Entrepreneurship, Prosperity, and Living Contra Mundum: A Q&A with Robert L. Luddy

In this month’s Q&A, managing editor Alexandra Davis interviews business leader and school founder Robert Luddy about his new book, Seeking Wisdom: The Road to Prosperity.

Alexandra Davis: Thank you so much for joining me. I really enjoyed the book and I’m excited to talk with you about some of the points that I think will be of particular interest to Public Discourse readers.

I like that in the book you pull together a lot of different threads. You talk about wisdom from the ancients; you talk about Catholic thinkers like Dietrich von Hildebrand. You talk about entrepreneurs, like Nikola Tesla, the Wright Brothers, Orville Redenbacher. You talk also a lot about the Founding Fathers, which is of great interest to us at Public Discourse, because we’re very interested in the American founding.

So I really appreciated this synthesis as well as its practical application: how can we apply wisdom from these different contexts in our lives, and how can we be excellent in all we do? How can we grow in virtue and how can we prosper? There are a number of points I’d love to discuss with you, but first, I want to ask, what does prosperity mean to you? What does it mean on an individual level? What does it mean for an individual to be prosperous? And what does it mean more broadly for a society, just in connection with human flourishing more generally?

Robert Luddy: I think it means determining what your skills are and how they can be applied in life. It could be in any form. It’s about contributing to society in the way that God intended you to contribute, as opposed to thinking somehow that society should provide for you in small or large ways.

Think about people who are great contributors. That’s one of the reasons I brought in Tesla. He actually gave up the money because he wanted everybody to have AC power. So that’s an example of someone who’s living a beneficial life for themselves and society, and they’re not putting “me” first; they’re putting others first. And that’s the road to happiness and contribution. It’s very much missed in secular society.

AD: I was going to say, it seems like we have a prosperity crisis right now. I think one of the great ills of our society is that everyone thinks about what they can get out of other people. Do you think that we’re uniquely self-focused now? Or is this just a different shape of human selfishness that’s always been there?

RL: No, I think we’re uniquely self-focused now. For example, a priest made the comment the other day, “If you’re not sure exactly how to live, why don’t you pay attention to how your grandparents lived?” So he was recognizing that this is a more modern issue. And if you think about where it came from, even back in 1960, when I was in high school, everybody had to work. The children worked, they had jobs in high school, it was just normal. Most mothers stayed home but when they had to come back into the workforce, the government began to collect more money and do more programs. It began with the Great Society, the government decided it could handle problems, which should be handled by the families.

I was in Vietnam at this time. Fortunately, I had a good assignment there. But Vietnam fractured our society, and big government basically took away that individual responsibility that everybody had in 1960. So this idea of socialized big government medicine progressed for the next fifty years, to a point of complete absurdity. Now it undermines everything else, because it’s consuming so much money and it’s pushed as an entitlement.

And then you fast forward to COVID, and supplementary $2 trillion spending packages, mailing checks to people, creating programs where fraudsters could scam money, … it all undermines society.

This flow of big government programs actually makes life much more difficult for the average person. Trying to buy a house is darn near impossible for an average person. To give you a frame of reference, fifty years ago when I moved to Raleigh, I bought a brand-new home in a very good area for $35,000. That home today is [worth] $500,000. Now, there’s no way that if you looked at the CPI [the rate of inflation], you would ever get to $500,000.

So, the flow of government money inflates the cost of everything, and then you have a higher demand for the government to do more programs. There’s an interesting comment from Ludwig von Mises, the great economist. He said: “All government interventions lead to trouble, and then they require more interventions, because they’re not going to work.”

Think about healthcare. It’s one intervention after another, even to the point of saying, “Well, the cost is so high that we’ll just have to pay the whole bill for you, because you can’t afford to pay it.”

That’s the level of insanity that we’ve come to. And the only way out is for the federal government to contract. And that includes all governments, federal, state, and local, to stop taking people’s money. It’s a pretty simple formula, and it goes back to the Founders. Can you imagine if the Founders were alive today? They wouldn’t believe what happened. It’s far worse than anything that happened under the king, where he was taking one or two percent of their income.

