CCCV – Corporate Proverbs

I have accumulated a list of proverbs over the course of my current employment. There are six: three negative (examples of what not to do) and three positive (examples of what to do). I work for a very large employer and when an organization gets to be a certain size it ceases to be a scrappy profit hunter and starts to become a slow, ungainly quasi-government. The negative proverbs are borne out of cynicism and repeated disappointments, the positive proverbs are borne out of lessons learned the hard way. In my future career, I intend to make use of these proverbs to explain my management philosophy if/when I am in a position to have to explain that. Without further ado about nothing:

1) “More of the Same Forever“
Periodically my company announces sweeping new reforms and the end result is a different brand name on the same thing. The best example of this is our annual performance evaluation. When I first started at this organization, annual evaluations were a five page questionnaire our managers filled out, and annual increases were more or less unrelated to the results from that. They rolled out a new system which promised to allow merit-based pay scales and detailed conversations with our bosses about our performance and our goals. The result has been that it is essentially the same process with different corporate graphics to advertise it to us. Instead of merit-pay, we are shoe-horned into a bell curve and the top 5% get maybe a 1% higher annual increase, and the bottom 5% get maybe a 1% lower annual increase, and for the 95% of us in the middle, we get what we’re given. To express our resignation to this process, my colleagues and I started saying “More of the same forever”. Now we use this predictively for future initiatives and changes in leadership. The remedy for this is a culture of transparency. Leaders should not promise what they are not giving; employees should be able to ask for what they want. Leaders don’t necessarily have to give it to them, but it is helpful to know what people need and desire. If a leader starts to hear the same thing over and over again from different people, they will start looking for actual solutions.

2) “Too Big To Succeed”
As a large, slow, ungainly quasi-government, there are a lot of big picture strategic shifts under way at any point. There are also a lot–a LOT–of micro-scale problems. What ends up happening is the Macro-problems get a lot of attention while the micro-problems get ignored. This creates a situation where, by analogy, the external facade of a building can be resurfaced multiple times but the moldering carpets and frayed wires of the interior don’t get updated. The remedy for this is a corporate culture where line managers are broadly able to address problems that they see, and can discuss them with higher managers and advocate for their teams. Managers and Executives that are too far removed from the front lines genuinely have no idea what is going on, and it is not really their fault. Communication needs to happen candidly up the chain for them to know, if the leaders aren’t going to intentionally come down the chain to see for themselves.

3) “Consistency over Accuracy“
I’ve written about this before. The most hilarious example was when I reported financial results that were an order of magnitude higher than they normally are. My boss messages me and says “This line item is too high“. It’s funny because the number was not too high, it was the correct number. What really happened is that it was unusually high, relative the rest of the year. It is OK to ask about numbers–in fact, when I was an auditor, I was trained to look for things that stick out and seem unusual. But the starting point can’t be that it is wrong–it must be that the explanation is unknown, and allow that maybe the explanation is that it is wrong.

4) “Everything is Fixable“
In accounting, nothing is final until the end of the fiscal year. This means on January 1 you can make a mistake, and until December 31 of that year, you can fix that mistake for financial reports. It is not good to let a mistake sit on the books for a year, but it isn’t irreparable. Everything is fixable, and every error identified ought to bear this in mind. The source of the error is the most important part, because you want to prevent future errors of the same variety. It is good to approach work with the attitude that everything is fixable because it builds trust with employees and allows them to feel comfortable sharing their errors. A punitive corporate culture encourages people to hide their errors, and so the errors are compounded and become entrenched. An emphasis on Consistency, as noted in #3, will encourage you to repeat the error in the future so the error establishes a trend and no one will notice. This is all bad for business and careless accounting: Fix the problems when you find them, and understand that everything is fixable.

5) “Going Outside the Process is How Things Break”
Processes exist for a reason, especially in large, slow, ungainly quasi-governmental organizations. The processes help ensure that every step has been followed and the output you receive today will be the same as the output you received yesterday. When working fast, when trying to make shortcuts, there is a temptation to go outside the process. This can be OK if you discover a new efficiency–then the process should be changed and documented. This is not OK if it creates errors or opportunities for errors for future employees who fill your position after you leave. Following processes helps provide predictability and regularity. The absence of processes creates unpredictability and instability. Stabilize your team by understanding the processes as quickly as possible.

