As an old friend says, “You chose this life” of voluntary simplicity. But I am an educated white male clergyman, to privilege born. I am appalled by the number of brothers and sisters denied both profit and justice without choice.

The late Rabbi Michael Lerner contended that all of us in the world of Capital suffer trauma. Why? Because in a Creation meant for love and justice, Profit is our Golden Calf. Pharaoh is our CEO. Rev. William Barber refuses to accept that a coal miner who dies young from silicosis was “called home by God to a better place.” No, a policy killed him. Capital allows us to be kind and fair only insofar as kindness doesn’t threaten profit. Capitolatry enshrines injustice. And kills.

And its practice in the United States revels in pitting the majority—you and I—against each other. Especially if we’re a different color, class or religion.

Democracy tempers some of capitalism’s flaws. But today, according to writer Jonathan Rauch, we lurch from democratic capitalism into illiberal patrimonialism. It plays well with slaveholder and racist religion. Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán seem to enjoy it. They profit from it.

I have thought a lot about how little of our lives, how few hours a day, are democratic. How many workplaces are democratic? The only workplaces I know are hierarchies. Our religions, unless they’ve grown up independent from empires, tend toward imperialist, top-down flows of power. God is like a CEO. If you’re not careful, you’re fired. Eternally.

And now our executive branch is dismantling our democracy, further shrinking our already meager access to it. Why? So we can function like a family business. We buy the myth that business is efficient, and it is. Unregulated, it efficiently channels commonwealth into private wealth for a minority: an efficient means to a merciless end. And many of us who fail to profit believe we are simply failures. But since government is not a business or a mafia, running it like either is disastrously inefficient. It does not lead us to a human end. As Pope Pius XI put it in 1931 (using dated pronouns),

… bodily labor, which Divine Providence decreed to be performed, even after original sin, for the good at once of man’s body and soul, is being everywhere changed into an instrument of perversion; for dead matter comes forth from the factory ennobled, while men there are corrupted and degraded.

That is, exploited. Deprived of a living wage. So it helps to have a government that can discipline capital’s raw drive toward extractive, exploitative practices: a democratic government with just policies that honor the dignity of bodies and souls. It helps to have strong institutions that can stand up to would-be strongmen. As theologian Joerg Rieger puts it,

The political principle of “one person one vote” stands in stark contrast with the corporate principle of “one dollar one vote,” according to which shareholder meetings are conducted.

According to Daniel Weiner and Tim Lau of the Brennan Center for Justice, the notorious “Citizens United” Supreme Court case of 2010

… ushered in massive increases in political spending from outside groups, dramatically expanding the already outsized political influence of ultra-wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups.

The good news is that we recently learned, through Wisconsin’s supreme court race, that sometimes votes can defeat dollars. Rauch notes that citizens eventually discover that patrimonialism is incompetent and corrupt. Its only purpose is “rigging, robbing, and gutting the state,” all the while waving the flag and praising “god.”  Let’s hope we banish it as soon as possible.

And thank goodness people like Adam Bucko imagine a different kind of future. I may not live to see it. Even if I do, I may not be competent to respond to it: I’m a likely candidate for dementia. So, before I lose my cognitive powers, I want to go on record as resisting patrimonial corruption and supporting a future of solidarity, a preferential option for the poor, led by the poor and their allies.

And may the rich be liberated. May they embrace the wisdom of Abigail Disney, who recently asserted that “every billionaire who can’t live on $999 million is kind of a sociopath.” May they seek and find healing. Maybe even joyous solidarity. To you who are younger than I am: if you have a choice between profit and joy, take the joy. Take friendship. Jesus was right: happy are you when you embrace the folly of solidarity. At least it has worked for me in my first seventy-two years.

Images from the photo montage above are from The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice.