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."
