Today’s corporate crooks are doing as taught in MBA programs

Harvard and other secular business school throughout the U.S. are committed to relativism, teaching only subjective values, which can never stand the pressures of life. The beautiful thing about religion is that it prepares people for the pressures of life and teaches them the need for fundamental ethics.

When our institutions of so-called high learning reject the very idea of God from which truth emanates, we should not be surprised that the brightest of their graduates loot, steal, and betray, harming the nation’s economy and stock market in the process.

Why should anyone be surprised at corruption in corporate America and the U.S. government when so many of these leaders are graduates of liberal colleges and grad school. Three quarters of all students in the leading U.S. universities are being taught that there are no clear and universal standards of right or wrong by which everyone should be judged. In addition to this fundamental distortion of morality in higher education, a recent poll commissioned by the National Association of Scholars and Zogby International reveals a large majority of students also report that they have been taught that corporate policies which promote “socially progressive” goals are more important than those that “ensure stock holders and creditors receive accurate accounts of a firm’s finances.” To be more specific, the survey shows that 56 percent of business and accounting majors have adopted a view that social goals are more important than “providing clear and accurate business statements to creditors.”

The ultimate problem is that when relativism becomes the majority philosophy of any people, that system is doomed to permanent decay. When character and integrity cease to be the national standard, the foundation for the rule and law is destroyed. It’s time for America to rediscover God from whom all character and integrity emanates.

A conviction in favor of personal ethics based on honesty and integrity is the best policy and practice. This conviction was the prevailing ethics rule in early America and has been since the period of our early business leaders. J. C. Penny lived his life on this principle, which he described and illustrated in his autobiography, Fifty Years with the Golden Rule.

Other great business leaders espoused the ethics of honesty and integrity. William Danforth, the founder of the Ralston-Purina Company, wrote a classic motivation book I Dare You, in which he urged his readers to live honesty and expose themselves to only the best things in life. He was convinced that if an individual read only the best books, listened to only the best music, and learned to appreciate the best of the arts, that person could live like a king.

The same concept is advocated in the Holy Scriptures, particularly in Philippians 4:8 where we are urged to expose ourselves only to things that are “true … right … pure … lovely … and of good repute.”

Most of our twentieth century business leaders believed in the virtues of the clean, highroad morality. Even today there are a few noticeable examples in the world. Chuck Colson has written several books compelling all of us to maintain high ethical and moral standards. William Bennett has succeed in reminding us of the need for such standards in his ethics compilation, The Book of Virtues.

The problem we are confronting as a nation is the combined negative influence of decades of teaching relativism, situation ethics, and the other tenants of secular humanism in our institutions of higher education and even in our secondary and elementary schools. This doctrine of relativism has even eroded the very foundations of our great nation. If you read the daily newspapers, if you watch TV, or if you review weekly magazines, you will notice the obvious absence of any references to absolute truth.

This negative erosion of “universal truth” is also a certain cause of the widespread abandonment of personal responsibility; for example, the tendency of transferring responsibility from individuals (who are pictures as mythical victims) to society at large.

Even the very definition of truth has evolved toward a subjective direction over the past four decades. In the early twentieth century truth was defined by Webster as having a basis in deity and premised on universal, objective principles of morality, honesty, and integrity. Yet the latest edition of Webster’s New College Dictionary (1999) defines truth this way: “a state proven to be accepted as true.” Note the personal, subjective ingredient of a personal “acceptance” of something as true.

To return to the core theme of this newsletter, The National Business Association challenges its members and our society leader to seriously evaluate the erosion of our commitment to honesty and integrity. We sound the alarm knowing that within small businesses and in some regions of the country there still exists some residual commitment to universal truth.

In 2000 a comprehensive survey of businesses in South Carolina was conducted to determine the skills and character traits our businesses are looking for in new employees. The survey gathered detailed information from 423 state employers, with a reduced use of retail businesses and an increased use of data from manufacturing-type businesses. Throughout the state, the category of “Integrity/Honesty” was number one in all six regions, being listed above other basic skills and attitudes such as “Team Player,” “Know How to Learn,” “Listening,” and “Responsibility.”

What is the starting point of the solution to this growing problem of decay from the abandonment of our commitment to universal truth?

The first step is to define truth as it is defined under our standard for the Judeo-Christian heritage on which this nation was founded. The Holy Scriptures are very explicit in defining truth in John 17:17, where Christ himself speaking of the Father said, “Sanctify them in the truth; Thy Word is truth.”

Christianity teaches that all truth emanates from the Holy Scriptures, and that any man-made law, policy, or practice is best tested against the truth found in God’s Word, the Holy Bible. Yes, this is narrow, but it is the only truly objective standard that our nation has relied on for more than two centuries. This standard has served us well over the years, and we should return to it to guide us in the areas of morality, ethics, and business concepts.

The National Business Association challenges all of our education, business, and government leaders to reassess our abandonment of universal truth and our resulting reliance on a sliding scale, personal relativism that removes objective ethics and personal responsibility from the equation for governing our actions that so drastically affect the lives of others.

We must renew our commitment to ethics, morality, honesty, and integrity in all of our business affairs, or we are doomed as a free nation. We need only to remember the immortal words of Alexis de Tocqueville after his extended tour of our great nation: “America is great because America is good. If America ceases to be good, she will cease to great.”

The good that Tocqueville saw sprang from the people of America’s relationship with Jesus Christ, exemplified in the Church. Apparently the presidents of our universities are not willing to be a part of the ethics solution for America. Instead they are determined to remain a part of this growing problem caused by the destructive doctrine of relativism.