Against transactional thinking (and a parable)

The week of April 5th, which was a couple weeks ago now, was Eastern Orthodox Holy Week. I decided to take that week off from work, and the result was an unexpected reflection on my life and what is important to me. That inspired this post, which is part one of a two (or maybe more) part series.

I was raised in the Greek Orthodox church, a part of the family of Eastern Orthodox churches. For the uninitiated, Eastern Orthodoxy is the other branch of Christianity that resulted from the East-West schism. The "Western" church contains Catholicism and all other denominations you are probably familiar with. Unfortunately, throughout my life I have seen how Christianity has gotten a bad rap. And in some sense, that's probably justified. It has been used to justify conquest. Massacres have been committed by warring sects. More recently, there have been numerous child sexual abuse reports and scandals in the Catholic church especially, even one reported as recently as early March of this year, where a multiyear investigation revealed that dozens of priests in Rhode Island molested hundreds of victims over decades. Child sexual abuse happens even in the Eastern Orthodox Church, but it receives much less media attention in the west. A post on the Orthodox Church of America website is remarkably candid about this.

Perhaps the most abundant criticism of Christianity nowadays is that it asks its believers to believe unbelievable things, such as that a man lived who was God and also the Son of God and died by crucifixion and rose from the dead three days later, appearing to his followers. This is a lot to accept, not least because it is entirely incompatible with our modern understanding of reality. I think I speak for many of us, however, in saying that we all still wonder if there is something more beyond our day-to-day rhythm of work, make money, pay bills, watch Netflix, sleep.

Despite the dogma of the church, which I certainly have a difficult time accepting most of the time, I still remain active in the church. This Holy Week, I reflected on why, and the answers boiled down to the following,

I have an intuitive recognition of the presence of God in my life.
I somehow understand that the teachings of Jesus offer a way to live without anxiety or fear, in a way that is beautiful and selfless. My heart resonates with these teachings as the right way to live, as opposed to trying to hoard as much money as possible to become materially wealthy, and conceited and selfish as a result.
I have a deeply rooted community of friends in the church that I grew up with and still stay in touch with. More on this in the second part of this series.

In my view, it is not difficult to experience God. Consider how a tree's branches all move individually when struck by a breeze, and yet the tree dances in the wind. Look around at your greatest friends, and reflect on how they came into your life. I'll bet it was more-or-less by chance, and yet entirely consequential for how you have formed as a person. The warmth of the sun, heating and enlivening all things. The plants and animals that exist for us to marvel at and take care of. When reflecting on such things, I fill up with awe and gratitude, and I hope you do too. But I digress.

In this series of blog posts, I'd like to take you on a tour of spiritually inclined ideas that I find interesting but often don't share with others. In this first post, I'll raise awareness of the error of transactional thinking, and I'll wrap up by trying my hand at writing a parable.

The economy is zero sum

The language of money is universally spoken, but it is not universally expressive. Unpriced externalities, such as environmental side effects of the economic engine, are by definition unpriced--they exist outside of money's lexicon, and yet they materially affect us every day. The cancer burden is projected to keep growing, with harmful chemicals in our supply chain, developed with intent to increase the cheap supply of food, likely playing a significant role. Big Tech profits immensely from harvesting our attention through algorithmically curated infinite-scroll media to serve our brains as many advertisements as humanly possible, but a growing body of research suggests that this has been severely destructive to our attention spans, formation of narrative identity in adolescence, learning outcomes, literacy, and the ability to have spiritual experiences.¹ ²

As more externalities become apparent with each passing decade--or each passing year at this point--our return on investment from "implementing" the monetary system continues to vanish. The utility of money is that it provides a convenient interface for exchanging value between humans, but in exchange we give up what we actually live for: connection, love, warmth, service. This is not to say that free enterprise is inherently bad; rather, the pursuit of money—through business or otherwise—has blinded us to the needs of our neighbors. Instead of freely giving and freely receiving, a transactional pattern has been imposed onto all things—think "I will only help you if you deserve it or I am compensated."

As Rabbi Michael Knopf points out, one midrash on the Tower of Babel posits that this very same inversion is the error of the people building the Tower of Babel:

... the people were so passionate about building the tower, so convinced were they of its utter necessity, that they paid no mind if a worker on the tower fell to his death; whereas if a brick fell, they would wail and mourn and lament the setback. The peoples’ conviction of the justness of their cause, aided and abetted by the universality of their belief, diminished their humanity and their concern for the welfare of their fellow human beings.

Our economy is the new Tower. And the latest tier of the tower is nearly complete, in the form of artificial intelligence. AI has the potential to manifest immense good, and this is the version of the future I hope to push for and will continue to argue for in my writings. However, if additional tiers of the tower continue to be built, we may invite the wrath of God (perhaps in the form of the dreaded AI takeover…) who wants us to be proud individuals rather than conformers to the pursuit of a single-minded (and absent-minded) goal.

