Shirley Chisholm’s observation cuts with surgical precision across decades: “When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.” She said this in the 1970s, but it reads like a dispatch from this morning’s news cycle. Some truths are stubborn that way.

There is a useful distinction worth making at the outset. Animals operate by instinct — they react, they survive, they pursue. No one blames a wolf for what it does. But human beings are different. We possess rationality, and from that rationality flows something instinct can never produce: character.

Character is not what we feel. It is what we choose — especially under pressure, especially when no one is watching, especially when we have every reason to do otherwise.

The oldest literature in the world understood this. Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, falsely accused, imprisoned and forgotten, eventually rose to power in Egypt. When famine brought those same brothers to his feet — desperate, unrecognizing, utterly vulnerable — he had every reason to be vindictive. The instinct would have been revenge. Instead, he wept. He fed them. He said, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” That is not instinct. That is character — rationality shaped by something larger than the self, expressed through conduct when conduct was costly.

This is precisely why the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s warning carries such weight today. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she observed that the most dangerous leaders are not openly monstrous, but those who have convinced themselves — and their followers — of their own righteousness. Let us take a pause to see if we know someone like that today.

When a leader borrows the imagery of Christ’s self-sacrifice to decorate a project built on self-interest, we are not witnessing faith. We are witnessing the absence of character — instinct dressed in borrowed robes. Pure absense of Character!

Cornel West puts it plainly: “You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people.” Love, in any serious moral tradition, reveals itself in conduct. It shows up in policy, in sacrifice, in the willingness to bear cost for others. It does not announce itself with a golden Bible or a messianic pose. When actions consistently contradict the image being projected, we are not dealing with a failure of messaging. We are dealing with a failure of character — which is simply to say, a failure of the rational, moral self to govern.

James Baldwin saw this self-deception with devastating clarity when he says, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” A nation that cannot name what it is witnessing — the weaponization of the sacred, by those who govern against the poor, the immigrant, the vulnerable — cannot begin to correct it. Let us not condone the failure of nerve among the leaders and pastors, rather let us remember this as character shown plainly and openly for us to be the judges of it.

I will put it in the words of philosopher Simone that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Pay attention now, because there will be a day when this attention we pay, will pay off the attention we give to it now. Truly seeing another person — their dignity, their suffering, their humanity — is itself a moral act. I want to say that again. Seeing another person — their dignity, their suffering, their humanity — is itself a moral act.

Its opposite, the studied indifference of the powerful, is a form of violence dressed in fine clothing. Joseph paid attention to his brothers’ hunger even when their cruelty was fresh. That attention was the proof of his character, not his words about himself.

What does it mean when the symbols of self-giving love are borrowed to dress up self-interest? It means we have arrived at a moment that demands not outrage alone, but clarity. Chisholm was right about profit. Baldwin was right about facing things. And Joseph — three thousand years removed — remains an example precisely because character, unlike instinct, does not expire. Character does not expire!

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