Nobody Gives You Anything for Being a Decent Human Being

Joel Osteen doesn’t drive a ferrari.

More accurately, there’s no definitive proof that Joel Osteen drives a $350,000 458 italia. Online rumors started circulating that he did, but they turned out to be unconfirmed. I guess it’s comforting the father of prosperity gospel doesn’t flaunt his wealth, except for his mansion.

And his second, even bigger mansion…

And his private jet…

Anyway, Osteen sat down with Oprah a few years ago to defend his wealth. “There’s nothing wrong with being blessed,” he said. Then he started talking about shallowness and greed. The guy frequently preaches about the perils of excessive wealth, so it just doesn’t click.

The whole idea behind prosperity gospel is that you get ahead in life by being a good person and thinking happy thoughts. Millions of his followers believe this idea because they want it to be true. They don’t really want to be good people. They want to pretend.

There’s plenty of criticism already out there attacking Joel Osteen, or anyone like him, who promotes the idea that being a good person entitles you to wealth and luxury. That’s not the point. What Osteen does goes beyond hypocrisy. It’s about more than his mansions.

Joel Osteen didn’t get rich by being a good person. He sold the idea that being a good person makes you rich.

Everyone bought it.

The universe doesn’t keep score.

Prosperity gospel has leaked into American culture over the last several decades. It predates Joel Osteen, going back all the way to books like The Power of Positive Thinking. Let’s remember: Norman Vincent Peale was a pastor who hated The New Deal and routinely called Franklin D. Roosevelt a blasphemous, godless, unpatriotic commie.

It makes sense. If citizens had support systems to lean on, they wouldn’t buy so much psychological snake oil.

We’ve come up with a secular version of prosperity gospel called gratitude. It doesn’t get muddled in religion, and it melds perfectly with the logic of late capitalism. Are you ready?

If you want more stuff, be grateful for the stuff you’ve got.

Be kind so other people will do favors for you.

Only negative people struggle.

All of this sounds great on the surface. It presents a very neat, transactional view of the world. This philosophy aligns with our views on karma and poetic justice. The universe rewards good people.

It punishes bad people.

Look closely at your life, and history, and you’ll be forced to admit something. That’s just not true. Even supposing the universe is run by some kind of benevolent, omnipotent being, it’s beyond arrogant to assume this supreme intelligence has the time or patience to continually make sure everything is fair and that every good deed goes rewarded.

That’s our job.

We believe cosmic justice exists because sometimes bad things do happen to bad people, and it’s highly satisfying.

The truth is, nobody above is keeping score. The universe doesn’t automatically reward good behavior. That’s up to us. It’s the whole reason we have laws and courts.

Our justice system hasn’t been doing its job lately. The agencies we created to protect our values and prevent bad guys from exploiting us have withered. We’ve gotten lazy. We’ve stopped holding people accountable, because we think they’ll meet some kind of divine judgement in the end.

They won’t.

The universe doesn’t care.

It’s actually hard to be a good person.

America has always had a problem with money and virtue. The first settlers here believed in ideas like predestination and godly wealth. You were either blessed to work hard and make a fortune, or you were damned to be poor and burn in hell. You spent your entire life trying to prove yourself. If bad things happened, it was just proof that the big guy upstairs hated your guts, because you were a terrible person.

One of the first philosophers to point out this dilemma was Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism.

If you ask me, he nailed it.

We wonder why America has such a culture of victim blaming and shaming, and why it’s so easy for one group of people to go around telling everyone else what to do with their bodies (especially women) while they refuse to make even the smallest concessions for others.

Well, it’s baked right in.

We’ve been led to believe that being a good person isn’t that difficult, and that it leads to rewards. We sort of depend on it now to keep society going. Almost nobody does things for their own sake.

The truth is a much harder sell.

Being a good person guarantees you nothing. It entitles you to nothing. If anything, it’s a liability. It makes you look vulnerable to scammers. Other people expect more from you.

Guys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want everyone to think you get ahead by being a good person. They know they’re lying. Read beyond the fluff pieces, and you see how far they go to exploit everyone around them for their own personal gain. It makes total sense why they don’t own up to it. They need everyone else to be a good person.

It makes their life easier.

Honestly, being a good person is hard.

It means giving up things you really want. It means doing favors for people even when they can’t pay you back. You might have to take care of someone, while nobody’s taking care of you. There’s no way to be truly selfless. You have to learn to measure your life in terms beyond gucci bags. That’s the hardest part, seeing value in stuff you can’t count.

Actually, no…

The hardest part is doing all this, while also realizing you live in a system that counts stuff. So you have to be a good person, and you have to go earn a living, because our society isn’t going to let anyone just get by on being a good person. You have to be a good person, and you also have to accept that it’s not enough. You have to do even more.

When you think about it…

That really sucks.

America is stuck in prosperity gospel.

It’s not just Joel Osteen.

It’s all of them. It’s every single author or podcaster who subtly suggests that being a good person makes you happy, or puts you on a path to riches. All of them do it. Here’s why it’s a problem:

They’ve turned virtue into a commodity.

We live in a culture of fake gratitude now. Neighbors and coworkers do each other little favors, only because they expect something far bigger in return. If they don’t expect it from the person they helped, they expect the universe to reward them. When it doesn’t happen, they get angry.

They always take it out on someone.

We also live in a culture where everyone pretends money doesn’t matter, when it matters more than ever. Those of us who aren’t in the top 10 percent have to do this tap dance act, pretending we don’t care about money while secretly acknowledging that you can’t live without it. We’re told not to chase money, but we’re also judged as morally inferior for being poor. It’s a situation that benefits only two groups of people:

1. Those with money.

2. Grifters.

Prosperity gospel and its secular cousin, the mindfulness-gratitude trap, are the biggest grifts of all. They ensure we go on blaming ourselves and each other, treating our financial uncertainty as a moral failing, and pretending to be good people just to get ahead.

If we were interested in being good to each other, we would consider changing the system. We would stop refusing to tax billionaires out of some misplaced belief we’ll be rich one day and won’t want to pay taxes. We would stop treating universal healthcare like a stepping stone to communism. We would stop telling everyone to bootstrap their way to the basic necessities in life. Finally, we wouldn’t allow anyone to go hungry or homeless, regardless of what we thought about their life choices.

Psychologists have warned us what happens to people who fall prey to positive thinking and emotional bypassing. It makes them worse people. It makes them more likely to shut down when the meritocracy they’ve invested in doesn’t pay their bills. It makes them more prone to anger. It makes them less mindful and aware, no matter how much they journal.

It’s not hard to find examples.

Look at how Rachel Hollis acts when someone disagrees with her. Look at what Tony Robbins does when someone gently calls him out for sexism at one of his seminars. Look at what Joel Osteen does when his community actually calls on him to open his doors and be the good person he claims to be. None of them step up. They all fail.

It’s pretty obvious what’s going on.

They’ve got their reward for being a good person. They don’t need anything else, so they’re not giving it.

That’s the ultimate consequence of a society built on prosperity gospel and secular, transactional gratitude. You do just enough to look like a good person, just long enough to get your reward.

Once you’ve won, you can quit.

There’s no price tag on being a good person. There’s no overlord of the universe keeping score. You can be a good person who dies in debt, or a bad person who dies on a yacht full of hookers and drugs. The only difference is that a good person has decided to measure their life differently, and they’ve chosen to hold themselves accountable.

Nobody gives you a ferrari for being a good person.

It’s what you give yourself.