Complexity in Global Warming: On the Imprint of Pride

It would be incorrect to claim that the planet’s atmosphere and oceans are both getting warmer in a linear, across-the-board way. The existence of exceptions, such as the slightly cooler average summers in some places in the interior of North America, no longer allows for credible claims of climate-change denial, an agenda that was financed and promoted in part by fossil-fuel companies in the U.S. and E.U. before being totally repudiated by science. Indeed, the credibility of natural science vastly exceeds that of corporations with vested financial interests. Rather than discuss those, which have become better known to the public, I want to describe the sheer complexity of a generally warming planet, which is rarely adequately grasped by non-scientists, and delve into the sordid self-love that I contend is ultimately behind global warming. 

Comparing summers of the past 30 years as of 2025 with the 1901-1960 average, the 48 contiguous American States showed “large changes I some regions, especially the West, and very muted ones in the central and southeast” States.[1] The “limited warming and even slight cooling in some locations” was “strikingly apparent.”[2] For example, Tuscaloosa County in Alabama cooled 0.6F since the first half of the twentieth century.[3] Lest this fact be taken as a rebuttal or counter-fact to “global warming,” Joseph Barsugli, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado cautions, “There are not too many places on the planet that are showing this, honestly.”[4] In fact locations in the interior of North America that have shown slight cooling are “an oddity amid a warming climate, as the general pattern is that the world’s land areas are warming up more quickly than the oceans. Europe, for instance, is one of the fastest warming land areas on the planet.”[5]

“According to the ERA5 dataset of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S)” in 2025, Europe, rather than North America, had achieved the honor of being the fastest-warming continent; in fact, it had been warming by “approximately 0.53C per decade since the mid-1990s,” and the Arctic was “warming even faster—around 0.69C per decade.”[6] Even the linearity in “0.53C per decade” is an over-simplification and thus it should not be projected out from 2025 to even 2035.  Although not directly impacting the summer heating, the Gulf Stream, an ocean current that brings relatively warm water from Florida to northern Europe, was still active, albeit slowing down, during the winter of 2024-2025. Should that conveyor-belt cease to function due to the influx of cold fresh-water from melting ice in the Arctic, European winters would be much colder, and that would lower the overall warmth of Europe annually and could even have an impact on the summer heat—which way, I do not know; the complexity easily surpasses my ken as I am not a climatologist.

My point is precisely that the complexity, including feedback loops that have already been set in motion by warming that had already occurred before the mid-2020s and are entirely natural and thus cannot be stopped, still eludes even the grasp of the scientists who study the phenomenon of climate change. The E.U.’s southern States in particular were extraordinarily hot during the summer of 2025, and no one could then predict if or when the Gulf Stream might shut down in the Atlantic Ocean. The human impact on Earth’s atmosphere and oceans had already gone beyond what human minds or computers could project in terms of the future. The negligence on population growth and pollution by business around the world during the 20^th century came with the convenient implicit assumption that the impact would not compromise or even extinguish our species, including homo sapiens being able to think its way to counter such wide-scale effects. In fact, the inherent or innate underlying human problem goes beyond cognition being limited relative to human prowess.

The preeminence of the self, in a narrow self-love according to Augustine, is pride, “the beginning of all sin.”[7] In other words, “’the love of personal pre-eminence’ (amor excellentiae propriae) . . . means not simply ‘love of money’ but that ‘general avarice’ which makes a [person] seek for ‘something more than is fitting’, ‘for the sake of [one’s] own pre-eminence and through a kind of love of possession (quemdam propriae rei amorem)’.”[8] Whereas Aquinas would contend that greed is the prime sin, Augustine hung his hat on pride as the root of all evil, from which greed, or the desire for more sans limit, as evinced by not only the executives and shareholders of fossil-fuel companies, but also consumers who refused to constrain their use of electricity and gas/petro for driving cars rather than taken buses, trolleys, and subways in the last half of the 20^th century and the first quarter of the next century. The impulse preferring instant gratification for the self over the public or common good was continuously given enough rope even to possibly choke the species eventually. 

The strategic use of regulation and contributions to political campaigns for influence rendered not only people running corporations culpable, but also elected representatives and appointed regulators in government. The comfortable, mutual back-scratching relations between people in business and government could easily betray even the medium-term general good. 

