Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about. In part that is because survival and solvency are quite difficult in the details; and in part that is because doing “good” requires a much richer concept of what you are doing than is required by being profitable and placating shareholders. It’s easier to get it wrong, harder to say when you’re done and can move resources to other things and harder to keep people’s actions aligned with the goal.

Over the past hundred years, California has been host to thousands of intentional communities, where people set their sights on something higher than making a living. Nearly all of these communities collapse within a generation, neither living up to their ambitions nor providing for their members’ most basic needs. These failures have multiple causes, but ultimately can be summed up in terms of having one institution serve too many different functions, in an environment where there are already specialized institutions serving those functions efficiently.

People seeking to do good in the world aren’t looking for work, they are looking for religion — in the sense of spiritual community and connection to the godhead. Doing good is the role of something like the Salvation Army and charitable missions — institutions of long standing which are subject to very different guidelines than businesses.

Those who would mix business and charitable, virtuous action are asking to be held accountable for neither while enjoying the rewards of both.