Sarah Connor

The Seven Deadly Sins – at the Scale of a Civilization. More than fourteen centuries ago, Christian monks drew up a list of seven sins. Not laws – a map of the human heart. Envy. Pride. Wrath. Sloth. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. It is still pretty much the most accurate psychology anyone has written. The monks were looking at one soul at a time. Look at whole systems instead, and you find the same seven. A vice that stays private ruins one life. Scaled up, it becomes an institution: a tax, a ministry, an ideology, a budget line. People will always have vices. The question is who pays for them. Adam Smith noticed that we owe our dinner not to the butcher’s kindness but to his self-interest. A free market does not abolish greed – it puts it to work: you get rich only by serving others, and you go bankrupt if you don’t. The vice pays its own bill. Bad systems let the vice send its bill to someone else – the taxpayer, the next generation, the innocent. A good civilization does not abolish sin. It sends the bill to the sinner. So here is what comes next, one sin at a time: 1. Envy – the engine of socialism. If I can’t have it, nobody should. 2. Pride – the planner’s conceit, from Plato’s philosopher-king to the Brussels directive. 3. Wrath – vengeance without trial, from the guillotine to cancel culture. 4. Sloth – comfort as a political program, from bread and circuses to the empty cradle. 5. Greed – the one everybody expects us to defend. We won’t: crony capitalism, the bailout, private profit and public loss. 6. Gluttony – debt. Eating the future. 7. Lust – pleasure cut off from its consequences, and from children. And then the cures: the four old virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude – and the institutions that make them stick. The monks thought sin was a matter for the confessional. They were half right. It is also a matter for the budget. Show me a country’s budget, and I will tell you which sins it subsidizes. First up: Envy. Envy – the Engine of Socialism. A genie appears to a peasant: "I’ll grant you one wish." The peasant thinks for a long time. His neighbor has a goat. "Kill the neighbor’s goat." That is envy. Not wanting what someone else has – that’s ambition, and it built most of the world. Envy is wanting him not to have it. Even if you gain nothing. Even if you lose. Every other sin at least promises pleasure. Envy promises only that someone else will have less. And it is the one sin nobody ever confesses – because it never calls itself envy. It calls itself fairness. Justice. Equality. Socialism is envy at scale: not lifting the bottom, but cutting the top. Thatcher caught it in one sentence in Parliament: her opponents would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich. In experiments, people will pay out of their own pocket to destroy money belonging to others. Whole countries do the same: the tax that raises little but drives away the people it targets, the school that abolishes the advanced class because not everyone can take it, the rule written to bring down whoever got ahead. In Soviet villages, a kulak – a "rich" peasant – was often a man with two cows. Liquidating the kulaks did not give anyone a cow. It gave everyone the famine. That is envy’s bill. Envy aims it at the successful. But the successful leave, or stop trying – and the bill comes back to everyone. Kill the goat and you get no milk. Neither does anyone else. The Greeks knew there were two kinds of rivalry. Hesiod wrote that the potter competes with the potter, the craftsman with the craftsman – and that this strife is good, because it makes everyone work harder. The other kind only destroys. A free society does not abolish envy. It converts it: you may have what your neighbor has – by doing what he did. Socialism converts it the other way, into policy, so that nobody has the goat. The cure is old and simple: gratitude for what you have, and the ambition to build what you don’t. Next: Pride.

The Seven Cures We have gone through the seven sins and watched each one grow from a private weakness into a public system. But the cures are as old as the sins, and our ancestors knew them all. A civilization is made of what it rewards and punishes. Reward the sins, and they become systems. Reward the cures, and they become a civilization. Against envy, admiration. Both begin the same way: by looking up at someone who has done better. Envy says: tear him down. Admiration says: show me how. One turns the feeling into destruction, the other into work. And few people envy when everyone around is doing great things. Against pride, humility. Humility is not thinking you are small. It is knowing the world is bigger than your plan. The proud man designs a society for everyone; the humble man lets everyone design his own life. And Madison put it most simply, noting that if men were angels, no government would be necessary – so power must be divided, and ambition made to check ambition. The cure for pride is not a humble ruler. It is a system that does not need one. Against wrath, patience. Wrath wants the punishment now, before the facts. Patience waits for them. Scaled up, patience has a name: the rule of law – evidence first, verdict last, or not at all. Every mob, from the guillotine to the hashtag, is wrath that refused to wait. Against sloth, diligence – not overwork, but care: doing your own work, and finishing it. The surest cure is ownership. Give a man something of his own – a house, a field, a business – and he will take care of it. Take everything from him, and he will care about nothing. When someone tells you that you will own nothing and be happy, he is selling you sloth. Against greed, generosity. Greed wants to take; generosity wants to give – and you can only give what is yours. Generosity with other people's money is not a virtue. It is greed wearing a halo. The state does not give. It moves money, and keeps a share for the moving. Many of the West's proudest hospitals, universities and cathedrals began as real gifts. Against gluttony, temperance. Gluttony lives at the expense of later and others. Temperance leaves something on the table – for tomorrow, for the children. At the scale of a state, gluttony is called debt, and temperance a balanced budget. An old proverb says that a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. Temperance is love for those who come after us. Against lust, faithfulness. Lust takes and leaves. Faithfulness stays – and builds a home. Lust is sterile. A home is where children grow up. A civilization that cures lust gets the one thing lust never gives: grandchildren. Put the seven together, and the pattern is plain. Every sin consumes; every cure builds. You could argue it is all just a matter of time preference – how much you value today over tomorrow. Every sin wants it now. Every cure can wait – for later, and for those who come after us. Aristocracy is a matter of time preference. Not blood, not money: the habit of thinking in generations. A politician thinks until the next election; an aristocrat, until his grandchildren. That is why a state that lives from election to election eats the future. And you need no title for it – any family that thinks in generations is founding a dynasty. And notice how each sin became respectable: it changed its name. Envy calls itself social justice. Pride calls itself expertise. Wrath calls itself the people's anger. Sloth calls itself a right. Greed calls itself generosity – with your money. Gluttony calls itself body positivity. Lust calls itself liberation. No sin becomes a system under its own name. It needs the Lie. So one cure comes before the other seven: call things by their names. The cures need only the truth – and someone brave enough to say it first.