The biggest problem with true believers isn’t what tenets they hold to be sacred; it’s that they want to force those tenets and what goes with them on people who don’t share them.

For example, in the United States, if a true believer doesn’t want to have an abortion, no non-believer is going to force her to have one. But if a non-believer wants or needs a medically safe abortion of a non-viable fetus, the true believers pass laws that not only restrict her freedom, but endanger her life. Their action endangers the non-believer… and there’s no cost to the true believers.

True believers have opposed restrictions on corporate political statements and contributions because they outlawed certain corporate practices. This ignores the fact, as events have recently demonstrated, that unlimited corporate “freedom of speech” effectively restricts individual freedom of speech not only because money drowns out individual viewpoints, but also because only wealthy individuals can afford to dispute the corporate view and because no individual in the corporation can be held legally responsible for falsehoods, misstatements, or lies. So, effectively, the corporation gets preferred treatment under the law.

Same-sex marriage doesn’t harm true believers. There’s no requirement for them to marry someone of the same sex, and, in fact, same-sex marriage is more likely to benefit the true believers because it creates more stable bonds and less societal disruption. But true believers oppose it because it doesn’t fit their beliefs.

True believers cannot recognize or accept facts contrary to their own beliefs, which is why so many still believe that lying, thieving, hypocritical Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

The true believers are the ones causing disruption because they and their political allies are passing laws and overturning others that are against the wishes of the majority of the people. In effect, they’re imposing minority rule, while failing to acknowledge it, and in fact hypocritically claiming the opposite.

Decades ago, one of my political science professors made the statement that Christianity was a religion for slaves. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s in this world, but believe in Christ, and you will be rewarded in the next. It’s a wonderful way of keeping the slaves in their place.

He was right, and the political right has taken full advantage of this fact that still underlies Christianity.

Corporations have the right to drown out everyone else’s right to speak, because they are in fact de facto Caesar in our current society.

The church, aided by the evangelical right and moneyed interests, now has the right to rule pregnant women’s bodies, while corporations get government to allow them to destroy the environment and to impair the health of the multitudes in order to increase what Caesar gets. But it’s all right. True believers will receive their reward in the next world, and for those of you who aren’t true believers, well… tough shit.

The right to pray and to coerce others to pray cannot be restricted, but a woman’s personal right not to reproduce, even if she’s raped or if it could cost that woman her life, cannot be allowed. No matter how you put it, that’s a form of enslavement. And it’s based on a belief that, first, life is sacred, and second, that there’s a soul – even before conception, apparently. Both are without proof, and they’re a set of beliefs imposed on non-believers.

The right, especially the religious right, has fought and consistently opposed an equal rights amendment. It’s not an amendment to give women greater rights, but equal rights. Why does the right oppose it? Largely because too many men don’t want women to have those rights, even if most men won’t admit it, because, after all, faith declares women must be subordinate to men, and also because it will cost corporations billions if they have to pay women equally.

What the far right wants has nothing to do with what’s good for most people; it’s strictly to maintain control over people’s lives and maximize the wealth of the few – and, despite efforts and words of the Founding Fathers, they’re using a slave religion to boost belief and bucks.

The true believers in the U.S. political system are savoring their successes. They’ve furthered the ability to carry all kinds of firearms under any circumstances. They’ve arrogated, on the federal level, the near absolute right-to-life of a few cells over a woman’s personal control over her own body, and they’re aiming at enacting more absolutes into law, as well as further eroding the Constitutional separation of church and state.

While they’ve accomplished their immediate goals, citing both what the Constitution says and what it doesn’t, they’ve employed very selective readings that other scholars have disputed and ignored anything contrary to what they want to believe.

One of our great Presidents made the statement that the battle of Gettysburg was fought so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Right now, however, the true believers insist that government of the people, by the minority of the people, for the minority of the people, shall be their goal.

The majority of the people believes that some form of abortion should be legal. The majority believes that there should be some form of restriction on who should be allowed to carry firearms and under what conditions. The majority believes that the results of fair and free elections should be honored. The majority believes that the right to vote by all citizens should not be restricted.

The true believers on the right believe none of that.

That is because true believers cannot comprehend that there is any validity to anything in which they do not believe, even when the facts do not support their beliefs, and even when those beliefs are not shared by the majority of the people.

If one looks at history, societies governed by true believers have seldom endured, and when they have endured, they have become brutal tyrannies. And, interestingly enough, and contrary to both the rhetoric and beliefs of true believers, most tyrannies in history have risen out of conservatism, not liberalism, or even ultra-liberal radicalism.

