The only thing good and greed share is their first letter g. The accumulation of great personal wealth beyond a certain measure should be humiliating, embarrassing and shameful. Pull back the blankets on today’s international tragedies and the disparity of wealth joined with an ambition driving people to accomplish personal accumulations of wealth colors everything. Efforts to redistribute wealth seem to invariably end up in violence and quite frankly the proper formula for any kind of redistribution is perpetually elusive. What is a formula but a standardized arrangement of decision points that consistently deliver a desired outcome regardless of the collaterals. Once established, the value of a formula is you can relax and not think about either the process or the outcome. The great moral failure of our age might just be that we believe that morality can be subordinated to a formula or prescription. Morality begins with the individual, the individual’s community mixed into the day’s context. Today’s so called culture wars are really nothing more but a pathetic struggle over the definition of ‘good’ and good is not containable in either definition or formula. 

Greed is a failure to reinvest excess wealth directly into the common good. Our economies, like it or not, are and will remain centrally capitalistic in nature given our current dependence on competition to stir the soul to performance. Greed disguises itself as high performance. But that said we reside over and ignore a wealth of religious and spiritual traditions that contradict that the assumptions of pure performance. I think this Project called The Good Decision is designed to help us return to the core moral and ethical precepts of our traditions as well as the hard work of contemplation and thought required to live a moral and ethical life. Wealth beyond the reasonable needs of the a good life should felt as a burden to be discharged. Moral humiliation needs to curb today’s world wide crisis arising out of the unexamined celebration of excessive personal wealth. What is humiliation? The process that forces us all to acknowledge that despite everything, we are only human.