In other words, allowing a lower good to surmount a higher good, which Aristotle called misordered concupiscence, for private and thus narrow immediate gain, is incredibly short-sighted and humanity even in the mid 2020’s was coming to realize that time was catching up and it was already time to begin “paying the piper” for all the accumulated political, economic, and social/cultural lapses that had contributed to excessive CO2 emissions. 

To be sure, the extent of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere relative to a human being could easily give people the misimpression of not being able to significantly alter the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans; but humanity should also have been sufficiently concerned about the exponential increase in the human population through the 20^th century, even with two world-wars to grasp the necessity of constraining that increase as well as the consumption of energy by individuals and the pollution of companies geared to supplying the greatly expanded population’s consumption.

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1. Chris Mooney, “The Strange Divide in How Americans Experience Summer Temperatures,” CNN.com, August 19, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. The E.U. Climate Change Service, “Why Are Europe and the Arctic Heating Up Faster than the Rest of the World?” 14 July, 2025.
7. Augustine, De Gen. ad litt. XI. 18ff, as quoted in John Burnaby, Amor Dei: Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), p. 120.

8. John Burnaby, Amor Dei: Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), p. 120. Burnaby quotes from Augustine, De Gen. ad litt. XI. 18ff.

 

 

Climate Change in Europe: On the Culpability of the Media

A report by the E.U. Copernicus Climate-Change Service in 2024 contains the finding that “Europe is the continent with the fastest-rising temperatures on Earth, having warmed twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s.”[1] In spite of “fastest-rising” and “twice as fast” are alarming expressions, no such corresponding sense of urgency had translated into a political will capable of pushing through game-changing legislation and regulations in the European Union. The short-term financial interests of industry, cost-conscious consumers, workers not wanting to be laid off, and taxpayers would pale in comparison were a sense of emergency to take hold the domain of politics. “Weak” states (i.e., governments) that are not willing or even able to resist short-term political pressures from an electorate exacerbate the problem even in the midst of climate change, which scientists decades earlier had predicted would really begin to move the needle on air-temperatures globally in the 2020s (and just wait until the oceans become saturated with CO₂!). You ain’t seen nothin yet may be the mantra for the 2030s.

It seems to be a case of the proverbial oblivious frog in gradually yet steadily warming water in a cooking pan on a stove, as the editors at journalistic media companies have been orienting their news to reporting on specific climate-related events that are disasters only in particular locales and thus do not point explicitly to global warming. For instance, on 4 July, 2025, a wildfire in the E.U. state of Greece “prompted evacuations in coastal areas south of Athens” and mobilized “75 firefighters, including five elite ground teams . . . alongside fire engines, volunteers, four helicopters, and two aircraft” as well as municipal water trucks.[2] “(O)ngoing heatwaves, drought and strong winds” kept the fire-risk high in the area.[3] Only at the end of Euronews’ article on the fire is climate change mentioned, and then only as an attenuating factor: “While fires are common in the area, experts say climate change is exacerbating them.”[4] That is to say: Oh, by the way, the warming of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans is in play here. Even as climate change is relegated thusly, that it is only exacerbating wildfires in the southern states such as Greece is a way of deflating claims that climate change ought to be handled as an emergency in terms of public policy. The media has thus been culpable.  

1. David O’Sullivan, “Firefighters Battle Wildfires in Greece and Turkey, Prompting Evacuations and Emergency Response,” Euronews.com, July 4, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

The Summer Solstice: Astronomy Is Not Meteorology

It boggles the mind that the same meteorologists who know that June, July, and August days are counted when calculations are made on the average temperature for summer nonetheless broadcast the summer solstice that falls three weeks into June as the first day of summer. To do so in the context of weather forecasts is nothing short of intellectually dishonest. To an unfortunate extent, those meteorologists may simply be following the herd of tradition at the expense of thinking for oneself. The human brain is suited for much more than a herd-animal mentality.
 
