cynical and thought I was exploited by a cruel capitalist society. I thought my desire to be productive was a puritan work ethic impressed on me to make me a better cog in the machine. Now, there may be truth to these notions, too. But after many years of holding down various jobs, I have to admit that it feels good to perform my work as best I can. I would note that taking care of my coworkers and clientele is an especially important component of doing the work well, it isn't just about the final product.
If I'd spent another minute reading the comments before adding my own, I'd have seen that you'd written my thoughts almost verbatim here (and better than I ended up expressing them).
I'm not religious, but I've always felt deeply sympathetic to the devoutly religious, and it's hard not to feel like we've lost something.
I'm glad you wrote out your comment. I'm also not inclined to the religion I was raised in but have felt an urge for some higher purpose. I know we're not alone in feeling this way and I hope to connect more with people around me about these thoughts and feelings.
Amen to that! No amount of professing faith can come close to the blessing of God’s grace. And I appreciate the reminder of my brokenness and the insufficiency of superficial calls to faith !
Section 5, though relies on an ineffective trope. Looking at SBF's mode of failure as unique and directly correlated to EA is extreme cherry-picking. Rather than being an example of a failure you see repeatedly across EA, it's rather an example of the primary pattern for failure that spans many moral systems. How is his mode of failure different from Madoff? A lack of hubris does not require EA, and enables trusted individuals across a wide set of belief systems to abuse that trust.
Section 6 is similarly confusing in the blindness to great people outside religion and the bad people inside. There's no uniformity that fails to span this divide. You can only arrive at the type of exclusivity Section 6 argues for by cherry-picking and application of a no-true-scotsman approach.
This is a lovely piece, and full of wisdom, but it is yet another contemporary polemic arguing for godliness without arguing for god. Like the innumerable contemporary conversion narratives that cite a desire for meaning, or community, or continuity, but never mention Truth. Like the countless contemporary churches that urge potential congregants to "belong before you believe". This is backwards. I would be wary of a man who became a Quaker because he wanted to be better at business, just as I would be wary of a man who became a Baptist because he liked the coffee cake and conversation. A faith rooted in the attributes of belonging will always be fragile, and always open to the challenge of "why this faith and not another", especially if that other faith also has coffee cake. And it is the same for faith manifest in business. It is not just secular constraints, as you put it, that "face the question: why maintain this when it is costly?". It is also faith, every day. And a faith that is held foremost because it is convenient, inherited, materially beneficial, in other words a faith that is chosen, a faith that is contingent, will be equally vulnerable to that question. It will be a tool for personal advancement, a justification for crusades, a mechanism for exclusion, but never what it should be. And so in arguing for godliness, you must first argue for god, or the project is lost before it begins, and only produces paper Christians.
Unfortunately, one of the over capitalized business categories today and in the future will be the church itself. I’m with Dorothy on their failure, and believe it’s because they themselves became businesses exploiting the customer.
I don't understand in these narratives what exactly a work "mattering" or being "godly" is suppose to mean. I can think to cache it out in a few ways
(1) It matters in an actual sense of, e.g. for the religious there really is a god and they really do like it when you do good work, and that's why you should do it. Or more secularly, there is actually a moral order to the universe that produces an imperative towards this sort of work.
(2) It is purely a description of your emotional valence to the work, saying a work "matters" or is "godly" is saying it tends to elicit a particular emotional state in the worker, nothing more.
(3) 1 but self deceptively, e.g. you ought to convince yourself that there is some greater cosmic sense in which your work is morally necessitated, having this belief is beneficial to you for instrumental reasons, so you should work hard to inculcate it in yourself regardless of its truth.
I always feel like part of the time people talk about godliness like pascal's wager (make yourself believe in a cosmic imperative that doesn't really exist for instrumental reasons, the quaker anecdote seems like a clear example of this, where a religious conviction solves a commitment problem), other times like it is some ultimate truth of reality, other times like it is a descriptive property of a cognitive process.
I believe the intended meaning is (3), but it is shrouded and complicated because of the obvious need to conceal this meaning, because believing in 3 is self-undermining.
