God's capitalists
When obscene wealth offers a path to heaven
This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: Confucius, the first humanist; Pascal’s wager; The Hammer of Witches
WHEN I HEARD that a seven-year-old American girl had set up a lemonade stand to raise money to help pay for her own brain surgery, the world I thought I knew entered a fairy-tale dimension.
Like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel and the Little Match Girl warming her hands around her last match (before she died of exposure), Liza Scott of Birmingham, Alabama, was charging twenty-five cents a glass of homemade lemonade, to raise the money to pay for the surgery she needed to save her life.
I wondered how this was possible in the wealthiest nation on Earth. That was not a …