6) “Take Ownership of Your Work”
The employee who says “This work is mine and it is my responsibility to do it well” will succeed for more often than the employee who makes excuses or passes blame. Likewise for leaders. The leaders who cannot make a decision for fear of taking a stand are weak and ineffective and slow down an organization and contribute to it’s quasi-governmental behavior. Leaders who take initiative and seek to get the most out of their team will be successful and see stronger results. This is all a corporate culture thing. A punitive workplace will lead to blame and excuses and doing everything you can to be the hapless cog in the machine which was fed a bad input. It is far better to enable employees to use their brains, to look at the data they are working with, and to ask questions of the people they receive data from and those people they send data to. Leaders who view their team as their personal responsibility and not a collection of inputs to be managed will likewise see better results.

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This has been: Corporate proverbs. I hope you enjoyed!

AMDG

CCCI – Ethnicity vs. Nationality

I had a conversation with a colleague about something and some subjects related to it. My colleague is from Afghanistan, and is the same age as me, and lived there when America invaded and has offered some interesting insights into the situation there now.

My colleague shared that there is a part of Pakistan–Balochistan–that historically and ethnically has been a part of Afghanistan. Due to the Durand Line established by the British colonial Empire, the region and people were separated. Now Afghanistan has a long standing historical claim on the territory and their ethnic kinsmen, but the people have been there long enough to now identify with Pakistan as their nation.

Both Ethnicity and Nationality represent “family” on some level. I have written a lot about the Sovereign as a paternal influence, being one flesh with his people. This is kind of like Nationality. Ethnicity is a deeper level of kinship, being structured around a personal commonality to another person and even to a sovereign, whereas mere nationality represents a geographic commonality to another person. The first nations were Ethno-nations, and with very good reason: If someone looks like me, talks like me, worships like me, they probably think like me, and I can trust them to support me the way I support them. Mere nations are more common since the colonial era, as political boundaries have been drawn around territory without any real regard for ethnicity. This is why Africa is such a conflict prone continent, and why Balochistan is alienated from Afghanistan and remains a source of tension in Afghan-Pakistan relations.

Where Ethnicity and Nationality overlap–or spill over each other–there is conflict. Ukraine (for example) is Ethnically Slavic but has a distinct national identity. Russia views itself as the father of all slavic peoples, so seeks on the one hand Ethnic unity at the expense of national identity. Ukraine seeks to preserve it’s national identity at the expense of ethnic unity. There will always be conflict on these grounds.

This is part of why America has some cultural instability. There is no ethno-nation upon which the supra-nation was built. All the ethno-nations that compose America must actively choose to accept their national identity and make it a priority. America doesn’t have a unifying culture. There are some cultural elements that are competing to be dominant but nothing central, nothing unifying.

These forces can be in tension in a positive way. The Philippines is composed of many sub-ethnic divisions but there is a common culture to all of the constituent ethnicities, enough to make their National identity strong and prevent ethnic conflict. As I understand it one of the main sources of internal conflict is where that common culture is different–namely, between the Catholic majority and Muslim minority. The Philippines have successfully harnessed their diverse ethnicities and created a national identity from it.

Any kind of nation–be it Ethno- or not–can be stable. But there must be some unifying element to give it stability. Ethnicity is the unifying element. Culture can be the unifying element, It could even be religion. But stability must be intentionally cultivated from the ground up, from the top down. Without an intentional effort at stability, there will be internal conflict which destabilizes the nation until either the various nations split apart from each other or one totally dominates the other.

AMDG

CCLXXIX – Vanishing Act

Commenter Buckyinky, in an article at his own space, talked about the phenomenon of Choirs socially distancing during performances. In a comment in reply, I realized that teams and organizations are cultures in microcosm, and that “There must be a desire to disappear into the culture, not a desire to stand apart from it.”

In response, Buckyinky made the innovative connection to the Litany of Humility: “Interesting how this goes hand in hand with many Saints’ spiritual writings on the virtue of humility. As in Cardinal del Val’s Litany of Humility, ‘From the desire of being esteemed…loved…extolled..honored…etc…deliver us’ “

These two thoughts differ only in scale. The word assimilate means to make similar, and when things are very similar they are indistinguishable. To assimilate into a culture then means to appear as if one never needed to assimilate in the first place–you can go to the grocery store, celebrate on holidays, and drive your kids to school just like all the locals. When in Rome, you do as the Romans do, and learn to think of yourself as Roman too. Individualism is deleterious to culture because it encourages people to stand out, and celebrates people for the mere fact of being different.

