Aspects of indoctrination

 

Religions indoctrinate through churches and governments and broadcasts and books, but mainly through parents. To indoctrinate a child has been described as a form of child abuse. It limits that child from having as full a life as might be. Religions, of course, aren't the only things that work to indoctrinate us. I would add businesses, both as sales organizations to sell something and as employers, and of course political parties and the adherents of no end of quasi-religions ideas and ideological movements. . Propaganda is I think the main tool of indoctrination. Stir up the person's emotions; people love children and puppies, so put pictures of little children on your soup can or a puppy on the cover of your book. People hate, so put pictures of atrocities, both real and invented, in your film. People are patriotic, so wear a flag pin and have flags in the background and patriotic music accompanying your commercial. People want to be accepted, so imply that those who think otherwise are outsiders. Finally, we all want to live forever, so teach a wonderful afterlife. This also can be used for people's desire for revenge. Logic and reasoning can also be propaganda when it is in the form of false evidence or pious fraud or cherry picking the evidence. You’re pointing to something real, but the picture is more nuanced than framing it as a single process called “indoctrination” that operates the same way across religion, business, politics, and family life. At a basic level, every society has to transmit beliefs, values, and norms to children—otherwise language, ethics, and even practical skills wouldn’t carry forward. Parents, schools, media, and communities all play that role. The key distinction most scholars make isn’t between “indoctrination vs. no influence” (because no one grows up without influence), but between: Open vs. closed teaching Open: encourages questioning, exposure to alternatives, and revising beliefs. Closed: discourages doubt, frames disagreement as wrong or dangerous. Autonomy-supporting vs. controlling environments Autonomy-supporting: “Here’s what we believe—what do you think?” Controlling: “This is true—don’t question it.” When people call something “indoctrination,” they usually mean the closed, controlling end of that spectrum. On religion and children It’s true that many people inherit religion from their parents. But whether that’s harmful varies a lot depending on how it’s practiced: In some families, religion is taught alongside critical thinking and exposure to other views. In others, questioning may be discouraged or punished. Calling all religious upbringing “child abuse” is a strong claim and not widely accepted in ethics, psychology, or law, largely because: It would apply to any strongly held worldview (political, cultural, even strictly secular ones). Evidence shows mixed outcomes—religious upbringing can correlate with both positive (community, meaning, resilience) and negative (guilt, fear, exclusion) effects depending on context. On propaganda Your description of propaganda techniques is actually quite aligned with what’s studied in media and psychology: Emotional appeals (fear, love, belonging) Symbolism (flags, children, animals) In-group / out-group framing Selective evidence or cherry-picking These techniques are used in: Advertising Political campaigns Activist movements Yes, sometimes religious messaging But they’re also not inherently illegitimate. Emotion and storytelling are normal parts of human communication. The issue becomes manipulation when: Information is misleading or false Alternatives are hidden or suppressed The goal is control rather than understanding On logic as propaganda This is an important point. Arguments that look logical can still mislead through: Cherry-picked data False premises Omitted context That’s why critical thinking isn’t just about logic—it’s about: Evaluating sources Looking for missing information Being willing to revise conclusions A more balanced takeaway Rather than seeing the world as “indoctrinators vs. free thinkers,” it may be more useful to think in terms of degrees of influence and freedom: Everyone is influenced. Some influences are more transparent and open to challenge than others. The healthiest environments tend to combine guidance with the freedom to question and explore. If you’re interested, we can dig deeper into one angle—like how psychologists define indoctrination, or how to recognize when persuasion crosses into manipulation in real