Good comment, but pet peeve of mine: “for the religious there really is a god and they really do like it when you do good work,”—to whom does “they” refer? The religious, or god? Are you saying “for the religious there really is a god and the religious like it when you do good work,” or “god really likes it”? The way you have written it is ambiguous; in fact because “the religious” is a group and god is singular, grammatically they must refer to the religious. Context indicates otherwise of course.
If you want to use “they” as a singular sex-neutral pronoun, fine, but you still have to be clear.
What a thorough and interesting article. As a Quaker (actually, a Cadbury great great grandaughter) this has clarified so much about economic theory I could never refine. I feel a little at peace. Thank you.
A gorgeous essay and something that the modern U.S. fails to contend with properly. Profits and calculations are invariably and utterly inadequate as an answer to the question of "why".
Anthropic is a good counterexample. I suspect the current culture will not last too long. But some companies like Patagonia seem to be retaining a unique culture over the long run.
My takeaway is that this is a refined, modern way of saying you can’t serve God and Mammon.
Serving God - working with honesty, moral fear, dignity and craft and reverence, with the quality and integrity of the output as the means of worship.
Serving money - working for making a profit. If profitable, you can and should ignore any moral objections; by virtue of making profit, you are justified. If you still feel bad about your profit producing actions, participate in charitable contribution. Don’t listen to an inner moral compass, that often gets in the way of profits. Instead learn to ignore it and focus on making money.
Behind the question, “why do we work”, you can answer it in two ways. To honor and worship wealth or to honor and worship God.
Thank you for this. Among other things, you have enlightened us as to the very heart of what has made the American republic the standard for human progress against which all other nations are judged.
As David Hackett Fischer documented in Albion's Seed, the Quakers are a vital part of our American constitution. I note that Quaker Thomas Paine was quoted prominently in Chief Justice Roberts annual report on the Federal Judiciary https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2025year-endreport.pdf
The concept behind no taxation without consent of the governed is also rooted in Quaker objections to taxes being paid for military action. Is that not a vital part of the history behind paragraph 19 of the Declaration of Independence, cited yesterday by the Chief Justice in the Supreme Court's decision overruling the Trump tariffs?
Abraham Lincoln was of Quaker descent. Was he not honoring the strain of Quaker thought embodied in our constitution when he observed in 1854: "[N]o man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle---the sheet anchor of American republicanism."
In the end, this is all about trust, isn't it? It's not just about higher bandwidth communication. Trust also *eliminates* the verification cost of figuring out whether someone's model of the world matches yours. Trust means *negative* transaction costs with each transaction.
Regarding Adam Smith. He famously misunderstood the potential social benefit of corporations — formal or (as the Quakers?) informal. He understood the importance of pairwise trust, but never fully recognized what it might look like at the next abstraction layer, or the layer above that.
SBF saw only additive, not multiplicative noise. The scalability of impersonal trust is a multiplicative phenomenon. Had he optimized for the geometric rather than the arithmetic mean, we'd still have him contributing.
Quaker society is wonderful archetype for for divergence maintenance:
I hope we can optimize for the scalable trust manifest in Quaker societies moving forward. The paradoxical benefit of AI threatening to annihilate divergence is that it has also made us more aware of its social and emotional benefits.
This is not about politics or economics. It's about whose reality we get to live in.
I don't think I have ever read anything like this.
I could write a whole lot of words, but suffice it to say that, as someone who's never had belief, but who's always felt a need to do good work for its own sake (or out of a sense that doing good work serves a higher purpose than whatever immediate material benefits result), this resonated with me. I've long felt something was missing from the way we as a society go about our business, and that it was a moral rather than a technical lack.
I know of at least one very secular, yet very resonant, articulation of this moral lack. That is Richard Feynman's coda to his minority report on the Challenger disaster: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
The desire to feel "part of something larger than oneself" is a cliche, but Feynman (and Sagan, and other secular scientists who truly internalized viscerally what they had learned about the universe) clearly attained that feeling, and it formed them morally as well as intellectually.
I hadn't even thought of that quote, even though I've always felt strongly about Challenger and other similar disasters, and admired Feynman. I've actually got an image of the shuttle just beginning to detonate on the back wall of my cubicle, with Diane Vaughan's definition of "normalization of deviance" as the caption.
In a similar vein, the docudrama Chernobyl* has the line "Every lie we tell incurs debt to the truth. Sooner or later this debt is paid".
