Listening to Cryptonomican 20 years after reading it. It is a curious embodiment of this "cult" but from a deeper, more epistemic place. The way Steaphenson treats the world, the way he describes it, is frenetic, packed with trivia and connections and ADHD deep-dives into related topics...but there is no heart to it. It's an empty, mechanistic view of the world, reducing almost every person a neat little network of abstractions, and then moving on. It is a strange book in that it seems to be a promotion of a narrative viewpoint rather than about the plot or characters. It is certainly the viewpoint of the "modern" tech entrepenuer, circa 1999. Somehow both extremely open minded AND judgemental; utterly unsentimental about anything, including the self; mere acceptence and wariness about indelible human needs. And so on.

Word on the street is that Cryptonomicon was required reading at Thiel's early Palantir. I read it now and it definitely hits differently. To accept that you must dwell in something in order to understand it, and therefore in order to wield power over it with any wisdom, is the antithesis of "The Cult of Doing Business". The hubris is baked in deep at an epistemic level, which is demonstrated to lead to epic moral hazards at an epidemic level.

You should read Zero to One if you really want to unlock Thiel's thinking re: business. It's both the best business book I've ever read and the perfect distillation of the core soullessness at the root of the matter. The goal is positive cash flows that can't be successfully attacked by competitors. That's the game, that's all everyone here is working for.

I will never, ever understand the praise for that book.

It can be summarized in one sentence: ‘Get a monopoly if you can.’ Brilliant insight there - thanks captain obvious!

If the author wasn’t famous it wouldn’t have even been published, and certainly wouldn’t have appeared as a ‘best business book.’

Well for myself it broke things down clearly in terms of the framework to operate in (zero to one, one to infinity) and what types of products you should even strive to build. I recall not seeing a lot of the ideas put so down so clearly and cleanly before, and as far as I know a lot of the book's framing became conventional wisdom in this industry after publication, or after many took his course at Stanford. So maybe it's nothing new to you because the lessons have been internalized already.

But Stephenson describes things in this mechanistic, ADHD way. It’s just his technique - he still paints a picture of people with rich inner lives and strong desires. Maybe the characters’ sentiments (mostly pro-Western tech optimism) don’t resonate with you, but that hardly means they don’t have any.

It definitely wasn't required reading. I have never met anyone who's read it or even mentioned it.

I heard that anecdote but it was at paypal/x, which makes more sense given the book's plot.

> Employees, no matter what their job, crave recognition, autonomy, and a personal connection to work, which is why they often contribute more than they’re paid for. Baker’s point is that celebrating workers’ “proactivity” disguises an essentially exploitative relationship.

The story of the modern Western economy is that all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked from the tree of technological and productivity improvements (in the context of the regulatory environment).

Therefore, the proportion of profit and revenue rooted in exploiting human flaws is and will continue to rise.

Examples are:

* Humans engage with drama and negative content (ad supported media)

* Humans overindex on a sense of family/belonging/tribe (employers as family extract more work for less pay)

* Etc

Perhaps the biggest is regulatory capture and exploitation of regulatory loopholes.

Sounds like exactly what happens when an empire is on its way to collapse. It eats its young.

The irony of "higher" standards of living is that meanwhile, African countries, and a few strict islamic ones, have much less of all this and they're the only places reproducing at faster than replacement rate.

It's just a human geography thing. Developed countries reproduce less because they provide greater autonomy to women. Underdeveloped or developing countries reproduce much more.

Turns out if you give women a choice to have children, a lot of them will say no. They'd rather have career. Having children has, like, a lot of downsides. It can literally kill you.

I have run into many of these types over the years. It's amazing to watch them run up their ladder of manipulative tactics until they realize that they aren't going to get what they want. Then you see who they really are. The whole problem is that being genuine matters.

The best boss I ever had never tried to be charismatic. He was a good listener, he was fair, and he took us seriously.

The Naploean Hill/Dale Carnegie types make my skin crawl.

Keep your own house.