life. Now where did I say indoctrination is always bad? Where did I say we aren't all influenced? Your responses need to be framed to deal with assertions actually stated. You’re right to call that out. You didn’t say indoctrination is always bad, and you explicitly acknowledged that influence is widespread across religion, business, politics, and culture. I overgeneralized your position and responded to a stronger claim than you actually made. A more accurate reading of what you did say is something like: Indoctrination is widespread, especially through parents. It can, in some cases, be harmful—e.g., limiting a child’s potential or autonomy. Propaganda (emotional appeals, symbolism, social pressure, selective reasoning) is a major mechanism behind it. These dynamics are not unique to religion—they show up in many human systems. That’s a much more targeted and defensible set of points. If I respond directly to that: Your emphasis on mechanisms—especially emotional leverage and social belonging—is well aligned with how persuasion and socialization are studied. The examples you gave (children, flags, fear, belonging, afterlife promises) map closely onto known influence pathways like: identity formation fear/reward conditioning in-group loyalty narrative framing And your point that even “logic and reasoning” can function as propaganda when misused is also important—because it highlights that the form of an argument (logical structure) doesn’t guarantee the integrity of its inputs. Where things get more debatable is your example: “To indoctrinate a child has been described as a form of child abuse… it limits that child…” That’s a strong claim, and while it’s been argued by some thinkers, others would push back by asking: What counts as indoctrination vs. normal value transmission? At what point does influence become unjust limitation? Is limitation always harmful, or sometimes necessary for development? So the real tension in your argument isn’t whether indoctrination exists or whether propaganda techniques are used—that part is solid. It’s about where to draw the line between: shaping a person and constraining them If you want, we can sharpen that line—e.g., come up with clearer criteria for when influence becomes indoctrination in a problematic sense. The point is to be aware, mindfully, that these things are going on. As to the idea of indoctrination being a form of child abuse, this depends on how one defines abuse, but regardless, it often is. That clarification makes your position much clearer—and it shifts the focus from arguing about indoctrination to recognizing it. At that level, your core point is hard to dispute: becoming aware of how influence works is itself protective. Once you notice the patterns—emotional triggers, identity appeals, selective framing—they lose some of their power. You don’t stop being influenced, but you gain the ability to evaluate rather than just absorb. Your framing of propaganda fits well with that awareness lens. It’s less about condemning any one domain (religion, politics, business) and more about recognizing recurring techniques: “This is making me feel something—what belief is it trying to attach to that feeling?” “Is this presenting a full picture, or a curated slice?” “Is disagreement being engaged with, or dismissed?” On the question of indoctrination and child abuse, your revised wording—“it depends on how one defines abuse, but it often is”—lands in a more defensible place. It acknowledges that: There’s a spectrum of influence in upbringing. Some forms clearly cross into harm (e.g., suppressing questioning through fear, shame, or isolation). Others are closer to guidance, even if they still shape the child’s worldview strongly. So instead of a binary (“indoctrination = abuse” vs. “just parenting”), it becomes a matter of degree and method: Does the child have room to question? Are alternative viewpoints accessible or forbidden? Is compliance enforced through fear or through reasoning and dialogue? Your underlying thread—mindful awareness of influence—is probably the most actionable part. It applies just as much to adults as to children, especially since many of these mechanisms work best when they go unnoticed. Of you wanted to push this further, an interesting next step would be: how do you actually teach that kind of awareness without just replacing one set of influences with another? One thing at a time. First, your remarks on is the child allowed alternative resources or is the child punished for asking the wrong questions?

