The moment that ignites the spark of faith, where you place your trust in someone else, rendering yourself deliberately vulnerable to another human being for the first time, is a body-filling, soul-encompassing moment.

But what is this faith? Yes, it is a bond of trust between two people. You can say it is faith in a person, and that is true, but it is more accurate to say that it is a confidence that a person will behave in a certain way toward you.

What you have faith in is that the other person will respect a set of mutually agreed-upon or accepted rules or principles when dealing with you. At the very least, this means they will respect your sense of personal security. They will not try to kill you, steal from you, lie to you, and so on, because you need to feel safe before you can willingly let yourself be vulnerable to someone else, that is, trust them.

It is no accident that these correspond to the Sixth through Tenth Commandments. The Ten Commandments, or this part of them, are the basic principles of having faith in another person. While the Ten Commandments are phrased as demands, they, like faith, are best viewed as expectations, expectations that you will behave in a certain way toward someone else.

To be reasonable, though, an expectation that someone is going to do or not do something must be rational. Rational behavior, by definition, is when people act in a way they consider to be in their best interest. In economics, this is called acting in pursuit of self-interest. This is rudimentary human economic behavior and should be simple enough, but the term “self-interest” has some baggage that needs a bit of clarifying.

First, let’s define things in the negative: what we are not talking about is greed or slavering Wall Street investment bankers and their ilk, whether in the present or in some ancient form. We are talking about self-interest, and all that means is that people try to find a way to do what is best for them in any given circumstance. We all know very well that we don’t always face the best options, but we do try to make the best choice from what we are given. And through our choices, made in our self-interest, we try to improve our lot on earth.

When you have faith in someone else, this means you have the expectation that, in their dealings with you, they will act in a way that is in your mutual self-interest. But while they may be acting positively toward you, again by definition, they are acting in their individual self-interest. Only in this way can you have true faith in the behavior of someone else.

Self-interest has a poor public image. This is mainly due to people who pursue a very narrowly defined self-interest, acting, while taking advantage of what human society has to offer, more like they are alone in the wild, with all the cold bloodedness and mistrust that entails. We are well acquainted with the reputations of John D. Rockefeller Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the rest of the colorful robber barons of yore. We are all too aware of the morality-free excesses of the Ivan Boeskys, Bernie Ebberses, Jeffrey Skillings, and Bernie Madoffs of recent years. The predations of these men are legendary, as are their betrayals of the public trust, all supposedly in the name of self interest.

But the truth is, those men were parasites, some acting more out of an ingrained sociopathy than true self-interest. To them, human beings, or at least human beings outside a very small sphere of family and friends, were nothing at all. Things, not people. They took more than they gave, most often. They and people like them do exist in society, but they necessarily are on the periphery. Society could not function if everyone acted as they have.

On the other end of the spectrum is a man whose name not widely known but whose story is legendary. It is that of Maximilian Kolbe, a German Franciscan priest who died on August 14, 1941, having volunteered to take the place of a stranger, Franciszek Gajowniczek, who was randomly condemned with ten others by the SS as retribution for a prison escape. For that “selfless” act, Kolbe was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1982.

But Kolbe was not going against self-interest. His self interest was simply so broad as to view his life’s purpose (the “interest” of his “self”) as something more than his own corporeal survival. Yes, he sacrificed himself for another individual, but his real gesture was for the survival of humanity, of which he felt an indivisible part. His focus was not perhaps the guaranteed physical survival of the humans around him, which, in Auschwitz was tenuous, but its moral survival, the maintenance of humanity’s moral integrity. And he was right. He confirms that faith in our common humanity is worth it, that it works. (Incidentally, Gajowniczek did survive. He lived until 1995, dying at the age of ninety-three, almost exactly twice the age of Kolbe.)

Self-interest, of course, does not require martyrdom any more than it does criminality, but one hopes that at least the sentiment within Maximilian Kolbe’s mind was closer to the average than Bernie Madoff’s. Of course, Kolbe felt that heaven exists, so in his mind he may not have been consigning himself to oblivion, but to an eternity for himself at the side of God. Even so, this hardly qualifies as putting himself and his interests before those of his fellow men. Indeed, he no doubt hoped everyone he was with would be with him on the other side.

But even if he had not made such a dramatic choice, but had chosen to continue to minister to his flock among the horrors of Auschwitz, that effort would have been consistent with the same sort of broader self-interest as well.