“What’s the difference between meteorological and astronomical seasons? These are just two different ways to carve up the year. While astronomical seasons depend on how the Earth moves around the sun, meteorological seasons are defined by the weather. [Meteorologists] break down the year into three-month seasons based on annual temperature cycles. By that calendar, spring starts on March 1, summer on June 1, fall on Sept. 1 and winter on Dec. 1.”[1] Therefore, meteorologists who broadcast the summer solstice, which falls between June 20-22 depending on the year (as per leap years), as the first day of summer can be reckoned as intractable herd animals in their own profession. Distinct from the weather, as “the Earth travels around the sun, it does so at an angle relative to the sun. For most of the year, the Earth’s axis is tilted either toward or away from the sun. That means the sun’s warmth and light fall unequally on the northern and southern halves of the planet. The solstices mark the times during the year when this tilt is at its most extreme, and days and nights are at their most unequal. During the Northern Hemisphere’s summer solstice, the upper half of the earth is tilted toward the sun, creating the longest day and shortest night of the year. This solstice falls between June 20 and 22.”[2] This does not signify the first day of summer in terms of climate or weather, and yet too many meteorologists continue to mislead the public by stating on a weather graphic that the first day of summer falls on the summer solstice.
At most, meteorologists should constrain themselves on the summer solstice to announcing that daylight hours are most on that day (and least on the winter solstice, which falls well into December rather than on December 1, which is the first day of winter as we know it. By June 20-22, summer as we know it here below on Earth is well underway. During that week in 2025, parts of North America and Europe were already in a heat-wave, so it would be ludicrous to claim—especially by meteorologists as they should know better—that meteorological summer has just begun. And yet the basic category mistake continued unabated.

A television station in Boston, MA misleading the public as if June 20, 2025 were the first day of meteorological summer even though the graphic itself shows a heat-wave coming up! (left). On the right, Weather.com shows the forecast high then for London, UK. Obviously, June 20, 2025 was not the first day of meteorological summer in the Northern Hemisphere, so the claim to the contrary by meteorologists is nothing short of puffed up ignorance based on a category mistake broadcasted publicly by people who should know better because weather is their profession. Meteorology and astronomy are distinct domains, even though they are related. Maybe meteorologists in London should have telephoned those in Boston to pass on the tip that 90F in London is well into meteorological summer rather than its first day. 

That cognitive phenomenon is aptly described by Nietzsche in regard to his infamous claim that God it dead. Even though he states that he is referring to a particular conception of God—the Abrahamic one in which God is both vengeful and omnibenevolent—he is been thought to have been an atheist. Rather, his claim that adding “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” to a deity that is omnibenevolent is to place an internal contradiction in that conception of the divine, as vengeance contradicts benevolence. The people responsible for this contradiction had no idea what they had done—their murderous act of discrediting an extant conception of the divine. Like light coming from the most distant star but not yet reaching Earth, news of their own deed did not arrive to them even as they had blood on their hands. Similarly, news of committing a category mistake has not reached the meteorologists who know that calculations regarding temperatures in a summer include June, July and August and yet broadcast that the first day of meteorological summer doesn’t “arrive” until the astronomical “summer” solstice. News of their own confusion and conflation hasn’t reached them yet, and yet their recurrent deed should be obvious to them especially, as their profession is meteorology. Perhaps astronomers could step and change the names of the astronomical “seasons”—not even using that word—so the public might realize that astronomy and meteorology are two distinct, albeit related, domains. Even astronomy is misleading in this respect in calling quadrants of the Earth’s orbit “seasons.” Therefore, I submit that the professions of both meteorologists and astronomers are at fault in enabling the confusing category mistake wherein two distinct domains are conflated. 

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1. The Associated Press, “Sunshine Abounds as the Summer Solstice Arrives,” APnews.com, June 20, 2025.
2. Ibid.

 

RBI Overheating India’s Economy: On Materialist Greed Fueling Ceaseless Consumerism

A phenomenon as massive as the global coronavirus pandemic, which ran from 2020 to 2022, is bound to have major economic ripple, or wave, effects in its wake. India’s record high 9.2% growth of GNP in the 2023-2024 fiscal year illustrates the robust thrust of pent-up demand met with increased supply. To the extent that consumption over savings is the norm in any economy, a couple years off can subtly recalibrate economic mentalities to a more prudent economic mindset wherein saving money is not so dwarfed by spending it. Moreover, putting the brakes on a consumerist routine and societal norm can theoretically lead to putting the underlying materialism in a relative rather than an absolute position and thus in perspective. Yet such a “resetting” must overcome the knee-jerk instinct of any habit to restart as if there had been no change. Coming back to college, for example, after a summer away, students tend to pick up their respective routines right away as if the recent summer were a distant memory. India’s astonishing rate of economic growth just after the pandemic demonstrates that the penchant for consumerism and economic growth as a maximizing rather than satisficing variable returned as if the steeds in Socrates’ Symposium—only those horses represent garden-variety eros sublimated to love of eternal moral verities, to which Augustine substituted “God.”

