Andreas Widmer explores what we worship through our choices, contrasting five ultimate ends: pleasure, power, honor, money, and God. Only God, understood as Trinity and perfect love, offers lasting fulfillment; the others create addiction and enslavement. He urges reordering desire by removing false altars and centering the divine in business and life.
Chapters
Can I ask you something? Why are you watching this video? Why are you taking this class? Because you want to learn. Well, why do you want to learn? Because you want a career. Why do you want a career? Do you want a family? Oh, why do you want a family? So you might say, because I want to flourish. Well, why do you want to flourish? Because you want to be happy. This is a so what question. Have you ever thought about this? Everything we do has a fundamental question to it. Whether you know the answer consciously or not, you're doing anything you do because of a fundamental so what? It's just that most of the time, we never go down and drill down deep enough to find out why am I doing this. But everything I do has a reason, has a deep reason. Without that deep reason, sort of the ultimate answer to us, we wouldn't know what we're living for. We wouldn't know how to order our will, how to order my desire, how to live, how to live life. That will and that desire, the deepest desire for happiness, is really about what makes me happy. It's what I give the highest worth to. What is worth the most to me. Bishop Barron, a bishop from an auxiliary bishop from Los Angeles, once said that this is what he called worth ship. Whatever we give the highest worth to is what you worth ship. And what you worship is how you order your life, your will, your actions. Towards happiness, however, is something that we should take very seriously. Happiness is our desire for infinite good. How happy do you want to be, and how long do you want to be happy? Do you want to be happy a little bit, a short time, a transient kind of happiness? Or do you want to be happy forever in a deep way, infinitely? You know, St. Thomas Aquinas talked about this and wrote a whole treaty about this that said, what makes us happy? And he says there can only be five major answers. Generally, humanity says there's five answers to this. Pleasure, power, honor, money, and God. Let's look at those. Is pleasure making us happy? Is pleasure the end of happiness? Is that the end of your life? Is that why you live? Aquinas says no, because pleasure is really a side effect of something else that you're doing. So it can't really be the end all, be all, because it's really only an effect, a side effect. Is it power? Why do you want power? We want power to get freedom to do something. So the end is really that something, isn't it? So power can't be either. Is it honor? Honor is a derivative of something. Honor is something we receive from others based on some perception. And it's somewhat questionable because think about this. Are the people we honor the most in society, Are they the happiest? Are they the ones who deserve the honor the most? It's not honor either. Is it money? Well, why do you want money? What is money for? Money is something that we can buy or satisfy our wants with, but only some wants. Because, you know many things and things, some things that are most important to you, you can't buy them. What these four first things have in common is they all give you sort of a buzz. They give you a transient buzz. But as soon as you have it, it wears off and you have to go back and to get it again, you have to try harder. I've done this in my life as an entrepreneur many times that you go back for honor, for money, for power, for pleasure. And you keep. Every time you come back, you have to try harder. As a matter of fact, you have to try harder to the point that you harm yourself. It's in a way, an entrapment of your person. It's a form of addiction that you keep having to go more and do more of this. It's more that these are not the source of your happiness. These are more of a source of enslavement, if you wish. These things actually make a very good servant, a very good slave themselves, but not a good master. That leaves us with the last answer, and that is that happiness is ultimately found in God. I think it makes sense to attach your infinite desire to an infinite being. The infinite object is ultimately the result or where we ultimately find our infinite desire. But who is God and what is God? That's a good question. I just want to leave you with this. That God, we say is love. But God is more complex than love because he is God is love. That is in the Trinity. The lover God, the lover, the Son, the beloved, and the Holy Spirit. The shared love between them. So God is not just love as a feeling. God is all of love. The aspect of that is that God is in the interest of the other. Love is to want the good of the other. It's a circle. It's a reciprocal action. That you love somebody and they want your good and you want their good. And they love you back and you want their good. This is what God is all about. To find yourself in God means to achieve ultimate happiness. This doesn't mean that when we do business that we do this in a very different way. Most of the theories, everything that we do in business is pretty much the thing as anybody else. But the difference is why we're doing it and who we're doing it for. And this isn't some great journey of climbing a mountain or something like that. This is actually something that happens right inside of you. The altars of pleasure, power, honor, money that we can worship on. They usually clobber up our heart, our soul. They clog our life. When all we have to do is not to go to great length to go find God, or to do something beyond our means. All you're asked to do is to clean out these other altars and put the one altar central into your life that will truly bring you happiness.
