“We love, because God first loved us.” (1 John 4:19, NRSV)
While it is not a usual topic amongst the staples of business studies, “life at home” comes up repeatedly in conversation relative to men and women in business. That this is the case is due to two reasons. First, as business men and women toil at their work and make all that money, they quite naturally look forward to and plan for a good and comfortable retirement in old age. Much of the dialogue therefore turns on how to retire well, and where to retire to – at home or in another setting. Then, secondly, conversations on this topic always draw out diverse commentaries on the pros and cons of reliance on household employees come retirement time.
An Asian business tycoon is so rich that he can afford to spend tens of millions Singapore Dollars to purchase resort bungalows in Singapore. And yet, with all that money, he and his wife seem grossly unhappy, for they do not – they never had, they say – faithful and trusted household “maids” or “servants”. The common lamentation these days -“Good help is hard to find” – takes on a raw reality with this wealthy couple. Their household employees do not obey instructions, so the report goes, thus giving them “headaches” and contributing to “unhappiness” and “disease” in their otherwise elitist and affluent lifestyle. “None of them ever stay long in their employment with us,” the couple is quoted saying. These employees, so it seems, are neither faithful nor trust-worthy, or so the couple sums up their “home team” definitively. This has prompted the couple to decide that in old age, they will not want to live at their own plush private home where they need to rely on household helps. They cannot imagine being dependent in old age on household employees who neither follow their instructions nor serve them well. Rather, they will much prefer to pay for – “we can afford it” – highly professional services in some exclusive institutions or at hotel penthouses. Never mind if those services are quite “impersonal”.
Asked why do they not want to work at treating the household helps nicely and building up a warm and loving, caring and durable relationship with them, the couple declare quite simply that they prefer to keep the master-servant relationship: “We pay them as servants and we just expect them to do what they are told to do. We keep them at arms’ length, so they can be more manageable. We cannot treat them like friends or family.
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The couple’s perspective is wholly secular, of course, which leaves a gaping hole in their vision. Six elements, amongst others, deserve attention.
- The Logic of Gift. To the couple, quite simply, the money comes from them, they have made all that money, they expect to get the services they pay for and if they do not, they dismiss the lot of the workers. They are in charge; they dictate the terms. Period. The logic of gift as an expression of fraternity so brilliantly articulated by Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate (paragraphs 34-36) has no place in the couple’s mentality at all. In the popular secular vision, which is an expression of the original sin, humans presume themselves to be the sole authors of themselves, their lives and the society in which they live. In this purely consumerist and utilitarian vision of life, what gets ignored is the experience of gratuitous gift. Out of God’s super-abundance, we have received so much in life. Recognising this gift turns us mere humans into transcendent beings capable of receiving with gratitude and going on to apply this transcendent force to build community. Where this element of gratuitous gift is ignored, and thus not received with gratitude, the self and its ego gets prioritized on every score and community-building does not appear even in the vocabulary. Where the principle of gratuitousness and the logic of gift as an expression of fraternity does not find its place in business or in domestic affairs, relationship-building is seriously curtailed. And so the couple, even though very wealthy, are not happy, imprisoned as they are by their own layer of silver.
- Wealth, Vanity and Pride. From Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness (Luke 4:1-13), we see how the devil works by way of “accuse and divide”. By innuendos, the evil one accuses God of this and that, in an attempt to sow seeds of doubt in the Son, thereby hoping to cause a rift between Father and Son. To accuse and divide is how the kingdom of the world works. The couple has adopted this very same modus, accusing their own household employees of all kinds of inadequacies, thereby unwittingly erecting a wall between employees and employers, resulting in a cold and stale relationship. Where love is missing, relationship suffers. On his visit to Mexico in 2016, Pope Francis on 14 February celebrated Mass in a poor neigbourhood in Ecatepec where he made a blistering critique against the tripartite temptations of wealth, vanity and pride which he said “lock us into a cycle of destruction and sin.” In a market system that leaves many without what they need, its wealth “tastes of pain, bitterness and suffering” as goods destined for all are seized for the use by the wealthy few, and is like poisonous bread that corrupts family and society. With vanity, the rich chase after short-lived fame. Imprisoned in pride, they falsely elevate themselves to a higher level than they truly are, feeling that they do not share the life of “mere mortals”. These three temptations “wear down and fracture the image which God wanted to form in us.” God dreams of being Father to all humanity, “of brotherhood, of bread broken and shared.” But these three great temptations, the lies of the devil, create a divided and fractious society, “a society of the few, and for the few.”