India’s central bank sought to spur economic growth in early June, 2025, by again lowering interest rates so as to increase the supply of money in the economy amid lower economic growth and inflation than anticipated. “The repo rate—the level at which the central bank lends money to commercial banks, influencing borrowing costs for home and car loans—[stood] at 5.5%, the lowest in three years.”[1] Even though India’s economy had grown by only 6.5% in the fiscal year ending in March—enough for India to still have “the world’s fastest expanding major economy”—RBI governor Sanjay Malhotra said the central bankers believes it was “imperative to stimulate domestic consumption and investment.”[2] Imperative? Such urgency and intensity point to a consumption-led approach to economics on steroids.

Although 6.5% is less than 9.2%, the economy was obviously larger in 2025 than it had been in 2022 and 2023 so the comparison is misleading in regard whether the incremental amount of GNP is sufficient cause for worry and a legitimate reason to stimulate the economy by lowering interest rates yet again. I submit that both 9.2% and 6.5% are artificially high as economic growth figures in that both occurred in reaction to the slowdown of the economy during the pandemic. It was unrealistic in 2025 to expect such growth rates to continue through the remainder of the 2020s. Furthermore, stimulating from the 6.5% growth-rate risked overheating the economy, which could easily spark inflation above the central bank’s threshold, especially as inflation was so close to RBI’s 4% target—retail inflation having been 3.16% in April, 2025. The prudence of Titanic’s captain in resisting pressure from the White Star company to light the fourth boiler in order to speed up even at night with iceberg warnings having already been received seems to have eluded the bankers in India in 2025, more than a century after the floundering of the ship that could not sink.

The lack of prudence stemmed in part from a maximizing rather than a homeostatic paradigm regarding an economy. Maximizing consumption rather than holding it steady, such that surplus earnings could go into savings for a rainy day, is bound to run out of steam at some point. Lighting the fourth boiler because economic growth has dropped to a mere 6.5% is ultimately fueled by greed, which, as the desire for more, is inherently maximizing. Government in general, and a central bank in particular, functions in the public interest by channeling or resisting the excesses of greed, rather than by incessantly facilitating it. Managing a soft landing from the effects of pent-up demand from a global pandemic rather than pretending that annual growth rates of 9% are and should be sustainable reveals the great difference that exists between maturity and being oriented to instant gratification. The latter, after all, is responsible for climate change in the age of Man, and overheating an already-growing economy adds appreciably to pollution.

In short, the habit of maximizing consumption established even as a paradigm is in need of transparency and modification, lest our species go extinct from its own socio-economic mentality. Economizing need not pierce the semi-permeable, over-arching net of ecologizing forces that can protect us from ourselves if we will to exercise control over our economizing instinct. Besides doing so ourselves, governmental institutions can do so if they are not populated by the hyperextended mentality that treats increasing consumption as a perpetual end in itself.

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1, Nikhil Inamdar, “India Central Bank Delivers Sharp Rate Cut as Growth and Inflation Fall,” BBC.com, June 6, 2025.
2. Ibid.

Spirituality in the Workplace: Dealing with a Dysfunctional Culture

Mohan Vilas, a Hindu monk at Govardha Ecovillage, spoke at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga Conference in 2025. He had gone from the world of financial derivatives to worshipping Krishna. Once he had fulfilled his “lower needs,” he looked for more. After obtaining a M.B.A. and while working in finance, he was hungry for knowledge beyond the world of business. So he studied ancient Vedic culture. His talk at the conference was on being an idealist surrounded by strategists. He addressed the question of whether the world allows individuals to practice virtue. Even when a person is not in a dysfunctional workplace or in a hostile society, the human mind struggles, Vilas said, to apply ethical virtues. Plato’s dictum that to know the good is enough do the good, and thus to be good, may be wildly optimistic, considering the instinctual force of urges in our nature to act immorally, even though other people are harmed as a result. It is even more difficult to get into a habit of doing good while “swimming upstream” in an ethically compromised workplace or an aggressive societal culture. An ethical Russian or Israeli soldier in the mid-2020s, for example, would have a lot of trouble refusing to bomb hospitals in Ukraine and Gaza, respectively, and, moreover, invading another country and withholding food so to starve an occupied group. Such a soldier would be intolerable to both Putin and Netanyahu, respectively. Vilas’s question is the following: What happens when a person who is good is put into a selfish society? Must an ethical person finally inevitably exit a culture that rewards narrow selfishness, passive-aggression and deception?

