The global economy is marked by chaos, confusion and ambiguity. In this unholy messiness, we can rediscover the sacredness of economics.
For many of us, the word sacred triggers unpleasant memories of organized religion and church institutions that have brought both real good and real harm. Yet the word sacred is older and broader than that.
From the Latin sacer (“set apart for the gods”) and via Old French sacrare (“to make holy”), the word sacred entered English meaning “made holy, consecrated.” Sacred things are set apart, revered, and treated as inviolable—in religious, moral, cultural, or personal life.
Almost no one would refer to the economy as sacred. In the 20th century, some treated capitalism and business that way. Gordon Gekko in Wall Street famously quipped: “greed is good.” Profit was the altar at which Gekko worshipped, and he might just as well have called capitalism sacred.
Today we’re living with the horrible consequences: unbridled capitalism, strains on democracy, and the concentration of wealth and power in tech. Disruption, ambiguity, anxiety. The economy feels anything but sacred.
And yet, at its core, the economy is sacred—because it is about human connection.
Set aside the noise about tariffs, geopolitics, soaring living costs, and environmental damage. Those matter, but they can obscure the simple engine beneath them all: exchange. One person has a need; another has the means to meet it. A market forms. That is economics; the rest is just complicating detail.
What’s fraying now is our human connection itself. Online shopping, self-checkouts, e-commerce, and social media are eroding our everyday contact. Even the fact that one doesn’t need to speak with the Uber driver, another human being sitting literally 2 feet away, is crazy. It may seem like a small thing, but taken all together, we see human connection under attack.
Sacred economics asks us to re-awaken those human connections. It’s the thread that holds our business, culture, society and democracy together. It’s how we navigate disruption without losing our bearings.
Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius put it plainly: “We are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids. To work against one another is contrary to nature.” Every religious and sacred tradition teaches similarly: humans are built for community, friendship, and love.
We can’t be naive about the challenges ahead of us. Kindness alone won’t pay the bills. Bringing your neighbour a banana bread doesn’t end the wars. Talking to the Uber driver won’t solve the tariff woes.
We are in a liminal space, the awkward and uncertain realm between a 20th-century economy that is crumbling, and a 21st-century version not fully arrived. It’s bewildering. Yet our best compass to navigate whatever chaos comes next is human connection.
Set apart. Inviolable. Sacred.