Big government is the enemy of religion and of the individual. And individuals cannot prosper with a powerful federal, state, and local government, because if you think about it, regulation is a restriction on innovation. So every time there’s a new regulation, it’s restricting somebody, somewhere. I mean, suppose there was a regulation that we can only have DC power. And you had Tesla saying, “Well, that’s not the right answer.” He might have won in his lifetime, or might not have, but people feel really comfortable with the regulation. But it’s vastly overdone.

AD: To that point, is this fixable? You mentioned the need for this great contraction. Is that possible or have we hit a point of no return?

RL: Politically, it’s not very easy, because in recent elections, as people become more desperate, they vote for people who are even worse than the ones that are in power currently. And so someone says, “I can fix all this,” and even though they have no remote idea how to do it, people will vote for them.

So I think it could be fixed if we had the right type of leadership, and if they could be elected, which is increasingly difficult—because people feel the cost, and it’s in the news every day now. The cost structure is so high that the average person can’t get ahead. And that was not true in 1960, 1970, maybe even 2000, because both the debt and the deficit have increased dramatically, and now we have this burden of a trillion dollars a year going to interest. You can’t do budget reform and cut the interest, so that’s going to be there forever. So we just squandered one sixth or one fifth of our tax collection on interest. It’s going to be increasingly difficult, and it’s going to take a lot of political will to resolve it.

AD: I’m interested in the idea of entrepreneurship as, if not a way out of this, a way to achieve at least some kind of return to prosperity at the individual level, possibly even within local communities. So I’d love to hear more about that.

You talk a lot about the idea of intellectual freedom, and how the kind of intellectual freedom that entrepreneurship allows isn’t really replicable within big government, with “central planners” as you say.

Can you talk a bit about what that intellectual freedom looks like and how we can harness that even if we are not entrepreneurs?

RL: Have you heard of the Latin term contra mundum?

AD: Yes.

RL: “Against the world.” That’s the nature of an entrepreneur. They’re looking at the world entirely differently. And in most cases, entrepreneurs are providing a superior outcome at a lower cost. There are times that it’s a higher cost, but even if it’s a higher cost, it’s a superior outcome. So yes, entrepreneurs, people who are willing to make a contribution, who are willing to take risks, are the whole basis of an economy. And if you don’t have those entrepreneurs, you have a socialistic economy.

A way out is for young people to figure out how they can make a contribution at whatever level, within companies, within organizations, within churches. And, as you stated, it needs to come from the ground up; it’s not going to come out of the federal government. It needs to come from the individual. And, as you probably know, in modern-day colleges, they talk about collaboration, as if people sitting around at a table would figure anything out. And there was a comment by Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera. He said that if you put five intelligent people around a table, you’re going to get the lowest common denominator; you’re going to get bad ideas. But one of those people at the table might say, “Here’s the best idea, here’s how it needs to be done.” That’s what entrepreneurship is. It’s not a blending of things down to where everybody feels good. It’s about unique ideas.

You can also try to design products and services that get around regulation. At least partially.

AD: How so? What’s an example?

RL: If you think about it, that’s basically what Uber did. They didn’t go buy medallions in New York City. They eliminated the need for medallions. That’s a way of getting around regulations, and that’s what entrepreneurs can do.

AD: Wow. Okay, so it’s not coming from the top down. It’s not going to come from the federal government giving young people grants to start small businesses. You can think of all the ways in which government could get involved to try to encourage entrepreneurship, and what you’re saying is that that’s not going to work. And I gathered from your book that you’re also not a big fan of meetings, which I’ve heard from others as well. That things are brought down to the consensus level, which isn’t always the best and highest contribution.

So as an example, let’s talk about your schools. I am a graduate of one of your schools, and while I was there, I sensed that the school was committed to delivering the very best education in a very lean way. And I very much was the beneficiary of that. Can we talk about Thales College, the Thales schools, the other institutions that you’ve had a hand in starting? What was your vision for cultivating intellectual freedom, this entrepreneurial spirit, within these institutions?