I like working, I’m not quite sure what I would do otherwise. It is perfectly acceptable to have genuine relationships with your coworkers, employees, and customers, but “genuine” is the key. What’s bad for you is not work, but lying and trying to pull a fast one on everyone around you.

Work, family, and a little leisure. Those are the three pillars. This hasn’t changed since we grew a brain stem, it comes far before language or farming.

This is a book review, right?

I'm confused by this pattern of people reading book reviews and treating them as if they were the book itself, or an original article.

Isn't the purpose to decide whether you want to buy the book?

If you are interested I always recommend to at least download the "sample" from Amazon Kindle before buying it.

21st century version is naval's twitter thread about becoming rich and paul graham's blog and tim ferris's 4 hour work week. i call it "microfeudalism", a riff on technofedualism and microcelebrities

Only an academic could write something like this;

"But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work."

Your mortgage servicer doesn't accept love as payment.

The comment below yours mentions suicide. Your brain doesn't accept mortgage servicing as a reason to continue living. So I think the idea is that priorities should flow from fundamentals.

> But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work.

While Maslow's hierarchy of needs help us understand motivation, this is the most true.

Strip him of his tenure, and let's see if love pays the rent.

Its because buisness escaping control forms a "nature" complete with behemoth out crowding the smaller critters, destroying the ecosystems that fed them, plagues and forrest fires. The state if it exist is a park if its not, its a dark forest. Worshipping this is just nature whorship redecorated.

I’m surprised that the author thinks devotion to vocation is uniquely American.

The Japanese take their jobs so seriously, that some have committed suicide, upon losing their jobs. Some CEOs have committed suicide, if their business fails, or there’s a big scandal (an idea that I sometimes think could be useful on this side of the pond).

You almost had me agreeing with you, but advocating for someone to kill themselves is way out of line.

I didn't interpret what they wrote as encouragement to suicide.

Suicide? No.

Taking personal Accountability for the corporation under your direct management? Yes.

P. S. I'll bet that the second one is the scariest one for most C-types.

This isn't uniquely American, but obsession with wealth accumulation as an individual is. I don't think this applies to all Americans at all, but it is just mire commonly accepted than other cultures.

It is very deep in American culture. I think this sums it up when Tocqueville was talking about America not having a true aristocratic class, circa 1830s

“In a democracy private citizens see a man of their own rank in life who becomes possessed of riches and power in a few years; this spectacle excites their surprise and envy, and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday very equal is today their ruler. ” ― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

In 21st century America, the internet and social media has poured huge amounts of gas on this fire that was already burning quite hot for a long time.

Even in my own lifetime, the character Gordon Gekko in the movie Wallstreet has gone from a villain to pretty much the aspiration and hero of most high school seniors. Greed is good, greed make number go up.

Wealth is freedom. One of the core tenets of Americanism is "freedom", in quotes because most of us are far from free, just different from "freedom" in monarchical/feudalistic societies. We are bound to the accumulation of wealth. However, some of us are able to break free. Software engineering for instance is a profession that allows this. It doesn't require the full commitment of your life to attain wealth, like finance or law or medicine for someone who has some intelligence and drive.

Wealth providing freedom is not an objective fact. It depends on your philosophical standpoint. I know a lot of people who would rather live cheap and small and be creative (as in arts). What you describe is for them wasting your potential to create. In certain cultures a stable job (like being government employee) is the ultimate freedom because you know how will you live, even in your retirement, no matter what. Some cultures like Japan and Korea extended this to private sector. But at the end, is it really freedom what people seek, or is it stability and safety for future? This is why people gave away their freedom in transition to feudalism in history. At the end if the day, how free are you if you are from one economic downturn or one costly disease away from losing it all?

There is no freedom. Everyone lives on earth. Despite all the billionaires building bunkers might think otherwise. Microplastic pollution and global warming will kill everyone.

Good read. I wish there was a bit more advice than the final sentence offers though.

Zizek has a few pretty good tips!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkweSiuG2E

This all makes more sense if you go through the article, and every time you see the word "work", substitute "work for money".

