A Management Scholar Speaks on Freedom of Religion and China

In the video below, Clayton Christensen offers insight into why Communism must be totalitarian and why we must not abandon our own fundamental beliefs. Christensen is a top management scholar. His theory of disruptive innovation has defined modern business strategy and greatly influenced my own research and teaching. I always listen to him carefully.

Personally, I don’t believe that any specific belief system is required for order and a well grounded secular regard for civics based on natural law will also suffice; but good and evil do exist. There are actions that are simply not conducive to the continuation of life and civil society and acts that are helpful. Those rules have been developed over thousands of years and offered up by prophets, philosophers and sages of all stripes. The best of them result in a tolerant consideration of other best summed up in the “Golden Rule” we get from Christ, Buddha and others. While we may find it hard to take these bronze age stories literally, we know-it-all modernists dismiss the wisdom in their tales at great peril.

When children are raised in a purely subjective environment where all positions must be considered valid and given no education in good v. evil or right v. wrong, chaos will ensue and force must be substituted to maintain control. Christensen is right to warn us about this and observant to note that a totalitarian China empirically demonstrates this fact.

Mao’s war against all objective ethical standards (Buddhism,Confucianism, any intellectual philosophy and Christianity) during the Cultural Revolution corrupted the country for generations. The problem is still there. In China today, money is God and whatever you can get away without the authorities finding out about is OK. “All power flows from the barrel of a gun” as Mao like to say.

Western business leaders, politicians and academics have partied in this ethical vacuum, exploiting China’s labor and debasing its environment for profit with the blessing of China’s government. China’s dictators whore out their nation’s children and their most precious resources to these men for the money required to keep the Communist Party in power and the opportunity to extend their corruption abroad. This results in the astoundingly nasty things we see today from the total lack of respect for other’s Intellectual Property to dog leather factories to baby formula poisoned for profit.

This is why the things that scare the hell out of Xi Jinping and the of cadre of soulless criminals that run China today are intellectual honestyTibetan Buddhists, House Churches and the Falun Gong.

(I’d like to thank Kai Chen for point this video out to me.)

Greg Autry is a professor of entrepreneurship and economics. He serves as Senior Economist with the American Jobs Alliance and with the Coalition for a Prosperous America and is co-author (with Peter Navarro) of Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – a Global Call to Action. He blogs regularly at: http://www.gregautry.us/blog  and on the Huffington Post.