- Human Dignity. Of particular relevance to our reflection is the Pope’s insight concerning “the pain which arises when the dignity we carry within is not recognized.” This is the pain of indignity when domestic “servants” get treated by their wealthy “masters” with contempt instead of with love and respect. And so, a dimension seriously missing here is the respect for human dignity. Workers may be your paid employees, but they are first and foremost human subjects, always deserving to be adequately considered as children of God, divinely endowed with various dimensions of God-designed reality including being made in the image of God. As human subjects, they are always unconditionally deserving of respect and never to be treated dismissively with contempt, as mere objects and instruments.
- Building Human Relationships. What we have here is a serious case of the ignoring of human relationship. Repeatedly, the Vatican document Vocation of Business Leader emphasizes the need for business leaders to work hard at building and nurturing the right relationships. Cultivation of faithfulness and trust in a relationship takes time, work, patience and much more. It begins with love. Recall the Korean TV blockbuster series, The Merchant [商道], recognized by many in the Asian business community as the best parable for forming virtuous business leaders. The most powerful message from that series is that profit is not the goal of business. Business people must first aim at winning the hearts of whomever they deal with. Embodying this principle, the storyline depicts the main actor Lim Shanwo practising genuine love of neighbour, doing to others what he wanted them to do to him and never doing to others what he did not want them to do to him. That calls for making immense sacrifices, always giving people a fair deal and never taking advantage of the situations of weakness in which they happen to be caught, often foregoing huge profits, being tolerant and forgiving, behaving like the Good Samaritan by going out of his way to help suppliers and business competitors in dire need, and “conquering” one and all with radical love to the “scandalous” end. This is not something the couple in our story can understand. To them, profit is everything in business, and winning is the rule of the game. Their singular focus on a competitive edge demands that they are one up on you. They win and they walk away with all the winning, leaving not even a bone for you. When the same sharp business attitude is brought into the domus in the treatment of workers, is it any wonder that the couple is bitterly disappointed despite all that wealth?
- Love and Mercy, Forgiveness and Mutual-Acceptance. The couple, not being Christians, is excused for not knowing a key message in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The father in the parable does not allow the son to come home as a paid servant. A strictly “paid servant” mentality does not create the space for a warm relationship between employer and employee to develop, especially when the employer is bent on making sure the employee knows his or her status of servitude. But the father-figure in the parable insists on a familial relationship where love and mercy, forgiveness and mutual-acceptance prevail. This is the Kingdom-perspective which aims at building community, wholly different from a secular perspective. Clearly, the couple does not see that kindness is an instrument of mercy and that nourishing workers with kindness builds community which will redound to the couple’s benefit. But, unable to share love, they remain unhappy like the Rich Young Man who chooses to keep his great possessions to himself (Mark 10:17-22).
- Respect Is Earned, Not Demanded. Then, there is a crucial point which perhaps the couple has not realized or, at any rate, seems not to have practised, and that is respect is earned, and not demanded, even if you are wealthy. You just cannot buy respect. In fact, the reality may be a whole lot more serious than that. Call it jealousy, an inner revolt against social inequality, or a hatred for the rich’s wanton neglect of the Poor, or whatever psychological label you may prefer to give it, what often remains unspoken is the fact that a substantial part of the human population which is not wealthy tends to have an auto-triggered reverse-contempt for the wealthy, especially when the wealthy flaunt their wealth. It gets worse still, when the wealthy make demands or issue orders or in any way treat their domestic workers with contempt. Such behaviour is easily experienced by the workers as an oppression of the Poor by the rich. The reaction triggered by such a negative and dignity-trampling experience is quite naturally one of hatred. So one cannot get respect, unless one is willing to show respect to others. The attitude that “because I pay, you have to respect me” is a very hollow claim indeed.
Vocation of Business Leaders, a Vatican document, stresses the importance of business people learning and practising personal virtue – “those life-enhancing habits and qualities of character essential to any profession.” The Vatican text insists that, “in practice, there is no substitute for sound judgment (practical wisdom) and right relationships (justice).” Virtuous business leaders are the ones who can wisely manage the complexity and tensions arising in particular cases, both in the business and in the home front (VBL, 59).
In times of doubt, either in running the business or managing the household, business leaders do best if they respond “with love, so that their work is not merely an exercise in self-interest, but a cultivation of relationships, building communities of people” (VBL, 82). What the couple in our story has yet to learn is that, you may have the money to pay for professional services in old age, but you cannot pay for people to love you with warmth and sincerity. Love takes some working at, and money is not always the most important issue.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, December 2016. All rights reserved.
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