RL: If you think about schools, they tend to be all process. And part of that process stamps down creativity, if you think about it, over a period of time.

Young children are very inquisitive. They’re asking a thousand questions; they want to learn. But over a period of time, they learn what’s taught to them, but they don’t learn much about getting past the status quo.

When I went to school, I was interested in what I was learning, but I wasn’t accepting it at face value. Some things are absolute, like you’re doing algebra or arithmetic, or you’re learning how to read. Those are K–5 basic knowledge, you need to know those really well, and they don’t really change. So we do a really good job of teaching kids to read, but you’re teaching them to read for the purpose of learning more about the world. And once they learn to be good readers, they can access information, then they move into the classical curriculum. Then (and we don’t do this perfectly, and we’re always trying to improve) it moves into Socratic.

I have a professor friend at Duke University, Dr. Adrian Bejan, and he says, “I don’t pretend to teach creativity, but I let students ask questions and we move into the discussion.” In that environment, the student can ask questions, and the professor or the teacher can inform them when they’re wrong about something or maybe something can be explored in a new way. That’s how you develop creativity. One of the comments he made to me and some of our engineers was, “Creativity begins with a hunch, and then you explore that hunch.” But if everyone tells you that’s a bad idea and you shouldn’t do it, they’re basically tamping down new ideas.

A biologist once made this comment that all the cells in your body have integrity, and they work toward the whole, to be beneficial to your body. The exception would be cancer. But those cells are also very accustomed to rejecting proteins from the outside, viruses, things that come in. And that moves into our psychological state, where we tend to reject new ideas, at least initially, because we’re programmed that way. As we think about them rationally, we eventually adopt some of those new ideas. So if you think about the educational process, it’s going to have a tendency to reject new ideas.

I’ll give you an example. In our business, we make commercial kitchen ventilation. There are fire suppression systems to put out grease fires, and they don’t work very well. They’re code-mandated, they’re expensive, and they barely work. I finally came to the conclusion that we should use water for these systems. So we developed a system that uses water, and it puts out every single fire.

But most people, if you said, we’re going to develop this little project and use water on grease fires, they’d say, “No, no, no, no, no, no. Everybody knows that you can’t do that.” And so my rebuttal was pretty simple: “What does a fireman do when they go in and there’s a grease fire? They put water on it, right?” And they do it in a different way than mom with a bucket of water throwing it on the grease fire. They do it with a fog nozzle.

So there’s a case of minor discrimination that allows you to think differently. And that can only come through discussion and debate. If you go to school and they say, “You could never put water on a grease fire,” and you believe that, well, then you just took away that opportunity to do anything differently.

That’s a negative side of school. Now, if you have an inquisitive individual or engineer, they might say, “Well, says who? Maybe under certain conditions you could do that.” Generally in school, you’re probably not going to get a good response to that. Some of it’s just due to expediency.

So we need to develop individuals who have what we’d call a sense of wonder. We need people who are truth seekers and willing to challenge even when they’re wrong. If you’re engaged in product development, most of the ideas you have are not going to work out. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to have ideas. And some of the ideas you have are good ideas, but they may take years to perfect, to get into the marketplace.

You need people to have the tenacity, the wonder, and the willingness to say, “I can do some things better than what is currently being done in the marketplace.” And that’s the nature of entrepreneurship. It gets boiled down in the modern society to “the entrepreneurial spirit.” And maybe that’s okay, to say, “I’ve got the spirit of doing something different,” but it doesn’t lead you anywhere. You have to have skills to challenge the status quo, to rethink, to experiment, to find new people that could support your idea.

Society, in general, tamps that down. If you’re working for a large company, it’s going to be very hard to bring new ideas to the table. Because you have all these levels of bureaucracy, which, if you notice, in the modern marketplace, they’re beginning slowly to cut those levels out, because they’re realizing they don’t make any sense. It’s very hard to make change, it’s very expensive to pay all these people. So you’re seeing, without announcements, slenderizing in many companies. They’re cutting out bureaucracy that doesn’t need to be there.