There are three words which describe how someone might approach this idea: Conformity, Assimilation, and Humility. Conformity means “to make agreeable”–literally, “to form together”. The colloquial connotation is that conformity means blindly following some herd. Certainly, that is very agreeable to the herd to blindly follow them, but it is not utilizing your talents or capabilities to the fullest. Colloquially then, conformity means to survive by being least objectionable to the herd, your focus is on the herd and not on anything else. You are actively trying not to think about your actions, but trying to follow the path of least resistance. Agreeable, but this kind of conformity never formed anyone into a higher being. Paths of least resistance lead down.

Assimilation, you might argue, has the same effect. The key difference is that you arrive at it differently. Assimilation is a deliberate effort to adopt customs and habits. The focus with Assimilation is less the crowd and more on yourself–you are trying to improve yourself to the point that you attain some advantage in your local culture.

Humility is wholly different. Humility is the practice of making onesself increasingly private, keeping ones interactions with the local culture agreeable because you are demonstrating restraint and not because you are a welcome-mat. This restraint does not change ones practices to be more agreeable to the local culture, but keeps prying local eyes out of ones private affairs.

Buckyinky’s connection to the Litany of Humility is striking because the examples he picks out are examples of one asking Jesus to give us the desire to not be superlative. Humility doesn’t seek esteem because esteem involves people in ones private affairs, it means people know about a thing you did and like that thing.

Which Saint can we turn to for a demonstration in this practice of Humility which disappears from view? None other than St. Joseph–his presence in the Gospels is brief but effective, and when his turn is done he is noted no further, not even to note his passing from this life. St. Joseph literally vanishes into the Gospels.

Lord, help me to disappear from view. Help me to seek no recognition for my good deeds; help me to commit no deeds which dishonor You. Lord, may I grow in the virtue and practice of humility, for your honor and glory. St. Joseph, pray for us!

AMDG

CCL – The Enemy Knows Our Name (But Not Who We Are)

I want to connect a few dots I’ve seen recently.

1. The Addams Family animated movie (2019)
   • A major theme of the movie is individualism, cinematically juxtaposed against “tradition”. Tradition, according to the movie, is the way our ancestors did things, and doesn’t make us happy because it doesn’t allow us to do things our own way.
2. Klaus animated movie (also 2019)
   • A major theme of the movie is that tradition is bad, illustrated by the longstanding feud between the Krums and Ellingboes. They don’t know why they fight, they do because of tradition. This tradition has kept their town poor and angry and resentful; only when the tradition is cast off can the town be illuminated with kindness and fellowship.
3. A roadsign by a gas station in Britain which is famous for Humorous quips
   • The sign said “Tradition is peer pressure from dead people”. It’s framed as a negative: Don’t let dead people bully you into doing something you don’t want to do.

What stuck out to me about these three data points is that Tradition is called out by name. The enemy is attacking Tradition, generally. But they don’t know which tradition or any specific things about the tradition which will save the world–the Christian tradition.

So that made me realize that the Enemy knows our name insofar as they know something about Tradition is worthy of their big-budget condemnation; they don’t know who we are insofar as they don’t know which tradition to condemn or what about it they don’t like.

CCXXXVI – On Patriotism

I recently learned that none other than Mark Twain wrote a biography on St. Joan of Arc. He spent twelve years in research and two years writing, he considered it his best and most important work. I have only just begun to read it but it is a fantastic read so far. The narrative got me to thinking about how St Joan was inflamed for love of her Country, and how ardent patriotism nowadays is rare but no less beautiful.

My political thought these days has been trying my best not to think about politics. I didn’t realize how effective it had been until my family started telling me about news and I hadn’t heard anything about it. My political antipathy is driven by a desire to protect my peace and forego grievance about things I cannot control. I am sure my antipathy will give way over time to apathy, but for now I find political news distasteful.

When I was in undergrad, I took a Spanish class and had a professor who was a Cuban expatriot. Towards the end of the semester, an anti-Castro and anti-communist journalist was assassinated, and the professor led us all in a moment of silence. We would enter parts of our textbook that talk about the cuisine of Havana, and he would reveal to us that just outside the tourist parts of Havana lies extreme poverty and starvation. His perspective was extremely moving to me and highly influential–it made me realize what true patriotism looked like. This professor did not wave flags and sing songs and wear patriotic symbols, but he felt deeply the pulse of his country. St. Joan reminded me of this professor–she wept following Agincourt, and felt injustice when the Queen made the Treaty of Troyes to disinherit the rightful King Charles VII. Because of my recent political antipathy, I realized I don’t presently have the same emotional attachment to my country; I realized I do not feel any sense of personal loyalty to my national leaders.

