What's wrong with the United States? The Protestant Work Ethic.
Professor Galloway "on follow your passion".
His advice?
Don't.
More particularly, his advice is dedicated yourself relentlessly to something you are good at, and it will become your passion, in no small part as you'll make money at it.
There's plenty of evidence that's right. . . and just as much that it's wrong.
Professor Galloway is a Calvinist. He comes by it naturally as his father is from Scotland.
Oh, sure, you'll note that Galloway states he's an atheist. Well, like a lot of people who are something on an existential level, he doesn't know what he actual is. And what that is, is a Calvinist. Perhaps a cultural Calvinist, but a Calvinist.
And it was Calvin, not the Church of England, or the Lutherans, who gave us the Protestant Work Ethic.
Well, that's great, right?
Not so much.
John Calvin was as French radical Protestant reformer who was grim in his outlook and basically an asshole. One of his central core beliefs was double predestination, which held that from the moment of conception almost everyone was going to Hell.
Calvin taught that all men must work, even the wealthy, because to work was the will of God. Irrespective of their ultimate fate, which they could in no way impact, it was the unyielding duty of men (and I do men men) to toil here on Earth as part of God's plan to continue the creation of the Earth. Men were not, in his view, to become wealthy, I'd note, but were to reinvest the fruits of their labor over and over again, ad infinitum, or to the end of time.
Calvin held that using profits to help others rise from a lessor level of subsistence violated God's will since persons could only demonstrate that they were among the Elect through their own labor.
The Puritans were Calvinists, and so were the Presbyterians, the latter of which has generally slacked up on Calvinist theology a great deal. None the less, the impact of Calvinism on the US has been huge. It founded the thesis that you should work and work, well past the point where accumulation of wealth made any sense. When you look at people like Elon Must or Donald Trump who have vast sums of wealth but keep accumulating, you are seeing the Protestant work ethic at work.
You are also seeing it when you lay people off in droves. They're lessors, and their economic plight is existentially foreordained. If they were among the Elect, this wouldn't be happening to them.
Work is what it's all about.
You see that well expressed in Galloway's comments. Galloway is an opponent of Musk, but they have essentially the same view on work. Galloway presents in the grim Calvinist style. You must find productive and useful work and love it, as that's the ticket to everything.
It isn't.
Contrary to what Galloway things, for one things, there are plenty of people who have done well in their carers and know a lot about what they do and hate it. The legal profession is a poster child for this, but I've found it to be the case for medicine as well.
And women have become particularly the victim of this in recent years, diving hard into careers as, John Calvin has told them, this would affirm that they were part of the Elect, in the modified American social view, only to find that they are miserable.
And all this because Calvin was flat out wrong. His theology was wrong, and his understanding of human beings appallingly wrong.
The Catholic view has been much more nuanced than the Protestant one. Catholicism itself holds to a degree that we work, because we have to, work being one of the results of the Fall. It also hold, however, that we toil as part of a community and are never to put that aside. The accumulative nature of the Protestant Work Ethic is basically antithetical to Apostolic Christianity, although there are certainly Catholics, such as Bill Gates, who have become extremely wealthy. Largescale wealth, however, comes in Catholic theology with a heavy burden to everyone else. Unlike Calvinist, you can't really morally justify investing over and over while those less well off suffer in your presence. Indeed, that would be one of the four sins God hates.
Okay, so why is this a problem?
It's a massive problem in that deep in American culture is an anti human dedication to acquisition and toil, that's why. People are expected to work themselves to death and tolerate those among us who acquire vast wealth. Ultimately, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, who often have simply benefitted from the circumstances of their birth takes from everyone else, makes millions miserable, and actually makes the economy less and less productive.
Society doesn't exist to generate wealth for those who can accumulate. Society exists for society. That means, at the end of the day, that some must be protected, for the good of us all, from their appetites, weather that appetite be for drugs, dissolute living, or avarice.
The fact that we have forgotten this is literally destroying the country.
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