Altruism is better than capitalism

Over the last few weeks I’ve struggled to describe the change I’m advocating for. I’ve called it “this idea” and “the change I’m advocating for.” Then I realized there’s a word for what I’ve been describing.

It’s altruism.

There are many competing visions of altruism. For some, it means giving to charities. For others it’s giving back to the community in non-monetary ways. Some want to measure it and others help us to see that measuring only tells part of the story.

In the Gospel of St. Luke, there’s a parable given by Jesus Christ about the steward of “a certain rich man.” Hearing that the steward had been neglecting his stewardship, the rich man called the steward to him and commanded him, “give an account of thy stewardship.”

The rest of the story is meaningful on many levels, but the idea of giving an account of our stewardship is meaningful here.

Many of us give sincere donations of our time and money to charities and other philanthropic institutions. And rightly so; there’s a great deal of poverty, ignorance, and unfairness in the world that these institutions do a lot to ameliorate.

But we also tend to get caught up in our daily lives. We divide the day into minutes and hours, dropping our time into neat little quadrants that allow us to be highly effective people but not always highly effective neighbors or friends or family. And so we tend to compartmentalize our caring because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to care all the time.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

In the U.S., a person who has a 40-year long career will devote somewhere in the neighborhood of 80,000 hours to that career; about 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, for 40 years.

What if, when we built the businesses that will consume those 80,000 hours, we learned to say, “This much is enough.” Enough to be comfortable. Enough to provide the best service. Enough to create quality. And enough to give us time to care whether others have enough.

So much of capitalism is powerful and good. But there is more power and more good to be found and to be shared. I believe that at the end of our lives we’ll be called before Jesus Christ to give an accounting of our stewardships, an accounting that will include how well we spent our time in the service of others. But whatever the ultimate outcome of this life, I have no doubt that having spent it trying to improve the lives of others will be accounted a stewardship well cared-for.