By Rebecca Terrell 03/01/2026
TheNewAmerican.com
Capitalism and socialism are close cousins in that they idolize the economic value of human beings over all other characteristics that make us human, such as personality, conscience, intellect, imagination, family, and, most importantly, the eternal soul. Despite their centuries-long reputation as ideological opposites, their rivalry stems from competition for the same materialistic goal. Indeed, under both systems, humans are reduced to units of production, consumption, and labor; the soul is ignored, and therefore implicitly denied. The logical conclusion is that people are disposable if they do not contribute to the material economy. Hence, abortion and euthanasia are not only acceptable, but expected.
Karl Marx famously reduced people to economic units in The Communist Manifesto, categorizing them as mere “labor power,” which he defined as the core human value. He may have criticized capitalism for turning the worker into “an appendage of the machine,” but his ideology was guilty of the same.
However, the criticism was well deserved. Though Adam Smith placed his theories within a moral framework, the “Father of Capitalism” famously observed in The Wealth of Nations that individuals are motivated by self-interest, and that society benefits from individuals pursuing their selfish intent.
Today, capitalism, unfettered by moral constraints, concludes that human worth is measured by productivity and income. The character Gordon Gekko encapsulated contemporary thought in the 1987 film Wall Street; “greed is good” became a modern mantra, rounding out the enthronement of the seven deadly sins in our society.
Former communist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed the similarities between Soviet communism and Western materialism. Addressing Harvard graduates in 1978, he noted that “the West has lost its civil courage” and moral compass by redefining “the pursuit of happiness” as the pursuit of material goods, while communism crushes the soul by subordinating everything to economics.
British author G.K. Chesterton similarly remarked that both capitalism and socialism erroneously agree that economics can solve humanity’s problems. “The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed,” he wrote in The Everlasting Man. “It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.”
The ancient Greeks would have agreed with Solzhenitsyn and Chesterton. “Man,” Aristotle wrote in Politics, “is by nature a political animal.” That is, he is more than a mere economic unit; he derives fulfillment from a variety of interactions with others. The goal of these interactions is, according to Aristotle’s Ethics, virtue — the essential component for both the individual and society to achieve happiness and prosperity. The philosopher placed economic factors such as production and distribution in their rightful place: as tools at the disposal of man in his pursuit of virtue. In other words, the economy is created for man; man is not created for the economy.
Toward this end, the Greeks prioritized leisure time — but not in the modern sense of sloth or idleness. The word leisure derives from the Greek schole, which means “study” or “learning,” because intellectual pursuits were seen as the best use of time. Aristotle gave a prime example in Politics, when he blamed the decline of Sparta on its incapacity for leisure. Though that nation had achieved supremacy through war, it lacked the morality and competence to maintain its power in peacetime. Its military myopia left Spartans unprepared for spiritual and cultural development. Predictably, their government collapsed.
Likewise, technological prowess is not what makes a society great. On his YouTube channel Predictive History, Harvard researcher Jiang Xueqin argues that although China pioneered transformative inventions such as paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder, Western Europe became the dominant world power. “In the grand scheme of things, technology doesn’t matter,” Jiang notes. “You must fix the culture first.”
What was different about Western Europe? Constantine the Great planted the seed of Aristotle’s vision of a virtuous society by issuing the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D., legalizing Christianity. The resulting central control wielded by a spiritual head over decentralized nation-states provided widespread stability, allowing more than a mere survival-based existence. There was time for the Greek ideal of leisure — time to achieve the highest good of spiritual cultivation — time for the “pursuit of happiness,” which Christendom rightly defined as the pursuit of God, for God is the source of all happiness; none can be found without Him.
The next thousand years witnessed a steady flowering of scientific ingenuity and artistic talents, resulting in the boom of the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. This was the age of the unparalleled cathedrals of Europe, a time when the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon pioneered the empirical method in science, and his Dominican counterpart Albert the Great laid the groundwork for modern biology. Illustrious universities sprang up, such as those at Bologna, Naples, Padua, Coimbra, Salamanca, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. Music and other arts thrived. Thomas Aquinas established Scholasticism and penned the most influential work of Western literature, the Summa Theologica.
It is no coincidence that during this time the Catholic Church mandated nearly 100 vacation days annually — more than one quarter of the year! (In ecclesiastical terminology, these are known as Holy Days of Obligation. They include all Sundays as well as other days set aside for commemoration, such as Christmas.) On each of these, business came to a halt while people were required to go to church and abstain from servile work. In other words, they were free to pursue happiness.
Did the economy tank? On the contrary, it flourished!
Despite that, the modern world calls those thriving centuries the “Dark Ages,” a term coined by 14th-century scholar Francesco Petrarch, who made it his goal to shed light on what he called the “darkness and dense gloom” of his own age. As the Father of Humanism, he shifted focus from man’s spiritual development with the goal of eternal life to man’s intellectual and scientific development in the temporal world.
Over time, Christendom’s ideal of leisure gave way to humanism’s gospel of work, which was firmly entrenched by 1673 when Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory defined work as a spiritual duty incumbent upon all, even those who “have no outward want to urge them.” This was the 17th-century version of “greed is good.” Thus avarice became a virtue.
“Capitalism and Communism are dedicated to the servile arts, those unworthy of a free man,” wrote the late Dr. Robert Herrera of Seton Hall University. “Both breed ‘men without festivals’ with greatly reduced horizons, the mass man who exists only by reacting to external stimuli.” On the other hand, Christian leisure is the groundwork upon which our culture was built. It is “the possession of tranquility” and “a requirement for man to be authentically, fully human.” It views people and things not as goods but as good — because they come from God, not because they are useful.
So as pundits debate which economic system will solve our nation’s problems, it behooves us to remember the lessons of history. They certainly back up the advice that God Himself gave us in His Sermon on the Mount: “Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.”