*which I highly recommend--I was expecting it to be anti-nuclear, but it's really not, and the technical accuracy is top-notch for something so approachable for the layperson. The last courtroom scene alone is a great primer for what happened.
Reading this helped me understand why I feel the work I do at my job is so important, despite the fact that I am a skilled laborer and not a great thinker or philanthropist. It is not only because of the impact my work has on others, but also because doing the job as best I can feels right in an irrational, transcendent way.
I used to be more cynical and thought I was exploited by a cruel capitalist society. I thought my desire to be productive was a puritan work ethic impressed on me to make me a better cog in the machine. Now, there may be truth to these notions, too. But after many years of holding down various jobs, I have to admit that it feels good to perform my work as best I can. I would note that taking care of my coworkers and clientele is an especially important component of doing the work well, it isn't just about the final product.
If I'd spent another minute reading the comments before adding my own, I'd have seen that you'd written my thoughts almost verbatim here (and better than I ended up expressing them).
I'm not religious, but I've always felt deeply sympathetic to the devoutly religious, and it's hard not to feel like we've lost something.
I'm glad you wrote out your comment. I'm also not inclined to the religion I was raised in but have felt an urge for some higher purpose. I know we're not alone in feeling this way and I hope to connect more with people around me about these thoughts and feelings.
Yall boys need to come on over to fatih. You're almost there. God bless!
Nah, we're here already. You, my friend, should find a mirror and gaze deeply in it. Your outward actions do not faith make, you actor.
Amen to that! No amount of professing faith can come close to the blessing of God’s grace. And I appreciate the reminder of my brokenness and the insufficiency of superficial calls to faith !
I really appreciated sections 1 to 4.
Section 5, though relies on an ineffective trope. Looking at SBF's mode of failure as unique and directly correlated to EA is extreme cherry-picking. Rather than being an example of a failure you see repeatedly across EA, it's rather an example of the primary pattern for failure that spans many moral systems. How is his mode of failure different from Madoff? A lack of hubris does not require EA, and enables trusted individuals across a wide set of belief systems to abuse that trust.
Section 6 is similarly confusing in the blindness to great people outside religion and the bad people inside. There's no uniformity that fails to span this divide. You can only arrive at the type of exclusivity Section 6 argues for by cherry-picking and application of a no-true-scotsman approach.
Great article. I stopped going to meeting a couple of decades ago, when it seemed that the Society of Friends was just a poorly funded Democratic PAC.
This is a lovely piece, and full of wisdom, but it is yet another contemporary polemic arguing for godliness without arguing for god. Like the innumerable contemporary conversion narratives that cite a desire for meaning, or community, or continuity, but never mention Truth. Like the countless contemporary churches that urge potential congregants to "belong before you believe". This is backwards. I would be wary of a man who became a Quaker because he wanted to be better at business, just as I would be wary of a man who became a Baptist because he liked the coffee cake and conversation. A faith rooted in the attributes of belonging will always be fragile, and always open to the challenge of "why this faith and not another", especially if that other faith also has coffee cake. And it is the same for faith manifest in business. It is not just secular constraints, as you put it, that "face the question: why maintain this when it is costly?". It is also faith, every day. And a faith that is held foremost because it is convenient, inherited, materially beneficial, in other words a faith that is chosen, a faith that is contingent, will be equally vulnerable to that question. It will be a tool for personal advancement, a justification for crusades, a mechanism for exclusion, but never what it should be. And so in arguing for godliness, you must first argue for god, or the project is lost before it begins, and only produces paper Christians.
Absolutely sublime piece. Thanks so much for writing and sharing this.
My man you are on a run.
Keep doing your thing.
Thank you
Unfortunately, one of the over capitalized business categories today and in the future will be the church itself. I’m with Dorothy on their failure, and believe it’s because they themselves became businesses exploiting the customer.
I don't understand in these narratives what exactly a work "mattering" or being "godly" is suppose to mean. I can think to cache it out in a few ways
(1) It matters in an actual sense of, e.g. for the religious there really is a god and they really do like it when you do good work, and that's why you should do it. Or more secularly, there is actually a moral order to the universe that produces an imperative towards this sort of work.
(2) It is purely a description of your emotional valence to the work, saying a work "matters" or is "godly" is saying it tends to elicit a particular emotional state in the worker, nothing more.