The full essay is at "Spirituality in the Workplace."

Political religion: Hitler Youth

In 2025 at Harvard, Madeline Levy presented her dissertation in progress in a graduate-student research workshop, which I was privileged to attend in my capacity as a research scholar at Harvard. She was presenting how the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany appropriated from religion politically, thus in a secular context yet with the aura of a religious cult. Interestingly, most of the kids in the program had been in church groups. Almost two decades earlier, I had audited a course on Nazi Cinema at another university; the course was taught by an 81-year-old German man who had been forced into Hitler Youth. Unlike Stalin’s cinema, which was blatant Soviet propaganda, Nazi cinema was escapist (not counting the anti-Jew propaganda “documentaries”). In contrast, Hitler Youth was hardly escapist, as the program was steeped in Nazi ideology. Although that ideology was secular, casting even Catholic Europe as an enemy, Levy was making the case that religious paraphernalia was incorporated in the program nonetheless. She brought up the element on ontology, or being, which in turn led me to draw on philosophy to explain the kids as becoming moral agents in a Kantian sense. Although philosophy and theology are distinct, both can be applied to political theory in a historical context.

In using the term, political religion, Levy related another expression, that of the “sacralization of politics,” which can include the appropriation of religious language, rituals, and symbols to the exclusion of traditional religions, and tying of these artifacts to secularization narratives.  That affect and motive are salient, according to Levy, is interesting because belief (a type of cognition) has been so salient in the Abrahamic religions. Even in Hitler Youth, there was a creed, and perhaps a “confirmation” event at which the kids, assuming agency, formally assented to the set of beliefs.

In thinking more generally of religious appropriation by the Nazi Party, I raised the question of whether Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will evinces religious-like ritual, as, for example, in showing the torch march, in which neo-pagan/druidic elements may be present. In showing an event—the annual Nazi party meeting—the film can be said to have a narrative structure, as does myth. Furthermore, regarding the Nazi flag with blood stains from the brief Nazi uprising in Munich in 1923, Hitler touching other flags with that flag in order to “sacralize” them treats that flag as a sacred object having a distinct, set-apart, ontological status powerful enough to “turn on” those other battle-flags. Images of Jews in a synagogue touching a wrapped Torah as it is led down an aisle may come to mind, to which Levy brought up the sacral object consecrated in the Christian Eucharistic liturgy and even processed.

Levy also claimed that Hitler was held up as a prophet in the sense of being an intermediary, and even as truth to power before 1933. In the Old Testament, the prophets tended to be thorns in the side of rulers, such as Nathan is to King David, whereas even before assuming power in Germany, Hitler’s role within the party, and later, Deutschland, was that of power. Therefore, it seems to be that Hitler’s intermediary role can be better labeled in terms of the divine right of kings, by which God sanctions absolute political (not divine!) power to human kings, who in turn can be thought of as partaking in a finite means of the divine attribute of omnipotence, without being divinized.

Unlike the practice of the ancient Romans, Hitler did not claim to be, and was not, divinized. Instead, after the failed assassination attempt in 1944, Hitler claimed on the radio that he had been narrowly spared by divine providence to complete his mission; President Trump would make the same claim in after having narrowly missed a bullet at a campaign event in 2024. In the case of Hitler, the irony in implicitly invoking the Abrahamic deity as sparing Hitler so he could finish the Final Solution reflects Hitler’s distinction of the Jews from Judaism, which in turn made it possible for him to appropriate from religion, including in the Hitler Youth program.