Or the Protestant work ethic? I didn’t think this needed a new explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

For me, an American, the work ethic comes from reading Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography after being inspired by a passage found in an American Literature textbook in 10th grade. [0]

edit: Of all the different philosophies a young person can subscribe to, entering in the middle of my life, I'm lucky to have chosen one of the better ones. I remember at the time really wanted to embrace an identity of being American and here is a founding father who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and signed the Constitution who was born and raised with the institution of slavery owning slaves himself and evolving into an outspoken anti-slavery advocate working to abolish the practice. That is what it means to be an American, to grow, change, and become better, just.

[0] https://fs.blog/the-thirteen-virtues/

Nice. On the virtue of silence: "in conversation [knowledge is] obtain’d rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue, ..."

> My list of virtues contain’d at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show’d itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc’d me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list, giving an extensive meaning to the word.

> I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.

(I alway laugh at this because to be truly humble a person can not boast of being virtuous therefore can't boast of being humble which creates a paradox.)

As a high school teacher would say:

“The good Lord gave you two eyes, two ears, but only one mouth”

("nice" in the good sense, I mean)

I think there are several weakneses in the Protestant work ethic as an explanation.

1. why is it directed at making money rather serving society? 2. Why does it glorify the rich rather than the "lowly workman" mentioned in the intro to your wikipedia link? 3. lots of evidence against it

The first two of these are even less convincing given that background of a religion that condemns the accumulation of wealth ("eye of a needle" etc.) and literally worships a "lowly workman".

As for evidence, this section of the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic#Criticis...

As a former Christian coming of age in the early 2000s there was a popular IP called "Left Behind" about the Rapture. I always thought the concept of the anti-christ was ridiculously absurd. That someone could convince Christ's followers to basically believe the opposite of the Gospel. After witnessing the rise of 45/7 and the complete bamboozling of my deeply Christian extended family I no longer consider it ridiculous.

All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.

> All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.

It’d be wild if they had. It’s a harder read than lots of books that the median reader struggles to understand, let alone enjoy enough to actually make it through. Most folks lack basically all historical context for the tales in it, and the book itself, so it reads as this unmoored set of confusingly-arranged-and-selected stories that have no hope of really making sense to them without a pile of reference books open alongside (what proportion of people are comfortable with and willing to engage in that style of reading?)

On the other hand, it’s also wild that more haven’t—one would think it’d be way up their list of life priorities. I take it as a sign they’re not really, under the veneer and trappings, convinced about the eternal (!!!) ramifications of the whole deal. “Well sure my eternal soul is on the line and I ‘believe’ I’m holding the literal word of the creator of the universe… but it’s haaaard and boring.” LOL.

> It’s a harder read than lots of books that the median reader struggles to understand, let alone enjoy enough to actually make it through. [...] Most folks lack basically all historical context for the tales in it, and the book itself

This is why the Catholic Church speaks of both tradition and scripture. You need the lens of unbroken tradition to interpret scripture, as tradition is the cumulative knowledge over millennia (including period context) that allows for the possibility for grounded interpretation (never mind interpreting from bad translations). Indeed, tradition precedes canonical scripture historically: consider that the biblical canon was only established at the Council of Rome in 382, which means Christians had existed without a biblical canon for three centuries.

Compare this with sola scriptura which leads to either incoherence or the demotion of biblical scripture to the level of some stuff some guys wrote that you can read however you want [0]. The tacit doctrine at play is often that of perspicuity, which, given the endless proliferation of Protestant sects, would seems at the very least highly suspect.

[0] https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/logic-and-pr...

What is an IP?

Also, I think its clear that some of this predates modern American evangelical Christianity, and some lies in secular values.

> That someone could convince Christ's followers to basically believe the opposite of the Gospel.

There are a number of historical examples. Most recently prosperity gospel and Positive Christianity?

> All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.