(3) 1 but self deceptively, e.g. you ought to convince yourself that there is some greater cosmic sense in which your work is morally necessitated, having this belief is beneficial to you for instrumental reasons, so you should work hard to inculcate it in yourself regardless of its truth.
I always feel like part of the time people talk about godliness like pascal's wager (make yourself believe in a cosmic imperative that doesn't really exist for instrumental reasons, the quaker anecdote seems like a clear example of this, where a religious conviction solves a commitment problem), other times like it is some ultimate truth of reality, other times like it is a descriptive property of a cognitive process.
I believe the intended meaning is (3), but it is shrouded and complicated because of the obvious need to conceal this meaning, because believing in 3 is self-undermining.
Good comment, but pet peeve of mine: “for the religious there really is a god and they really do like it when you do good work,”—to whom does “they” refer? The religious, or god? Are you saying “for the religious there really is a god and the religious like it when you do good work,” or “god really likes it”? The way you have written it is ambiguous; in fact because “the religious” is a group and god is singular, grammatically they must refer to the religious. Context indicates otherwise of course.
If you want to use “they” as a singular sex-neutral pronoun, fine, but you still have to be clear.
What a thorough and interesting article. As a Quaker (actually, a Cadbury great great grandaughter) this has clarified so much about economic theory I could never refine. I feel a little at peace. Thank you.
A gorgeous essay and something that the modern U.S. fails to contend with properly. Profits and calculations are invariably and utterly inadequate as an answer to the question of "why".
Then what is your explanation of Anthropic's culture? Seems like the successful version of a secular constraint set
Anthropic is a good counterexample. I suspect the current culture will not last too long. But some companies like Patagonia seem to be retaining a unique culture over the long run.
the best reading of this whole week. and I've did plenty. thank you, will.
My takeaway is that this is a refined, modern way of saying you can’t serve God and Mammon.
Serving God - working with honesty, moral fear, dignity and craft and reverence, with the quality and integrity of the output as the means of worship.
Serving money - working for making a profit. If profitable, you can and should ignore any moral objections; by virtue of making profit, you are justified. If you still feel bad about your profit producing actions, participate in charitable contribution. Don’t listen to an inner moral compass, that often gets in the way of profits. Instead learn to ignore it and focus on making money.
Behind the question, “why do we work”, you can answer it in two ways. To honor and worship wealth or to honor and worship God.
Thank you for this. Among other things, you have enlightened us as to the very heart of what has made the American republic the standard for human progress against which all other nations are judged.
As David Hackett Fischer documented in Albion's Seed, the Quakers are a vital part of our American constitution. I note that Quaker Thomas Paine was quoted prominently in Chief Justice Roberts annual report on the Federal Judiciary https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2025year-endreport.pdf
The concept behind no taxation without consent of the governed is also rooted in Quaker objections to taxes being paid for military action. Is that not a vital part of the history behind paragraph 19 of the Declaration of Independence, cited yesterday by the Chief Justice in the Supreme Court's decision overruling the Trump tariffs?
Abraham Lincoln was of Quaker descent. Was he not honoring the strain of Quaker thought embodied in our constitution when he observed in 1854: "[N]o man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle---the sheet anchor of American republicanism."
In the end, this is all about trust, isn't it? It's not just about higher bandwidth communication. Trust also *eliminates* the verification cost of figuring out whether someone's model of the world matches yours. Trust means *negative* transaction costs with each transaction.
Regarding Adam Smith. He famously misunderstood the potential social benefit of corporations — formal or (as the Quakers?) informal. He understood the importance of pairwise trust, but never fully recognized what it might look like at the next abstraction layer, or the layer above that.
SBF saw only additive, not multiplicative noise. The scalability of impersonal trust is a multiplicative phenomenon. Had he optimized for the geometric rather than the arithmetic mean, we'd still have him contributing.
Quaker society is wonderful archetype for for divergence maintenance:
https://www.symmetrybroken.com/maintaining-divergence/
I hope we can optimize for the scalable trust manifest in Quaker societies moving forward. The paradoxical benefit of AI threatening to annihilate divergence is that it has also made us more aware of its social and emotional benefits.
This is not about politics or economics. It's about whose reality we get to live in.