Levy’s thought on appropriation of religious symbol, myth, and ritual in the Hitler Youth program centered on ontology (i.e., reality) as the nature of being, as in holy blood being related as Germanic spirit to the human soul. Here, the sacred is a marking out of being, whereas the profane is non-being. In this sense, Leibniz’s notion of God as perfect being is relevant. In setting apart a special race, which itself may remind us of God having a “chosen people” in Judaism, the “setting apart” feature of the process of sacralization is evinced even in terms of sacred objects, such as a flag, that are ritually and mythically set apart ontologically in going beyond mere symbol. Even though the Aryan race is “set apart” in Nazi ideology, individual Germans, even the young people in Hitler Youth, knew that the individual can and even should be expendable for the collective. That is to say, a young person in Hitler Youth reached the point of being a moral agent in being able to realize the moral duty of sacrifice as binding even as the agent thereby knows oneself to have freedom (of choice). This is basic Kantianism applied here not to critique the Nazi ideology, but to understand moral agency within it.

Kant argues that the moral law applies to finite rational beings (i.e. us), and that the recognition of being a moral agent (i.e., in realizing that I ought to have a certain motive or do something) must be premised on being free to do otherwise. I ought to do X means that I have the freedom not to do X. Kant’s theory maintains that such freedom is ontological, or noumenal, rather than being merely in the realm of appearance. Paradoxically, the necessitation of the moral law is conditioned on the reality of freedom of moral agents.

Whether Hitler Youth had a “confirmation” ceremony or not, at some point, a participant would have realized that the freedom of the individual includes the moral law’s necessity as the duty to sacrifice oneself for the collective. Because reason has absolute value as the means by which value is assigned to things (and other rational beings), and individuals are finite rational beings, however, the duty of an individual rational being to be sacrificed for a collective, which is not a rational being, is ethically problematic. Even Hobbes insists that individuals have the right to act to extend their self-preservation even when the political sovereign is trying to kill them. Even so, that Kant’s moral theory can be used to critique the deontological or deontic, duty-based, moral dimension of Hitler Youth is not to say that the participants were not intended to become moral, duty-based (rather than utilitarian) agents. Perhaps this gets at Levy’s interest in the role of agency in Hitler Youth.

In short, the secularization of religious symbol, myth, and ritual played a political role in Nazi Germany, including in Hitler Youth. This is not to say that Hitler was divinized or that any religion was adopted as the state religion, as in a theocracy. In terms of the duty-based ethics that ironically discounted to ontology of the individual in favor of that of the collective, the Germanic people, the political “religion” could only play a supporting, or background, role because theology and philosophical ethics are distinct domains even though they intersect. Levy’s notion of ontology as existentialist (i.e., of being) can be bifurcated between that of a distinctly religious transcendent ontology and an ethical ontology, such as Kant’s claim that the freedom of the will is “a fact of reason” that has a noumenal rather than merely phenomenological basis. The difference is that a distinctly religious transcendent referent is inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (Pseudo-Dionysius), whereas Kant’s fact of reason is, well, of reason, and is thus not transcendent in the sense that a religious object is. Therefore, although capable of being related, theology, philosophy (i.e., ontology and ethics) and political theory should not be conflated. Perhaps this too is a fact of reason.

A Hindu Business Ethic

Applying a religion such as Hinduism to business is laudatory. Undercutting any benefits of doing so, however, is the advocation of religious principles that are so unrealistic in the business world that they undercut the credibility of the project itself. John D. Rockefeller was a Baptist who taught Sunday school at his church even as he pushed competitors out of business who refused to be bought out by Rockefeller’s refining monopoly, Standard Oil Company. To be sure, after retiring, he gave away about half of his $800 million (1913 dollars), but he did not claim that his personal generosity justified his earlier restraint of trade as a monopolist. Rather, he claimed to be more of a “Christ figure” as a monopolist than he was next as a philanthropist. In my study on Rockefeller, I concluded that he was delusional, yet to some extent well-intended, given the destructive competition that was ravaging small businesses in the refining industry during the 1860s. Rockefeller thought of his giant as saving the otherwise presumably drowning competitors, but Jesus in the Gospels does not drown people who are unwilling to be converted. Clearly, the application of religion to business can be abused, including in being much too idealistic, even utopian, and in being used to justify egregious economic tactics and even greed itself.

The full essay is at "Hinduism Applied to Business."