People sometimes call any partially altruistic behavior “enlightened” self-interest, as if it were something truly extraordinary, but it is hardly that. While certainly admirable, it is very common, very ordinary, because most people, to a greater or lesser extent, feel themselves to be part of humanity. And of course that is the purpose of the faith, the bonds of trust we create with each other. We want to empower the pursuit of self-interest to benefit as many people as possible, including ourselves. This has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the material improvement of man’s situation on earth.
Most humans identify their self-interest with others, in particular their family, especially their children, and will, if it comes to that, sacrifice themselves for those people. This is because they have identified their self-interest with something more than merely their own physical body. It is still self interest; it is just not a narrow self-interest. This is because the great majority of the time, this broader self interest in fact does further the basic physical survival of the individual, but as part of something else. So-called self sacrifice is merely putting more value on your legacy than on your mortality. It is still part of you and your self-interest, however.

This still does not explain why having faith in anything or anyone else would be in one’s self-interest. Total control looks safer. Trust, vulnerability, dependency? Risky. But let’s look at the moment that created God again, but with self-interest, not God, in mind.

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We’re back in the wilderness. You and Steve [a former competitor you have now entered into a bond of trust with] have decided not to kill each other. That’s great. You get the warm fuzzy feeling of trust glowing inside you. You don’t have to worry about him stabbing you in the back. At least for now. But what else has happened?

First, he will help you against other enemies, so you don’t have to do that yourself. Also, you don’t have to take precautions against him, so you can focus your energies and resources on other threats. The result? Your security is improved, and you bear less of the effort, meaning the cost of your security to you has gone down.

Then maybe he will help you hunt. This improves the efficiency of your hunting. Also, you and he can exchange things if one has something the other needs. Finally, he is available if you need other help, if you are injured for instance.
These are the simple economic benefits of placing trust in Steve. Your life is made better. Obviously, then, a series of one-on-one arrangements would create even more benefits, but let’s go further. Suppose you Steve, Bill, Bob, Jack, and George all get together and start hunting larger game together. After a while, trust builds, and you create the same arrangement with each other that you and Steve had first.

A change becomes apparent to you. You are spending less time and energy on things that used to consume you. This is because of the efficiencies of working together for hunting and defense. You have greater security and more food with less effort and less cost.

So you have more time on your hands, all of you. What do you do with it? Other than enjoying more rest and down time, you have time to think of new ways to improve your life. You get an idea and make something. You show it to the others. Each of them has had an idea and has made something, too. You exchange things so that you each have everything the group can produce, even though each of you is only making the thing you thought of. You are way better off than before—all because you, Steve, Bill, Bob, Jack, and George each have faith that the others will abide by your collective arrangement. You are all obeying the same rules, the same laws, because you trust that everyone else will obey them.

This is the real faith that is working for you. It has nothing to do with a god, and everything to do with self interest, the motivating force for every economic decision, large or small. By achieving a common acceptance of rules, faith is allowing you to reallocate your resources more efficiently. It is lowering your costs. You are economically better off because you have faith.

Thus the acceptance of the law of the single god has less to do with religion than economics. Acceptance of a common law in Judah, even though it was a religion-based law, made peoples’ lives better because that law provided a foundation for economic growth. It was successful precisely because the threat of Persian intervention ensured that any conflicts over religious orthodoxy wouldn’t be allowed to be overly disruptive.

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The exchange of goods and services that is promoted by the efficient allocation of individual resources is called trade. This is not a new concept. It has been going on since the New Stone Age. Trade seems to be a powerful human impulse. It is fueled by the desire to improve one’s survival chances by gaining wealth, but it is dependent on faith. Not a mystical, spiritual faith, but a practical faith, born of experience with other human beings.

The faith required for trade can be quite minimal, often reverting back to very basic interpersonal trust when external conditions are tenuous, such as when nations are in conflict. It is a faith quite independent of religion: trade is as likely between people of different religious traditions as it is among those who share an affiliation. One need only think of the famous Silk Road, which stretched from Europe to China, crossing Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and pagan lands while creating benefits for each. The endurance of this route—it has existed in one form or another for the better part of three thousand years—is a testament to the compelling nature of trade and the ability of people to build long-lasting trust in each other and in the commercial processes needed to ensure goods were delivered and paid for. Wars raged, dynasties rose and fell, empires came and went. These all affected the flow of trade, but none stopped it; the pull of the Silk Road outlasted the ambitions of all the conquerors history has produced.
As before, we ask, What does this have to do with the Ten Commandments? And again, if we leave the religious part aside, the part relating to Josiah’s single god, and focus on what likely came before that revelation, we are left with a few rules that have a distinctly practical bent. The proscriptions against random killing and stealing (whether of possession or of people) and the admonitions to protect the family and obey basic authority are plainly fundamental to the same sort of trust relationship that fosters efficient allocation of individual resources, leading to exchange and trade.

What the compilers gleaned from their ancient sources was, then, not just the minimum requirements for social stability, but the minimum requirements for economic progress.