Often the ones who place the most importance on the Bible alone, and the most likely to be literalists! I think that is the root of it, because read as a "book" rather than a collection of documents, that exists in multiple versions, subject to disputes about wording and translation, each document written within a cultural (sometimes even personal) context, you can make it mean whatever you want to.

Intellectual property. Here referencing the body of work starting with books, falling with a TV series and movies. Referring to it as the "IP" abstracts across those forms.

Intellectual Property, I believe it started as a book series but had movies, shows and I'm sure other media as well.

What is 45/7 ?

By the way, I highly recommend all of nonstampcollector's videos! https://youtu.be/7gvv_UM7CYg?si=Yer3KeaJZs7FQ03s

US President number 45 and 47, i.e., Trump.

> why is it directed at making money rather serving society

i think this particular phenomenon is rooted in calvinism, particularly in North America, and calvinists hated humanity. It also wouldn't surprise me if the protestants coming over here normally prone to social responsibility (eg some lutherans) were less willing to show up for their community than those in the old world.

right, a.k.a "European Miracle" . I had classes about this (racist and largely debunked) concept in undergraduate Geography. But the link above is a review of a book that presumably aims to take existing research further.

> Weber also argued that the Protestant work ethic influenced the creation of capitalism

An alternative explanation is for the first 140 years of the US, "Protestants" were the "people that did the work". Catholicism was illegal until the states re-wrote their constitutions/laws after the revolution (or ratification of the First Amendment, which ever came first).

Also, there wasn't anything to do but work. If you wanted a house, you cleared land and built it. 50% of early European settlers were indentured servants.

Oh and there wasn't any money or banks. Tobacco was the currency (in Maryland/Virginia). The only business partner was the UK, that managed the colonies as businesses. The entrepreneurial part was the Crown getting shareholders to foot the bill for provisions for the colonies. Shares in Virginia were sold on the London Stock Exchange. Maryland had a sole proprietor that funded the infrastructure build out.

Its more protestant/catholic structures create legal structures/institues that then form into a modern state and accidentally support the mechanisms that secularize society and themselves. The main component is driving sexual others into social service contract cults while severing ties to clan/family.

Source:

> The main component is driving sexual others into social service contract cults while severing ties to clan/family.

The implication being homo- and asexuals join the clergy because it obviates the expectation that they will marry? How does this lead to secularization?

Protestantism lacks a clerical tradition (reverends and ministers can still get married, and there are no monasteries to join), so how does your theory apply there?

It produces church bureaucracy which becomes state bureaucracy , the judge looks like a priest for a reason.

That’s what I suspected you meant, but it doesn’t address my two other questions. What does this have to do with sexual others? How does it track with the Protestant tradition?

Protestant tradition was to declare sinful almost every expression of sexuality. Leading to a ton of supressed non normative sexuality.

Whose owners then migrated into state bureaucracy and public services . From prussia to the pentagon, the smithers clichee is very much alive and a byproduct of that culture.

And rules based and hierarchy based as such systems are, they develop a live of their own. Until a monarch as pope competitor appears, takes over or copies the machinery for the catholics, or a protestant develops rigor by internalizing the inquisition and deciding to dedicate his life to paperwork for jesuses justice and to escape temptation .

It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry. The human mind has wandered since. We’ve built systems of belief, technological systems, political systems, every possible system you can imagine. All to deal with the simple fact that our minds feel like they should be doing something, but there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done; surplus.

Since our first surplus all those years ago, we have continued to increase our surplus relentlessly. The problem is the more surplus we have, the more the mind idles, the more we try to invent things for the mind to do.

That is where I see the cult, the cult consists of faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus, whether it’s through positive means like improving technology or business, or negative means like slavery and exploitation. It’s a hollow existence. There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.

I think it's deeper. The mind is an optimization tool. It always keeps looking for something better, hence it is always not completely happy with the current state of things. The first noble truth (aka the principle of dukkha) is at least 25 centuries old; it says that sentient existence is inseparable from discontent, and thus from suffering.

