OJI
Since religion is such a touchy subject, navigating it requires tact and subtlety.
Two people walk into a room. One raises her hands and prays loud enough for the back row to take notice. The other stretches out his hand and asks loud enough for the whole street to take notice. Different rooms, different scripts, same opening move: look at me, and give me something for it.
I’ve written about both of these people separately — the performer of piety, and the professional beggar. What I didn’t say clearly enough the first two times is that they’re not two different problems. They’re the same problem wearing two different costumes, and the costume department is leadership. Or more precisely, the absence of it.
The Believer’s Hustle
I wrote a piece asking what most of us actually want — to be righteous, or to be seen as righteous — and landed on an uncomfortable answer: mostly the second one. We pray loud in public and cut corners in private, because loud public prayer pays out immediately (nods, “Amens,” a reputation) while quiet private integrity pays out slowly, invisibly, sometimes never in a way anyone claps for. Given the choice between an instant reward and a delayed one, most humans — not bad humans, just humans — will take the instant one every time. That’s not a spiritual failing. That’s an incentive structure working exactly as designed.
The Beggar’s Hustle
Same math, different setting. I’ve also written about a culture where public need became a career — where showing up empty-handed and desperate-looking gets you further than showing up early and useful ever will. Nobody plans to become a professional beggar the way nobody plans to become a professional performer of piety. It happens one transaction at a time: you ask, you receive, the ask worked, so you ask again. Eventually the asking is the plan. The tragedy isn’t that people beg. It’s that somewhere along the way, begging quietly out-earned working, and nobody in charge noticed, or cared enough to fix the math.
Same Root, Two Weeds
Here’s the thread connecting all three pieces, and it’s the one I keep coming back to: behavior is not an accident. It is designed, whether anyone intended to design it or not. I’ve argued elsewhere that societies get exactly the behavior their incentive structures pay for — reward the queue-jumper and you’ll get a nation of queue-jumpers; reward the visible beggar over the invisible hustler and you’ll get a nation of visible beggars; reward the loudest pray-er over the quietest integrity and you’ll get a nation of loud pray-ers with quiet compromises.
None of these are character flaws in “us.” They’re leadership vacuums, and human nature — endlessly resourceful, mildly feral, never one to leave free money on the table — simply moved into the space nobody was guarding.
Small joke, big point: give a culture a loophole, and it will build an entire cathedral in it. Complete with a choir.
What Actually Works — And Why It’s Uncomfortable
I keep bringing up Nigeria’s War Against Indiscipline under the Buhari/Idiagbon government, and I’ll bring it up one more time, because it’s the cleanest proof I have of the alternative. Queue-jumping didn’t stop because Nigerians had a sudden, unprompted change of heart about fairness. It stopped because the consequence for jumping the queue became immediate, visible, and consistent — candy for compliance, cane for the alternative — and the reward for performing your way around the system quietly disappeared. Nobody needed a sermon. They needed a system that no longer paid out for the behavior it claimed to discourage.
That’s the uncomfortable part for anyone who’d rather talk about culture, character, or faith than about design: you don’t fix performance culture — religious or economic — by asking people to be more sincere. Sincerity doesn’t scale. Consequences do. You fix it by making the real version of the behavior pay better than the performed version, consistently, publicly, and without exceptions for people with the right connections or the loudest “Amen.”
The Part, I’m Actually Asking You
So, here’s where I land, and it’s less comfortable than a tidy conclusion usually is: every time you reward the appearance of something over the substance of it — the loudest prayer over the quietest integrity, the most desperate ask over the most consistent effort — you are, whether you meant to or not, doing leadership. Bad leadership, but leadership. You are teaching the room what gets paid.
The question isn’t whether you’re “in charge” of anything official. Most of us aren’t. The question is what you clapped for last week, what you gave money to on the street corner, what impressed you on a timeline — because that’s the vote you cast for what kind of culture gets built next, one small transaction at a time, exactly the way it always has been.
Same hustle. Different altar. One root cause, and it’s been sitting in plain sight in all three of these pieces the whole time.
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TheReciprocist