So this raises the question: What is the proper object of patriotism? It seems to me there are three options: A people, a territory, or an office. A patriotic love of a people is a kind of cultural unity. A patriot might say “I love these people because they are my countrymen”. A patriotic love of a territory makes me think of the phrases “fatherland” or “motherland”, a love for the land in which one lives. A patriotic love of political office is like a love of tradition–this land has had a King for time immemorial, and will continue in that way.

A love of people, a love of place, a love of leadership. This calls to mind the image of a family. The place where I live is my home, I love it and take care of it and want it to be hospitable and comfortable and clean and nice. The people who live in my home are my family, and I love them and want to take care of them. The people who lead my family are my parents, and I love them and listen to them. Patriotism is loving your country as if it is your home, loving your countrymen as if they are your siblings, and loving your sovereign as if he is your father. This is why Joan was incensed that Charles VII was disinherited–her “father” was insulted and a stranger declared himself step-father. This is why my spanish professor felt so deeply for his country–he was homesick, and misses his “family”.

It is easy to take ones house and home for granted when you live comfortably in it and are not called to defend it. My antipathy towards politics stems in part from a series of bad “fathers” (ignoring for a moment the confusion of who exactly the sovereign is in a democratic state such as ours). But I have no ill will towards my countrymen, and certainly an affinity for the territory. Patriotism is a virtue because it is a demonstration of filial love, obedience, and charity. It is a higher order of love than mere love of symbols, like most meme-patriotism is represented these days.

Cultivating patriotism requires growth in all the related virtues, and wishing that growth on ones countrymen.

AMDG

CCXXVIII – Profit Motive Does Not Imply Public Good

Wood over at his blog “Wood Faileth” has an article that connects to a thought I’ve had but haven’t known how to introduce. If you’ve read my recent Economics thought-sprint then go read Wood’s article and come back here, then I will try to complete my point. Another helpful pre-reading is my brief series on Public Good.

In my Economics series, I pointed out that when the units used to measure everything is dollars, you lose some nuance when you discuss the value of those things. Price is different from value.

In my Public Good series, I pointed out that Good implies proper order, and proper order implies pointing to God. That which is good is ordered to God; the Public Good is that which orders the public to God. There was a separate distinction though, that public good as it is used colloquially describes those things which society likes. So I will call socially approved things “Public Like” and things which are properly ordered to God “Public Good”.

In Wood’s article, he uses the example of Madison Avenue to point out the silliness of complaining about “Evil Capitalist Greed”. Madison Avenue is hardly the paragon of the social benefits of Capitalism, yet is a striking example of a some kind of order (I make no judgement on whether it is properly ordered or not–just that it reflects some order). People use Madison Avenue as a straw man because they think it is Evil–Wood accurately points out that most people these days hate beauty, and so hate order, and so reject that order; People use Madison Avenue as a straw man because they think it is Capitalist–Wood points out that it is hardly the best example of rampant capitalism available to us.

With that as preamble, we can now dig into some of the meat and potatoes of this article.

The First Law: Markets Are Efficient

A common defense of capitalism you may have heard is that profit motive accomplishes the public good. This is half true: Profit motive accomplishes the “Public Like”. When people say profit motive accomplishes public good, what they mean is that market forces will reward those people who help society, and will punish those people who harm society. Again: this is half true. In evidence, lets look at the fact that people pay money for pornography. The profit motive here is rewarding purveyors of sin. This is not good in any way; but this particular sin is currently not objected to by society, therefore falls within the “Public Like”, and is not prohibited. Profit motive of pornographers thereby advances that which society already approves. The sum of all things which society approves is it’s culture. Therefore profit motive perpetuates the culture in which the profit motive is deployed.

A rejoinder by the capitalist interlocutor may be that Profit Motive has many other benefits as well. Wood’s article points to one: plummeting prices through competition; I will add innovation and technological advancement as another. Profit motive leads to Entrepreneurial problem solving: If you can make money by doing something better, then eventually most people will do things better, until you can’t make any money doing that thing.