That’s a very sharp place to focus, because those two questions get close to the practical boundary between influence and what most people would recognize as problematic indoctrination.

A child is never in a neutral environment—no one is—but the treatment of curiosity is a strong diagnostic signal.

If a child can ask “wrong” questions and the response is engagement—perhaps even a firm disagreement, but still an answer—then the system is at least porous. The belief structure may be strong, even dominant, but it isn’t sealed. The child is learning what to think, yes, but also how thinking works, including that beliefs can be examined.

If, on the other hand, certain questions trigger punishment—whether that punishment is overt (anger, discipline) or subtle (withdrawal of approval, shaming, “you’re a bad person for thinking that”)—then you begin to see something different. The issue isn’t just that the child is being given answers; it’s that the space of permissible thought is being policed.

That has a few important consequences:

First, it shifts the child’s motivation from truth-seeking to approval-seeking. The question becomes not “what is true?” but “what can I safely think or say?”

Second, it tends to produce self-censorship, which is more powerful than any external control. The child learns not to ask certain questions even internally.

Third, it often attaches emotional weight—fear, guilt, shame—to particular lines of thought. That makes those ideas harder to examine later, even in adulthood.

Now, on “alternative resources”: this is a subtler version of the same issue. A child doesn’t need full access to a university library to develop intellectual freedom, but if exposure to other viewpoints is actively blocked—or framed as dangerous, evil, or corrupting—that again narrows the field. Not by argument, but by pre-emptive disqualification.

What’s interesting is that neither of these requires religion specifically. You can see the same pattern in political households, ideological movements, even in strongly “rationalist” environments where certain conclusions are treated as beyond dispute.

So if one were trying to draw a practical line—not a philosophical one, but an observational one—it might look like this:

A system becomes concerning when it protects its beliefs not by answering questions, but by discouraging the asking of them.

That doesn’t make all strong teaching indoctrination, but it does identify a mechanism that, when present, tends to limit the child in the way you’re pointing to.

If you like, we can go one step further and look at something trickier: cases where questions are technically allowed, but subtly guided so that only one answer ever feels acceptable. That’s a more sophisticated form—and much harder to detect.

Children can't be expected to see these thing, it's up to the parent and the society.

Yes—and that’s the uncomfortable part of it. A child can’t be expected to stand outside the system that’s forming them and evaluate it. That capacity develops slowly, if at all. So responsibility does fall, as you say, on parents and on the surrounding society.

But that immediately raises a tension: the very people responsible for preventing harmful indoctrination are themselves shaped by their own upbringing, loyalties, and blind spots. In other words, the “guardians” are not neutral. That doesn’t make the task impossible, but it does make it inherently imperfect.

At the parental level, what can realistically be asked isn’t neutrality—that’s a fiction—but a certain discipline. A parent will inevitably pass on values, beliefs, and attitudes. The question is how they do it. Do they present beliefs as unquestionable facts tied to approval and belonging, or as convictions that can be explained, examined, and even challenged? Do they react to a child’s doubt with anxiety and suppression, or with some tolerance, even when it’s uncomfortable?

At the societal level, the role is less intimate but just as important. Societies can widen or narrow the range of perspectives a child will eventually encounter. Education systems, media, and law can either:

– protect exposure to differing viewpoints,
– encourage basic critical thinking,
– and avoid punishing dissent,

or they can do the opposite—standardize belief and stigmatize deviation.

Even then, there’s no clean solution. A society also has an interest in transmitting shared norms—without that, it doesn’t cohere. So it’s always balancing two competing goods:

– continuity (passing on a way of life),
– and openness (allowing revision of that way of life).

Too much of the first, and you get rigidity. Too much of the second, and you risk fragmentation.

So your point stands: children can’t manage this themselves. But neither parents nor society can perfectly manage it either. What they can do—at best—is create conditions where, as the child grows, the door to independent thought is not locked behind them.

Let me pick on Jehovah's Witnesses for a moment, althugh they are not alone in this. Children are told to read only JW publications and never touch the internet at risk of losing their chance at eternal life.

That’s a good concrete example of the pattern you’ve been describing.

Within the Jehovah's Witnesses, guidance around information sources is often framed in explicitly moral or spiritual terms—“spiritually safe” versus “dangerous,” “truth” versus “worldly influence.” When that message is directed at children, and especially when it’s tied to something as weighty as eternal consequences, it does exactly what you were pointing to earlier: it raises the emotional stakes of curiosity.

The issue isn’t simply that a community prefers its own literature—that’s common across many groups. It’s the coupling of three elements that matters:

– restriction of outside sources,
– framing those sources as spiritually or morally hazardous,
– and attaching very high consequences to exposure (in this case, loss of eternal life).

That combination tends to narrow the child’s intellectual world quite effectively, not by argument alone but by making exploration feel dangerous. Even if no one is standing over the child, the boundary becomes internalized.

At the same time, if we’re being precise, people inside such communities would not describe this as “indoctrination” or “limitation.” They would say they are protecting the child from error and harm, much as any parent filters what a young child is exposed to. From their perspective, the internet isn’t neutral—it’s full of misleading or corrosive material—and the stakes (eternal life) justify strong caution.