This whole search for a better optimum, like other evolutionary mechanisms, results in survival and proliferation, but not necessarily in happiness. Proliferation seems to correlate positively with happiness, but up to a limit, and the limit is all too visible.

On the other hand, reaching the true global optimum does not seem too blissful either: any change would be a change to the worse, so all development, all motion except basically spinning at place would need to stop. This is not very different from death. OTOH the human mind, as it is, would still try to keep on searching, still feel somehow discontent.

(I agree that the reasonable path is to try to limit the suffering of living beings, including but not limited to ourselves. It's the least bad option.)

Optimization seems to be a relatively rare cultural phenomenon. We take continuous optimization and innovation for granted, but the archaeological record shows that many societies went hundreds or even thousands of years with essentially zero progress. The very concept of optimization seems to be a kind of mental or social "technology" that some cultures either never figured out or lost along the way.

I don’t have a lot of surplus. I hope to, I’m working towards it. I have the privilege, talent, and positioning. But I can’t understand how anyone just below me in the hierarchy making ends meet.

I think that is one of the most interesting take aways from this line of thought. It is nearly impossible to reconcile the idea that we as a species have unimaginable surplus, but nearly all of us feel we are living precariously on the edge of ruin, or are living in destitute poverty. There is plenty to go around, but because the worst parts of human nature have triumphed the good, we are forced to live in an incredibly inequitable distribution.

Rather than build a system that works for everyone in an altruistic manner, we have a system that funnels surplus to our most sycophantic, manipulative, exploitative, brutal members. It might just be human nature, our worst instincts tend to beat our best instincts.

> It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there.

The article and the book it reviews isn't really about what happened in roughly 9,750 of those years. It's about a narrow band of meaning and apologies that happened during the small slice of most recent time due the vast majority of people falling for Worthington's Law[1].

Coloring the vast majority of the time slice with this idiosyncratic problem seems like the kind of notion that would be covered in the book. It's also confusing-- from those 10,000 years there must still be dozens of mainstream, practical political ideologies and belief systems based on embracing "the positive aspects of our spirit." It seems like you're identify this subset as examples of the problem you're discussing, but also as a potential solution to the same problem. I don't get it.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEFcjT7-I0

Have you read “The Accursed Share”? Batailles argues that society is shaped by the ways we squander surplus (eg in war, sacrifice, carnival, art, sex, etc)

> caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry.

Religion predates the emergence of both agriculture and animal husbandry. These belief systems didn’t emerge as a result of surplus.

> There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.

How do you reconcile this belief with the idea there is no meaning, and that “there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done”?

Religion is not my strong suit, but I don’t think religion as we think of it today was really around like that, it might have been but that is not my current understanding. IE There probably weren’t prehistoric monks and rabbis having epistemological debates about the meaning of life or what a good life is. Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc. Not an expert again.

On your second point, “there is no meaning”, I’m not sure I exactly prescribe that. I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met. And when I say that “there isn’t actually anything that actually needs to be done”, I mean that if you have a surplus of all your needs, say just after harvest, you don’t actually need to do anything. All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day. Prior to agriculture, surpluses were not regular.

Addressing the spirit of your second point though, even today there is much to be done. As a group we have and produce more surplus than we could ever use, but the distribution is such that many people live in abject poverty, or precariously close to it.

> Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc.

It’s impossible to know because we lack written records from the period, but this largely aligns with the earliest religious writings; they are mythical stories, often a sort of folk physics. The point is that the search for meaning is implicit in being able to ask a question. Animals might try to discover an algorithm of behavior to obtain a reward (e.g. press the button, get a biscuit), but it isn’t clear that they can even ask questions (“Why does pressing the button produce a biscuit?”). The question “Why does it rain?” doesn’t ask anything philosophical, but it does imply “I need to know why it rains.”

We could reduce this all to purely evolutionary terms (“I need to know why it rains to further propagate my genes”), but my hunch is that something deeper is going on.

> I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met.