In the New Testament, Jesus also recognizes the perverseness of having money as the fabric of society. A classic example of this can be found in all four canonical gospels: Jesus' entry into the temple and subsequent outrage at those buying and selling within. Here is the version from Mark 11:15-19,

Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves, and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

This is one of the very few times in the New Testament where Jesus gets physically aggressive. It's a powerful image, and a relevant one. Our world is the new den and many corporations are the new robbers. Exploitation in the name of money happens every day billions of times over on Earth today. In America, our clothes are bought with modern slave labor. Our chocolate is bought with child labor in Africa.

Money can no longer be the interface if we are to live meaningful, moral lives. A life lived for money is zero sum. In death, money disappears, and for every dollar extracted from the economy, there is a potential friend that could have been made, or an idea that could have been shared, or a person in need who could have been helped.

Against the zero-sum life

This ethos of rejection of money as a mediator of value is illustrated further in how the early followers, the first people who can be called Christians, conducted themselves in the book of Acts. I have always found the early chapters of Acts to be particularly heartwarming, because they describe humans living in communion with each other and their surroundings. For example,³

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

This is diametrically opposed to the norms of our world. Taking this depiction at face value, it is clear that ownership as we conceive of it now did not exist in the early Christian community.⁴ The disciples' way of life sent ripples out into the world. Their commitment to nontransactional thinking allowed them to create a movement larger than themselves, so much so that I'm still writing about it now, 2000 years later.

Those who don't think transactionally have a willingness to be generous, to love, and to be unconcerned with what they will receive in return. This inspires everyone around them (I hope) to be better. If you aren't religious, now perhaps you can understand why people choose to go to church on Sunday to hear how Jesus and his followers interacted nontransactionally with the world.

The good news is that developing nontransactionality in thought is simple. Like anything else, it is a skill that can be practiced. Freely give, and freely receive.⁵ When someone is in need, do something for them without worrying about whether they will do something for you. Don't second guess anything, so that you do not "let your left hand know what your right hand is doing."⁶ When someone helps you, accept it with gratitude and don't worry about "repaying them" as if you owe them a debt, unless they ask you to.

This might seem like a losing proposition: we get taken advantage of, we give more than we take, how does this profit us? This is transactional thought programming at work. Why do we believe we get taken advantage of when we give more than we take? What "profit" are we looking for? There isn't a logical answer to this question, despite the desire I have to articulate it clearly for you on this page. Ultimately, letting go of transactionality is a choice.

I'm advocating for this simply because I believe our world is better for it. And you'll feel better for it. That is my platform.

Sendoff

Go forth, and be active rather than passive in the world. This is one of the themes of the "different way" that I plan on building up in this series of posts. Letting go of transactionality means becoming an active participant in the lives of other people, rather than passively allowing your trajectory to be guided by the transactional mode of seeking profit and paying back debts.

I hope to respond to my own call as well. I know I still have a journey ahead of me toward living actively and nontransactionally. This blog is part of that effort.

I'm sure this won't land for everyone, and that's okay. But if it lands for you, drop me an email and subscribe to my newsletter with the box at the bottom of the page. One of my goals with this blog is to start a community around this sort of thinking.

In the next part, I will recount a particularly moving experience from my adolescence which revealed to me the boundless love that can exist in social bonds between humans. Then, I will reflect on how modern Christianity may be turning into "just in case" religion, and propose an alternative path forward.

A parable

On a street there are three houses, each with a man living in it.

The first house has an exterior that is unkempt. The roof is in need of repair. But the poor and needy in the town know that this man will invite them in, so they come to his house, and he invited them in and feeds them and clothes them and gives them whatever they ask.

The second house is well kept externally. Visitors seldom enter the house and the man inside seldom ventures outside. This man has friends from across the city that he occasionally invites over, and they invite him over from time to time as well.

The third house is also well kept, and this man is always outside, inviting strangers passing by to come in. He even walks over to the doors of the first and second houses to invite those men to share a meal with him. “We are neighbors,” he says, “why should we not be friends?”

A curious traveler came to this city and stopped at each of the three houses. In the first house, he was received with kindness because he knocked on the door. The man inside gave the traveler bread and some money. The second house did not open its door to the traveler even after persistent knocking. The man in the third house ran out to greet the traveler as he was walking towards the house. The man then invited the traveler inside where he already had others from around the city at the table. They laughed and ate and shared themselves with each other.

The traveler asked the man, “why do you do this?”

The man replied, “I give food and drink and whatever I can offer so that thieves do not steal. I offer up my house so that vagrants have a place to rest their heads. I regard all as friends so that no one is lonely. I keep my house so that it is inviting and run out to greet people so that no one is afraid to ask anything of me.”

The traveler left the third house full and content and filled with happiness. He said, “I will never forget the man in the third house.”