So you end up with two competing interpretations of the same practice:

– from the outside: restriction of information and constraint on independent thought,
– from the inside: safeguarding truth and well-being in a high-stakes moral universe.

Your earlier point about awareness fits neatly here. An adult looking back can sometimes see how those mechanisms operated on them; a child inside the system generally cannot. And when the cost of questioning is framed as existential, even adults may find it difficult to step outside the boundaries that were set early on.

If you want to sharpen the analysis further, one interesting question is this: is the problem mainly the restriction itself, or the severity of the consequences attached to crossing it? That’s often where the real leverage lies.

As a rule JWs are at a disadvantage in this, as they operate as a minority group and the child is bound to encounter contrary views, so very few children of the Witness movement stay with it.

Yes, and that’s a key structural point rather than just a moral one.

A minority group like Jehovah's Witnesses faces a built-in tension: it needs strong internal cohesion to survive, but it exists inside a much larger culture that inevitably exposes its children to alternative views. That exposure doesn’t have to be sought out—it comes through school, casual conversation, media, even simple observation of how other people live.

So the dynamic often looks like this:

The group raises the cost of leaving (spiritually, socially, sometimes emotionally) and tries to manage information flow, precisely because it knows exposure is unavoidable. But the surrounding society keeps lowering the barrier to comparison—the child sees other frameworks, other lifestyles, other interpretations of reality.

That creates a kind of pressure gradient. Some children internalize the group’s framework deeply enough that outside views are filtered or dismissed. Others experience a growing mismatch between what they’re told and what they observe, and that tension can lead them away.

Your observation that “very few stay” is directionally true in many studies of high-commitment minority religions, though the exact numbers vary by country and method. Retention is often significantly lower than adult conversion plus birth rates would suggest, which is why such groups tend to rely heavily on active proselytizing to maintain or grow membership.

What’s interesting is that this isn’t unique to religion. Any high-boundary minority system—religious, ideological, even cultural—faces the same problem:

– If it relaxes controls, it risks dilution.
– If it tightens them, it risks alienating members, especially younger ones.

There’s no stable, perfect balance. It’s an ongoing adjustment.

And it ties back neatly to your original theme: awareness. The more porous the surrounding environment, the harder it is for any closed system—religious or otherwise—to operate without eventually being questioned from within.

Where the state participates or the religion is predominant and controls local media, the internet is about the only alternate source, if it is not blocked or distorted.

Exactly. That’s the flip side of what you were just describing. When a religion dominates the cultural and institutional landscape—schools, local media, even law enforcement—then the child’s exposure to alternative viewpoints is drastically reduced. In that scenario, the internet becomes one of the very few windows to ideas outside the dominant narrative.

Of course, whether the internet actually serves that function depends on access and freedom. Even if it’s physically available, the information may be blocked, filtered, or heavily distorted, and the child may face social or familial consequences for seeking it. In such environments, curiosity itself can be risky.

This highlights a broader pattern: the more pervasive and closed the societal system, the more the child’s worldview can be shaped without contrast. In contrast, minority groups in a pluralistic society, like the Witnesses we discussed, have to contend with ongoing exposure to alternative perspectives, which naturally undermines the group’s ability to maintain total intellectual control.

So, whether the child is trapped in a high-stakes belief system largely depends on the combination of internal control mechanisms and external diversity of viewpoints. The internet, ironically, becomes a key pressure valve in closed or dominant systems—sometimes the only means by which a child can even begin to see alternatives.

If you want, we can map out a kind of spectrum of exposure vs. control, showing where different societies or groups fall and how that affects a child’s chance to think freely.

Bad Corporation!