In my Economics Sprint, I pointed out that Entrepreneurial problem solving is a way of utilizing available resources to solve problems, and is not necessarily a way of benefitting society. Again: the first pornographer was using available resources (shamelessly sinful individuals) to solve the problem of satisfying demand for autoerotic voyeurism. Entrepreneurship is not inherently aligned with Public Good, but is aligned with monetizing resources in a way which society approves. Competition just means resources can be monetized in a way which is also accessible to society.

This is the first law they teach in economics classes: Markets are efficient, or Markets Work. This is absolutely true, but markets are not clearly defined. One person looking for pornography represents a market. If an entrepreneur thinks he can make money from it, he can enter that market and satisfy that demand. Markets are efficient, but markets are not inherently good.

Mining for Money

An important thing to note here is that Money is itself a resource, and is not a mere unit of measure, is not mere points. In a previous article I disambiguated a things value from its price. This allows us to do two things: Look at all transactions as bartering, and to look at all transactions as exchanges of value instead of exchanges of goods and services for money.

Looking at money as a resources explains a little bit of the American Venture Capital scene these days. There are huge sums of money being thrown around to start-ups, and the reason for this can be seen in my definition of Entrepreneurship: It is a way of utilizing available resources to solve problems. Money is a resource that, in the venture capital world, is abundant. Those who seek venture capital dollars are simply trying to find a problem which that resources can be deployed to address. Because the people who control that resource are members of society, that resource will only be deployed in ventures which align with the “Public Like”.

The Alternative

The reason the axiom “Profit motive = public good” has gone unexamined for so long is because it hints at a fundamental truth without actually arriving at it. Markets seek an equilibrium, and this line of economic thought is predicated on the idea that people make strictly equal exchanges: A given product is sold for the maximum price someone is willing to pay, and that must be no less than the amount it cost to create. The value, expressed in units yap, is always exchanged at a value gain, or a yap profit. The example I used previously was that a Canoe was on sale for $100 and I saw it, wanted it, and bought it. I like canoing, so the Canoe was 5 yap valuable to me, and in order to acquire that 5 yap value, I need only hand over one paper bill, which is only 2 yap valuable to me. The net exchange for me is +3 yap. For the seller, he does not want the canoe anymore, it is 1 yap valuable to him, but with a paper bill he could pay his rent, so the paper bill is 4 yap valuable to him: a net exchange of +3 yap.

This makes logical sense: If the canoe was more valuable to the seller than the money he would get for it, he would not make the exchange. If the money were more valuable to me than the canoe I would get for it, then I would not make the exchange.

However, we cannot stop here and say simply that “Value motive = public good”. The value scenario can still accommodate a person seeking and buying pornography, instead of a canoe. This digression about Value thus is interesting and descriptive but doesn’t change the results of our analysis. We must apply additional steps to arrive at some economic activity which truly implies public good.

Can I Exchange Rai Stones for Public Good?

Public Like can be anything, Public Good can only be that which points to God. The true issue at hand is cultural, and not economic. Can economics be used to wag the dog and change a culture from one that approves of pornography to one that condemns pornography?

Regulation is not the answer, because Laws follow that which a society already believes. Economics can only be leveraged to solve economic problems, and because the Public Like currently includes sin and godlessness, that is a social–and so cultural–problem. Culture can only be changed on generational timescales, and is less of a marketplace and more of a war. One culture must dominate and destroy another in order to replace it. The alternatives are only cultural victory, cultural secession, or cultural death.

So the answer is that there is no economic motive that promotes the public good unless the culture is already aligned to God. The levers for changing culture are to either outwit or outlast the dominant culture: Outwit through conversion, or outlast through having many children.

TL;DR: Profit Motive does not imply public good, therefore have lots of kids.

AMDG

CCXVII – Voluntary Atlas

I think we like to burden ourselves to feel important. I really don’t know how to preface this idea, and I don’t mean it as an insult: it feels like a natural impulse. I can sense it in my life and can see it in others, at times. You would be right to say, “Physician, heal thyself!”, yet I don’t think that diminishes the truth of the phenomenon.

Let me break it down a little bit. What do I mean by feeling important? The highest sense is that our lives have purpose and meaning. Properly ordered, it seems to me that feelings of purpose and meaning come from God. It is not unreasonable to suggest that someone who has no reverence for God cannot well understand their role in creation. God provides the omniscient context for our lives, so without that context, it is like a unit-less number: naked, meaningless, prone to having meaning assigned to it incorrectly.