I appreciate from the tone of your post that this probably is not your position, but this line of reasoning is the cause of a lot of strife. If there is no universal meaning (or no means by which we can ascertain it, e.g. in moral skepticism), then we can’t really go on to say that there is an ethical imperative to fight injustice; we can’t even really define anything as injustice.

> All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day.

I see what you mean. I had interpreted your comment to be in the vein of certain strains of eastern or postmodern thought which take that claim rather literally; we don’t “have” to do anything, and every choice is just as valid as every other choice. Whereas what it sounds like you are saying is that when our physical needs are met, the mind has time to wander, and this leads to the hedonic treadmill that motivates adventure, conquest, philosophizing, and things like that.

I think there’s some merit to this idea; I suspect being engaged in satisfying pressing physical needs would correlate with lower levels of neuroticism (anxiety, depression, etc.), though this is only a hunch. The reason I took exception to your comment was that it seemed like it was reducing all of those activities to being merely a product of a flawed mentality resulting from material excess, whereas I would contest that and say that human history is in fact a product of something meaningful - not just personally meaningful, but ultimately meaningful.

It's not "faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus"

It's "mute compulsion"

Author is an arts graduate. General Patton warned against such historians. It is why he recommended autobiographies rather than biographies. The words of Caesar rather than the words written about Caesar. You also delegate your agency to critique. Patton took the good of Napoleon and savaged the bad. To paraphrase Patton, it's a type of tall poppy syndrome. The historian lacks the skills, talent, and mindset that causes men and women who achieve success in the real world. They resent those who remind them of what they lack.

Because of his tenured position, he wants for nothing while, outside of STEM, contributes very little. He is wholly reliant on the types of men and women he bashes. It's the dilettante who mocks the farmer as he eats the farmer's food. Reminds of the critique of self righteous pacifists during the World Way 2(Godwin violation. Apologies.) "How easy it is to be a pacifist safe and secure behind the security of the American Navy's big guns." How easy it is to mock entrepreneurs, capitalism, and strivers when they permit your standard of living and very existence.

What’s wrong with finding meaning in work?

Of course like all things the entrepreneurial ethos gets very silly and begins to incorporate a lot of very silly other ideas (think and grow rich!) when you dive deep into it, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that most movements, philosophies, and ideologies get silly if you go deep.

Thinkers, like people on dates, put their best foot forward first. As you get to know them is when you find out they never wash their underwear.

The alternative, I guess, is finding meaning in things other than work, and that’s okay too. Or you can do both.

Specifically, if your work is a typical job, it makes your meaning dependent on a business relationship where one side has a lot more power than the other side. Example: an employer may end or modify the relationship for factors that are unrelated to your goals at any time.

In general, depending on work for one's ultimate meaning is dumb because whether or not you worked "hard enough" is judged by other people, not the entity responsible for putting humans (and therefore you) on the planet in the first place--you're already here so you obviously are supposed to be here, otherwise you wouldn't be. Good work makes you deserve to be among others but it can't make you deserve to exist on the planet.

> What’s wrong with finding meaning in work?

Who told you you did not have meaning?

> One of the strangest features of American work culture is the constant pressure to treat one’s job as something more than a job: a calling, a means of expressing oneself, a vehicle for personal growth. This pressure comes from bosses <...>

The idea behind this - expressing oneself - isn't American. When ideas like that come to this world, they come to many nations at the same time, the greatest minds pick them up and create their own interpretation, based on local culture and their beliefs. Some of those great minds see the great ideas well and express them cleanly. Others distort the ideas with their egos and sometimes even add poison, creating intentionally misleading interpretations.

The idea that you need to express yourself, find a calling that's bigger than you, is true and spiritual in nature. It draws attention to a core aspect of what we are. However some of the great minds are also selfish: they are able to see this idea, they recognize it as an important and powerful truth, but then they find a way to distort it for personal gain. So they create a thin lie around this truth: that you need to express yourself thru work for self at the expense of others, because that's the only way to survive and thrive in this world of scarcity. Most people will be fooled because this lie is an artwork of minds far greater than them. So the common folk embrace this false interpretation and start living according to it.