 

Corporations are bad. I think maybe that is just sometimes true. Corporations everywhere are much the same, and, the way they are structured, to get to the top and deal with competitors, you have to have a certain set of ethical lacks. Hence making money prevails over employees, customers, and nature. Some are worse about that than others. Corporations, though, serve a necessary function, even in socialist states. You need to organize a business along autocratic lines (benevolent but still autocratic if you want to hold employees and still get things done). The good thing about capitalism is that risky ventures can be undertaken by private interests, rather than the government, in return for most of any profits. The most efficient way for private interests to do this on large ventures is the limited liability corporation. The bad thing is that they will often do whatever is necessary to maximize profit, including gouging the public, putting out unhealthy products, destroying competitors, exploiting resources and employees, false and misleading propagandistic advertising, bribing government officials (such as corporate donations to political campaigns) and so on. Government and law is needed to curb this, in hopes of getting the good from corporate organization and mitigating the bad.

You’re circling something real, but I’d push back a bit on the idea that corporations are inherently populated by people with “ethical lacks.” That’s a common intuition, and there’s some evidence that certain personality traits—competitiveness, risk tolerance, even a bit of ruthlessness—help people rise. But that’s not the whole story. What matters more than the moral character of individuals is the structure they’re operating in.

A corporation is essentially a machine designed around a few core rules: limited liability, separation of ownership and control, and—crucially—pressure to generate returns for shareholders. Once you set those rules, you don’t need villains. Ordinary, even decent people can end up making decisions that look quite harsh, because the incentives nudge them that way. That’s the insight behind ideas like principal–agent problem: managers are acting on behalf of owners, and both are often focused on measurable returns, not diffuse harms.

There’s also the legal doctrine—often overstated, but influential—of shareholder primacy, reinforced historically by cases like Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.. While modern law gives more flexibility than people think, the cultural expectation remains: if you don’t prioritize profit, you’d better have a good explanation.

That connects directly to your point about necessity. You’re quite right: large-scale economic activity—railroads, pharmaceuticals, global supply chains—requires coordination, hierarchy, and the ability to pool capital while limiting risk. That’s why even states that call themselves socialist still rely on corporate-like entities. The alternative isn’t some gentle cooperative village; it’s usually bureaucracy, which has its own pathologies.

So the real tension isn’t “corporations vs. goodness,” but efficiency vs. externalities. Corporations are very good at producing things efficiently under competitive pressure. They are much less good at accounting for costs that fall outside the transaction—pollution, public health, long-term environmental damage. Economists call these externalities, and without intervention, they tend to be ignored.

That’s where your final point lands solidly: regulation, law, and norms are not optional add-ons—they’re part of the system. You don’t “fix” corporations by hoping for better people at the top; you shape outcomes by changing incentives and constraints. Things like liability law, antitrust enforcement, disclosure requirements, and even cultural expectations about reputation all act as counterweights.

One refinement I’d suggest: governments don’t just restrain corporations; they also create the conditions that make them work—property rights, contract enforcement, infrastructure, and sometimes even the initial research (think of early internet or pharmaceutical work). It’s a more symbiotic relationship than a purely adversarial one.

So you end up with a slightly less moralized but more structural picture:
corporations are powerful tools—dangerous if left unchecked, extremely useful when embedded in a framework that channels their incentives toward broadly acceptable outcomes.

If you like, we can dig into where that balance is working well today—and where it’s clearly failing.

There are a variety of ownership structures of corporations other than publicly traded securities (the most important as it provides capital more readily). There is of course state ownership, where the taxpayer bears the risks, limited group ownerships, such as a family, employee ownership (doesn't seem to work very well) and customer ownership, as with mutual insurance companies.

You’re mapping the landscape pretty accurately, and your instinct—that structure matters more than slogans—is exactly right. The interesting part is that each ownership form solves one problem and creates another.

Publicly traded corporations are unmatched for raising large amounts of capital quickly. That liquidity and scale are why they dominate sectors like energy, tech, and pharmaceuticals. But the tradeoff is distance: the people who bear the consequences of decisions (workers, communities) are often not the people who make them. That’s where the pressure toward short-term results creeps in.

State ownership flips that. In theory, the public interest is built in. In practice, you often get softer budget constraints and political interference. A state firm may keep too many workers or pursue prestige projects because failure doesn’t fall cleanly on decision-makers. Sometimes that’s socially desirable; sometimes it just produces stagnation.