There are lesser orders of feeling important. Self Actualization is a buzzword that I run into sometimes, and to my understanding it means that we are doing everything we want to do the way we want to do it. Absent a higher order–God’s divine context–self actualization can be for good or ill. Liberalism (in the classical sense) is the idea that anything anyone wants to do they should be able to do. So a hobo living on a park bench can be self actualized if he doesn’t want anything else. This is usually where third parties enter the Liberalism equation to say that he would want something else if he had more opportunity. Yadda yadda–that’s not what I want to get into here but I wanted to note that other people have a different idea of how you should be self actualized than your own idea of your own self actualization.

Continuing the descent down orders of importance, I would say about equal are ideas of vocation or responsibility. Vocation has a couple different meanings and everyone seems to have a different idea of how exactly vocations work. I am using it in the sense of “God’s calling” for us. We all have a universal vocation to holiness, for example, but not everyone will feel equally called to, say, serve the poor. An important thing about vocations is that there is a gap between what we feel called to do and what we are doing. Responsibility functions in a similar way, but I would contrast it by saying it’s the world’s calling for us. If you have kids, you are responsible for those kids–you cannot shirk that responsibility. There can be a gap between what you are responsible for and what you are behaving responsible for.

When someone has lots of responsibilities they sometimes feel important. When someone is fulfilling their vocation they feel important. When someone is self actualized they feel important. When someone believes in the intrinsic dignity of their own life as a unique and specific of God’s creations, they feel important.

Lets talk about burdening ourselves now. A responsibility is a kind of burden: having kids is an important responsibility, and it limits the way we live because we must order our lives around satisfying that responsibility well. It is possible to take on too many responsibilities. If you have kids, are president of the Rotary club, are on the Parish Council, coach your sons baseball team, and are in charge of the Planning Committee at work–you have a lot of responsibilities. When we do not feel important enough, we are tempted to add responsibilities, seek out vocations, more perfectly self actualize until we feel important.

When our time cannot fit any more obligations, whence can we take up burdens of importance? Now we arrive at the thing on my mind when I began: We take up mental burdens.

Mental burdens are a species of burden which we worry about but cannot do anything about. Politics, the stock market, sports drafts, corporate strategy–these are all things which occupy our minds and very few of us can do anything tangibly to influence. These are things which take no time to worry about and yet which cost us greatly in terms of energy. Now, I do not mean to suggest that feeling important is the only motivation for worrying about these things. There are infinitely many reasons to worry about them. The species that I am most susceptible to is this idea of feeling important.

How does worrying about politics, the stock market, sports drafts, or corporate strategy make us feel important? Lets simplify this with an analogy. In Politics, the stock market, sports, or Corporate strategy, your “tribe” can be winning or your tribe can be losing. You naturally want your tribe to win, and so worry about the performance of your tribe. Any action taken in any of those spheres I listed will either result in a win or a loss for your tribe. A win will result in your elation, because this is something you worry about and your tribe is winning. A loss will result in your depression, because this s something you worry about and your tribe is losing. When your tribe is winning, you are winning, and so you feel more important. When your tribe is losing, you are losing, and so you become outraged, and so you feel more important.

Scenarios: Governor Dingus raises taxes: If you want higher taxes, your tribe wins; If you don’t want higher taxes, your tribe loses. A company whose stock you own releases a new brand of widget: If the stock price goes up, your tribe wins; if the stock price goes down, your tribe loses. Your sports team plays in the national championship: If they win, your tribe wins; if they lose, your tribe loses. Your company opens a Springfield branch: If you think this is a good decision, your tribe wins; if you think this is a bad decision, your tribe loses.

In every one of those examples, a person would receive emotional whiplash from external factors controlling their peace.

It is very much like we are all our own kind of Atlas and we voluntarily take these burdens on to weigh us down. What meaning would Atlas have if he didn’t have the weight of the world on his shoulders? If we have a properly ordered dignity from God, we don’t need any extraneous material things to give our lives meaning and purpose. Laying down the burden of politics frees us from the emotional whiplash of changing political fortunes. Trusting in God–beyond that, abandoning ourselves to Divine providence–frees us from all Earthly concern.

And yet: Christ calls us to pick up our cross and follow him; to accept an easy yoke and a light burden. We can shrug and lay down the world, and when we pick up our cross find importance in the only thing that really matters: glorifying God through our lives.

AMDG