This Devil’s Advocate is worried. My professional activity depends on the emergence of recognizable personalities who display something like saintly behavior. Like a recruiter who screens CVs, my job has long been to separate the performative and the mediocre from those whose character and deeds genuinely embody communal ideals. For decades the trend in potential saints has been downhill.
Not long ago, even a brief news item might present someone worthy of civic admiration. These figures didn’t have to be religious: a secular civic culture supplied its own saints. They surfaced through service to neighborhoods, care for the vulnerable, quiet devotion to family, or acts of public courage. Fictional figures — from Popeye the working-class champion to Superman the guardian reporter — performed the same cultural work: embodying shared virtues and modestly displaying banal heroism that reinforced a civic ethic.
Real-life exemplars such as Helen Keller, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. carried forward an essentially religious tradition of moral elevation even into the late 20th century. But the world that produced them has been transformed, and the change is quicker and deeper than many realize. What we are witnessing is not merely secularization in the sense of fewer church-goers; it is a wholesale remodeling of our shared value system.
Consider how everyday choices and public norms have shifted over the past half-century. Behaviors once deemed unthinkable for people in positions of authority are now treated as pragmatic or even admirable. Where covert abuses could be rationalized if they fit institutional patterns, bold public acts of exploitation that once would have invited shame are increasingly celebrated as cleverness or competitive spirit. The moral grammar has shifted from restraint to assertion: failing to seize advantage is now more likely to be criticized than overreaching.
Ideas of what is “natural” have long informed Western mores, and those ideas have changed. Practices once normal became unacceptable and vice versa. The Ten Commandments, and the broader religious-moral frame they represented, used to function as a widely recognized backdrop for social life. Not everyone observed them with theological rigor; rather, they established an arena of moral expectation — a set of “thou shalt nots” that gave moral decision-making its tension and meaning. Saints, in the Catholic sense, were those rare people who lived by the spirit and letter of such rules and who still confessed failures when they occurred.
Today, however, the negative framing of morality — rules that limit behavior — has been largely supplanted by a positive imperative: maximize success. Success, typically measured by wealth or influence, now sits at the apex of our hierarchy of goods. That elevation changes everything. Actions are judged instrumentally by whether they produce desirable outcomes rather than by whether they conform to ethical constraints. The celebrated transgression becomes a pathway to triumph rather than a moral failing that excludes one from respectability.
The ethos of contemporary elites rewards audacity. Consider the professional counsel reportedly given by a leading tech executive to young engineers: copy a popular product, take its users and content, release fast, and if it works, hire lawyers to sort out the fallout. If no one uses it, the theft was harmless. Fifty or sixty years ago, such an instruction would have been unthinkable to say aloud; if attempted and successful, it would mark the perpetrator as a pariah. The old social calculus linked success with legitimacy in a way tempered by shame at overt wrongdoing. Today, success itself neutralizes the stigma.
That shift is visible in politics as well. A former national security figure once boasted that, as CIA director, he and his agency had lied, cheated and stolen — even citing training for such behavior. When a former West Point cadet and a man charged with upholding rules of honor casually celebrates institutionalized deception, we see how norms have been inverted: confession has become a boast and moral transgression a badge of experience.
History offers context. Calvinist strains of Western thought long associated success with virtue: prosperity could be read as a sign of divine favor, or at least of industrious character. Capitalism and colonial expansion further entwined success, accumulation and moral dissonance, creating mechanisms to ignore causes and consequences of wealth. But earlier elites understood there were limits to what one could openly claim; private guilt and public restraint remained parts of the social fabric. In the current climate, ostentation of the means to success — even illicit or exploitative means — can be part of a publicity strategy that consolidates power.
The consequences are not merely theoretical. Success measured by wealth can fund political influence, lobby power and media sway, shaping decisions across democracies. Those who build predatory monopolies or capture markets can then write the rules to protect their position, reinforcing success as both cause and effect of clout. Saints of the old civic order, who embodied restraint and service, find fewer institutional suitors today. The marketplace prefers winners, not exemplars of shared moral habits.
This recasting of values affects national politics and international actions. When states and financial institutions openly contemplate confiscating vast assets in the name of strategic aims — or when leaders rationalize actions by appeal to success, security or expediency — it’s worth asking how our civilizational scale of values has shifted. What was once framed in terms of “thou shalt not” is increasingly reframed as an obstacle to successful outcomes.
I am not arguing that the past was morally pure. Historical actors achieved wealth through genocide, slavery and exploitation even as they framed success as virtue. Yet there was at least an underlying public language that made some acts shameful and kept a space for public ideals. That space — where saints and civic heroes once symbolized shared ends — has narrowed. Today’s leaders often wear their transgressions as badges of competence. The sociable tension of ethical uncertainty that once kept moral stakes visible has been dulled by success-worship.
If we value a common civic culture that recognizes exemplary virtue distinct from mere achievement, we should notice this transformation and consider its consequences. Saints in the secular marketplace are rare not only because religion has receded, but because the rewards and incentives of our social order now favor mercantile cleverness over moral example. The question becomes whether a society that prizes success above restraint can sustain the public goods that depend on trust, mutual obligation and a shared sense of the limits that make cooperation possible.
*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the “Devil’s Dictionary,” shifting focus from rhetorical sleights to substantial issues in the news. Read more of The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]*
[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]
The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