Family or closely held firms are fascinating because they often take a longer view. A family that expects to pass a business down a generation has reasons not to strip-mine it. But they can also become insular, resistant to change, or poorly managed if competence doesn’t match inheritance.

Employee ownership—what economists often call worker cooperatives—doesn’t fail as broadly as people assume, but it has very specific limitations. The classic example is Mondragon Corporation, which has been quite durable. The difficulty is scaling and capital: workers tend to be risk-averse about their own jobs, so they may underinvest or avoid necessary restructuring. It’s not that the model “doesn’t work,” but it works best in certain sectors and cultures.

Customer ownership, like mutual insurers, is a clever inversion. Since policyholders are the owners, the incentive to exploit customers is reduced. Organizations like State Farm or Nationwide tend to emphasize stability and service over aggressive profit-taking. But again, the tradeoff is access to capital and sometimes slower innovation.

What ties all of this together is a deeper constraint: who bears risk, who controls decisions, and who gets residual profits. You can rearrange those three elements in different ways, but you can’t eliminate the tensions between them.

Your aside about employee ownership “not working very well” is worth sharpening rather than discarding. It often struggles in highly competitive, capital-intensive environments—but in more stable or locally rooted industries, it can be quite resilient. The failures tend to be quieter than corporate scandals, so they don’t leave as vivid an impression.

If there’s a unifying theme, it’s that no ownership structure escapes the need for discipline. Public companies get it from markets (sometimes too harshly), state firms from politics (often too erratically), cooperatives from internal consensus (sometimes too cautiously), and mutuals from member expectations (which can drift).

So the real question isn’t “which structure is best,” but which distortions are you willing to live with in exchange for which advantages. Different societies—and even different industries within the same society—answer that differently.

If you’re inclined, we could take a specific sector—say healthcare or energy—and see how these ownership models actually behave on the ground. That’s where the abstractions get interesting.

The corporation, except for the private ones, has a board of directors chosen by the owners, who watch over the interests of the owners, at least in theory, and who hire the corporate officers.

Yes—and that “at least in theory” is doing a lot of work.

Formally, the structure is exactly as you describe: shareholders elect the board, and the board hires (and can fire) management. The board is supposed to act as a buffer between ownership and day-to-day operations, providing oversight rather than running the business itself.

But in practice, a few frictions creep in.

First, ownership is often diffuse. In a large public company, no single shareholder has both the incentive and the information to closely monitor management. That’s where the principal–agent problem shows up again: the “owners” are scattered and mostly passive, while the “agents” (executives) are organized, informed, and in control of the flow of information.

Second, boards are not as independent as the textbook version suggests. CEOs often have significant influence over who gets nominated to the board, and directors may be socially or professionally connected to management. It’s not usually corruption in a crude sense—more a kind of mutual accommodation. Oversight becomes gentler than intended.

Third, incentives get blurred. Directors are typically compensated modestly relative to executives, and they meet only periodically. They rely heavily on information provided by the very management they are supposed to supervise. So unless something goes obviously wrong, boards tend to ratify rather than challenge.

There are, of course, counterweights. Large institutional investors—pension funds, sovereign funds, asset managers—can exert pressure. Activist shareholders sometimes force changes. Legal duties (like fiduciary responsibility) give courts a role, though courts are usually reluctant to second-guess business decisions unless there’s clear misconduct.

In closely held or family corporations, the structure is often tighter: the owners and the board may be the same people, so the monitoring problem is reduced—but then you risk insularity or lack of expertise.

So the board system is a kind of compromise. It’s meant to introduce accountability without making ownership unwieldy. It works tolerably well much of the time, but it’s rarely the vigilant guardian the theory imagines. It’s more like a part-time referee who steps in when the game gets rough, rather than controlling every play.

For the most part we can rely on the fact that there are, in a healthy economy, a number of corporations in a given business, to deal with incompetence. The social problems of anti-competitive behavior, abuses of all sorts, and of course damage to the environment require external observation and interventions.

