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CHAPTER 4 Courage When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers. —ralph waldo emerson B uckminster Fuller said that “a problem well stated is a problem well on its way to being solved.” My objective here has been twofold: first, to identify the right problem and, second, to state it clearly. I have tried to undertake this within the largest possible context—not from inside the existing framework, but outside of it; not to see how we can score better on the grading system imposed upon us, or even to find a better grading system, but to see how we might transform the whole of the society in which we live. Problems are vulnerable to thought. Once a problem can be seen for what it really is, the solution is not far behind. The pace of our progress is limited only by the pace of our thinking and by the courage we supply to support it. The problem began a long time ago. The early Puritan settlers in America were naturally self-interested. They came to New England to create God’s new Israel and to separate themselves from a church they saw as too closely allied with Rome. They also came to pursue new economic opportunities. They believed that wealth was a sign of divine approval . They were the early builders of American capitalism. They were also Calvinists and believed in Calvin’s view of human depravity. This made their natural self-interest psychologically problematic. They therefore compartmentalized it. Self-interest could only be pursued in the interest of others or in the interest of set-asides for future charity or the pretense of the same. Therefore, charity became another world— an economic sanctuary of morality and an ameliorative influence on 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Pallotta:Uncharitable page 177 178 UNCHARITABLE self-interest. In this way charity and self-deprivation became synonymous . Self-depriving charity gave them psychological permission to pursue their natural self-interest elsewhere. Charity became a mechanism for regulating self-interest, profit making, and, therefore, capitalism . Capitalism, profit making, and self-interest were necessarily banished from the sanctuary itself. This is problematic. Capitalism produces economic wealth. It produces a wealth of labor, leadership, capital, demand, productivity, ideas, and progress and a wealth of surplus that has a multiplier effect on all of these. Nonprofit ideology, on the other hand, produces economic poverty. It produces a poverty of leadership, capital, demand, and ideas and leaves no surplus at the end of the day, thereby forcing the sector to live from paycheck to paycheck. It discourages compensation based on value, paid advertising, experimentation, long-term investment , and the payment of a financial return on capital investment. Capitalism, it is alleged, produces inequity in society. The nonprofit sector, along with government, is assigned the task of restoring balance to the situation. Yet it is asked to create this balance without the tools of capitalism. Thus, the imbalance widens. This we call charity. Because it would be impossible to police every clandestine violation of nonprofit ideology in the sector, a simple detection mechanism has been established to ensure compliance with it. This is called the “efficiency ” measure. It polices wages, the use of paid advertising, experimentation , the use of donor funds for anything other than short-term relief or set-asides for a rainy day, and a prohibition on financial return on investment. This we call the measure of charity. Such a system will never produce the change we seek. It wasn’t designed to. It was designed to compensate for depravity. It never had a larger objective in mind. The sobering reality is this: if we do not have a larger objective in mind, there is no need to take issue with the existing ideology in the first place. We might just as well abide by it. It serves us perfectly well for keeping things the same. But if we do have a larger objective in mind, we must summon the courage to state it. We must...

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