And those are two other facts that the true believers on the right cannot understand or accept.

More than once, I’ve been critical of the business model that can be described as “maximizing profit at any cost, particularly when you can foist off as many costs as possible on someone or something else” [like the environment and/or public health].

This is scarcely new in the United States. For almost fifty years, big oil promoted cheap gasoline enhanced by tetraethyl lead, with adverse health impacts, particularly for the children of low income families who lived in cities filled with automotive exhaust. Big tobacco did the same with cigarettes… and still is.

For almost a century and a half, businesses just dumped wastes of all sorts into the nearest waterway, making most of the large rivers little more than toxic sewers. Even now, pesticide run-off from factory farms has created and continues to increase a massive area in the Gulf of Mexico that’s has little or no oxygen and almost no fish of any kind.

Big and small business have attempted to do the same with the minimum wage, keeping it as low as politically possible, and business continues to wonder why millions of people who have any option at all refuse to take many minimum wage jobs, even though it’s statistically and economically impossible to live on that wage in almost any city in the U.S.

But the profit/greed instinct runs strong in the human animal, as does the need to quantify how much more profit your business is making than are your competitors – or how much less, meaning that you have to cut costs to be “competitive.”

The standard measurement tool is ROI [Return on Investment]. The form is simple. Divide the gain from an investment by the amount of the initial investment. The result is ROI.

Right now, U.S. gross corporate profits, net corporate profits, and profit rates (i.e., ROI) are at an all-time high. In three industry sectors – information technology, real estate and financials – the average profit rate is above 20%. In big pharma, a Bentley University study found a gross profit margin of over 70%. But thanks to creative accounting, often high gross profits mysteriously turn into more modest numbers.

The problems involved with using ROI as a metric for business success are close to innumerable. First, how do you isolate/account for outside factors? The state of the national economy has an effect on all businesses. The same is true about state and federal laws and regulations. So does the amount and nature of competition. External economic factors also affect ROI, particularly interest and inflation rates.

Corporate internal factors also affect the return on investment. Have bad managers been replaced by good ones [and are higher salaries required by better management factored into the investment costs] or good ones by those less able?

For all these problems and difficulties, addressed time and time again in industry and scholarly articles over the past several decades, all too many corporations use simplistic or slanted versions of ROI that serve their purpose, either to boast or to show regulators how little profit they make. There are literally scores of articles on different forms of ROI, but in the end it’s all about how to maximize output from inputs and processes to keep costs low and profits high.

All that seems to matter is to meet the minimum regulatory standards, keep wages as low as practicable, products as cheap and shorted-lived as customers will tolerate, dividends or stock prices just high enough to retain investors, while maximizing ROI and upper executive pay.

Seldom does one see a different calculus, such as how can a business remain solvent, produce good products, satisfy customers, and fairly pay its employees and stockholders. It’s far simpler to trot out the single magic term – ROI – as if that explains and justifies everything.

And for U.S. business, that seems to suffice.

As the House of Representatives’ hearings on the January 6th insurrection continue, and Republican after Republican testifies, and Trump campaign official after official testifies, and they all say that Trump lost the election, one thing is crystal clear.

A significant percentage of Americans will never be convinced that Trump lost the election, and they will continue pour money into fraudulent organizations that falsely claim they’re out to reverse “the steal” while Trump funnels the funds into his own pockets or to deceptive organizations set up by close Trump cronies. In fact, they’re so convinced he won that they won’t even look at the evidence to the contrary. Nor will they look at evidence that the January 6th insurrection was violent and inspired by Trump.

I can understand people supporting officials who claim to represent their views. What I have a hard time understanding is why they send often hard-earned dollars to support someone who’s continually demonstrated that he lies, who fires or drives out or turns on so many of those working for him, whose most ardent supporters appear to be white supremacists, and who is effectively pocketing money donated for “legal expenses.”

Trump reminds me of a combination of a frontier snake-oil salesman and a fire-and-brimstone preacher who inspires followers to give him money, and then leaves them with little but faded hope. The problem with this is that, because he’s so charismatic to his followers, they’ll blame everyone but him for the unsolved problems and difficulties in their lives, and they’ll keep sending him money under false premises. The more money they send without the results they want, the angrier they get at those who fail to support their snake-oil messiah.

Those followers are so angry that Republicans who have shown that they know he’s peddling lies now preach the same lies because they fear his wrath and the power of his followers.

And you wonder why I’ve always felt that “true-believers” of any kind, especially those whose beliefs deny reality, are the greatest danger to a free society?