That’s a sound division you’re drawing: competition handles performance; institutions handle behavior. When markets are genuinely competitive, incompetence tends to get punished without anyone needing to intervene. Firms that misprice, mismanage, or misjudge simply lose ground.

But that hinges on “genuinely competitive,” and that condition is more fragile than it looks.

In many industries, scale matters so much that you drift toward concentration—sometimes even without bad intent. Network effects, high fixed costs, or control of distribution can leave you with only a handful of serious players. At that point, the disciplining force of competition weakens, and you start seeing the need for things like antitrust law and oversight bodies such as the Federal Trade Commission. Not because every firm is misbehaving, but because the structure makes misbehavior easier to sustain.

There’s also a subtle point: competition can actually encourage certain bad outcomes if they’re profitable and not prohibited. If cutting environmental corners or using manipulative advertising improves margins, firms under competitive pressure may feel they must follow suit just to survive. That’s the darker side of efficiency—it doesn’t come with a moral compass. That’s where regulation isn’t just corrective, but preventive, setting the floor beneath which competition isn’t allowed to go.

Environmental damage is a textbook example. A company that fully internalizes its environmental costs may lose to one that doesn’t—unless rules level the field. Economists again would frame this in terms of externalities: without intervention, the market price simply doesn’t reflect the real cost.

One place I might gently refine your view is this: competition doesn’t always “deal with incompetence” cleanly. Sometimes incompetent firms survive because they’re large, politically connected, or simply entrenched. And sometimes highly competent firms produce socially undesirable outcomes because they’re too good at exploiting the rules as written.

So you end up with a three-part balance rather than a two-part one:

• Competition to drive efficiency and weed out some failures

• Regulation and law to set boundaries and correct market failures

• Governance and norms (boards, reputation, culture) to shape behavior inside firms

When those three are aligned, things work surprisingly well. When one weakens—say, competition fades or regulation is captured—the system starts to tilt.

Your framework holds up; it just needs that extra caveat: markets are good at selecting for success, but they are neutral about what kind of success they select for.

I agree with your caveat, but suggest it was implicit in what I said. Nevertheless, like most things, it is all messy and unappealing to an idealogue.

Yes—that was implicit in what you said. I think I was just dragging it out into the light a bit.

And you’ve put your finger on the deeper truth: this whole area resists clean theories. It’s untidy because it’s dealing with human incentives layered inside large systems. Any ideology that tries to make it neat—“markets solve everything” or “the state should run everything”—ends up shaving off the inconvenient parts of reality.

In practice, what we actually see are hybrid arrangements that would make a purist wince: regulated markets, quasi-public corporations, state-backed private risk-taking, industries that are competitive in some layers and monopolistic in others. Even something as straightforward as a “private company” often depends on public infrastructure, legal frameworks, and sometimes direct subsidy.

There’s also a kind of cycling over time. Periods of strong competition tend to produce concentration (the winners grow), which then invites regulation or breakup, which restores competition—at least for a while. You saw that with things like Standard Oil breakup, and later with AT&T antitrust breakup. Neither produced a permanent solution; they reset the system for a generation.

What makes it feel especially messy is that the “right” balance isn’t just technical—it’s political and cultural. Different societies tolerate different tradeoffs between efficiency, fairness, stability, and risk. There isn’t a single equilibrium; there are a range of workable ones.

So you end up not with a theory you can apply once and be done, but with something more like ongoing maintenance. Adjustments, corrections, occasional overreactions, and then corrections to those.

Not very elegant—but it does have the virtue of being real.

Worship and serving God

 

People often take words for granted and don't realize the word has little meaning. I have the word "worship" in mind. What is "worship?" People go to Buddhist temple and there sits a huge statue of the Buddha in all his glory, and people get on their knees and bow to it. You ask these people what they are doing, and you get an answer that is easy to translate "worship." But it isn't worship. Of course a Westerner translates it with that word, and thereby instantly doesn't understand what the Buddhist is doing. The Buddha is in Nirvana. That means he is "at peace" or "in bliss" or in a kind of heaven where everyone meditates all the time, or dead (extinct), it largely depends on the Buddhist sect you ask; most Buddhists don't give it much thought. As such the Buddha has no knowledge or even interest in the people honoring him in the Temple. "Honor" is probably the best translation. Does the Christian god demand worship? There are certainly enough Biblical passages that refer to giving him glory. That, I suppose, is worship. Why? When one glorifies God, it is not going to add even the tiniest bit to his infinite glory. You cannot add anything to infinity. Looked at closely, the concept seems unsophisticated if not primitive. OK, we "worship" God by loving him and doing his will and serving him here on the Earth. God commands us to do these things, not for his benefit but for ours. I wonder. Wouldn't it be better if we did these things on our own accord and not out of some indirect left-handed motive? How about we love God because we love him? How about we do his will because his will is what is good, and we do what is good on our own volition? As far as the last one goes, "serving God," this makes no sense. What can we do compared to his infinity? When someone says "I'm doing God's work," one can appreciate this as deep, but also see self-righteousness and maybe a little pride.

You’re putting your finger on a real problem: one English word trying to carry several very different human experiences. “Worship” is one of those words that looks solid until you lean on it—and then it wobbles.

In English, especially shaped by the traditions around the Christianity, “worship” tends to bundle together a few ideas: praise, submission, love, obedience, and sometimes even fear. It implies a relationship between a human being and a personal, aware, responsive God—one who can, at least in principle, receive what is being offered. That assumption is already doing a lot of work.

But when a Westerner walks into a Buddhist temple and sees people bowing before a statue of Gautama Buddha, the same word gets applied—and it quietly distorts what’s going on. In most forms of Buddhism, that gesture is not about feeding glory to a deity who is watching and judging. It’s closer to reverence, gratitude, imitation, even a kind of embodied reminder. You bow not because the Buddha needs it, but because you do. The act shapes the mind: humility, attention, aspiration. “Honor,” as you suggested, is already closer.

So right away, “worship” splits into at least two different things:
– offering something to a being
– doing something to oneself in the presence of an ideal

Those are not the same, even if they look identical from across the room.

Now, your question about God—why an infinite being would “demand” worship—is an old and serious one. Thoughtful theologians have wrestled with it for centuries. The more sophisticated answers tend to move in the direction you’re already pointing: God doesn’t need worship; rather, worship is what properly ordered creatures do. Not to increase God, but to align themselves with what is real and good.

In that view, “giving glory to God” is a bit like acknowledging the sun is bright. You’re not making it brighter; you’re seeing clearly. Refusing to do so isn’t modest independence—it’s a kind of distortion.

But that still leaves your discomfort intact, and I think rightly so. Because in practice, the language of “commanded worship” can sound like vanity projected onto the divine. It risks making God resemble a very large, very insecure monarch.

Your alternative—loving God because one loves, doing good because it is good—is actually quite close to what many religious thinkers would say is the highest form of devotion. Not obedience out of fear or calculation, but alignment out of understanding. In Christian language, that would be something like loving God “for His own sake,” not for reward or avoidance of punishment.

As for “serving God,” taken literally it does sound absurd—what could the finite possibly add to the infinite? The usual move there is to reinterpret it: one “serves God” by serving what God values—other people, justice, compassion, the created world. In other words, it’s indirect. Whether that feels meaningful or like a rhetorical sleight of hand depends on one’s temperament.

And your last point—about “doing God’s work”—yes, that phrase sits on a knife edge. It can express genuine humility (“I am part of something larger than myself”), or it can slide into self-importance very easily. The difference is often less in the words than in the person using them.

If you step back a bit, “worship” might best be understood not as a single act, but as a category of behaviors humans use to orient themselves toward what they take to be ultimate—whether that’s a personal God, an enlightened teacher, truth itself, or even moral ideals. The outward forms can look similar; the inner logic can be entirely different.

Your instinct—to strip away the word and ask what is actually happening—is exactly the right move. The word is doing less work than people think; the underlying human impulses are doing more.