So young people need to work for companies that at least have an open mind for new ideas. In my case, at age thirty-one, I left the company I worked for and said, I think I can do these things way better than they’re doing them. That’s what I would call the entrepreneurial attitude, or, as I used to call it (I have a bunch of brothers), “the Luddy Boy Attitude”: We think we can do it better than you’re doing it!

That’s the nature of competition, right? We may be proven to be wrong, but at least we have the attitude to say, “we’re going to try hard to improve.” And that’s what we need students to do, to challenge the status quo over time to make a higher level of contribution to the world.

AD: So how do we put that into practice in K–12 education, for example?

RL: How can we do a better job with these kids? Students at a very young age can understand some level of abstract concepts. What is the natural order? What is natural law? How does physics play a role in my life? I actually have a meeting tonight on this with some priests and a physicist. If you said, “Okay, the natural world was designed by God, we can’t have any impact on it, the natural world’s going to do what it’s going to do.” In this case he calls it “flowing, moving.” It’s dynamic, so it applies to the actual earth itself, the trees, the flowers, the animals, the birds, and it applies to us as humans. And he said that in the natural world, it wants to move or flow toward higher levels of efficiency.

There’s the whole basis of entrepreneurship. We’re not just trying to work harder; we may have to work really hard to get to a point where we can contribute, so we’re going to do both. We’re going to work hard and find ways of becoming more efficient over time.

Leonardo da Vinci had the blessing of not having any formal education. He made these observations of the natural order, and then he learned the state of the art from the best sculptures, the best painters, and he improved on it. So we should get everybody to think more like da Vinci. He worked hard to perfect his skills to improve the efficiency of products, the beauty of paintings, the beauty of sculpture. He actually was a top-notch engineer, which most people don’t think about. He was a magnificent engineer, but it all came from his observations of the natural order and of highly skilled people. And that’s what we need to turn education into, you know, beyond K–5, where you should learn all the basic skills, but you should at least come out with a sense of wonder and some understanding of the natural order.

AD: Wow. That’s great, thank you. When you talk about the natural order, it makes me think about, years ago, when I took a drawing class and we were instructed to observe the items. So, if you’re drawing a chair, you observe the angles, observe the lighting and the contrast and capture that, instead of thinking, “I’m going to draw what I think a chair looks like.” And the difference between the two was striking.

What you said about education made me think of that, because it almost seems like what you’re attempting to do is teach people to observe the angles, the lighting, if you will, the natural order and capture that, versus applying a certain framework to ideas and concepts. It’s, draw what you see, don’t just picture a chair in your head and try to draw it. You’re teaching them to observe the world as it is.

This also makes me think of Father Robert Spitzer. He says if you teach students about science, they will eventually reach certain conclusions about God and who he is, because we can see him in the way that the world works.

RL: Right.

AD: But in your book you mention, at several points, how we are utterly flooded with distraction, ephemera, more so now than ever before. And I remember speaking with one of my teachers from high school a few years after I graduated. And he said, “It’s amazing to see the effect of these distractions on students now. It’s even more pronounced now than it was when you were here.”

A lot of our readers are professors, a lot of them are in K–12 education, many of them are entrepreneurs, professionals, and many are parents. And all of them are equally concerned about the effect of all of these distractions on our minds and imaginations, and our ability to do all of these things that you’re talking about right now, cultivating a sense of wonder.

I want to hear your thoughts on what we can do to overcome this cultural challenge. How can we be contra mundum? How can we be signs of contradiction when everybody has a smartphone fused to their hands?

RL: Yes. One thing that I’ve been thinking about is, volitionally, we have to segregate ourselves from popular culture and the secular world.

And what does that mean? When I went to college (I went to La Salle in Philadelphia) they had a pretty good basketball team. I attended zero basketball games.

Now that’s pretty extreme. I’m not necessarily suggesting that. But maybe a thousand boys (it was all male at that time) went to La Salle. The dorm students were like a different class of students. But the class I was in commuted, and they worked, so they came to school to learn and they went to work, and that was their life. They didn’t go to parties, and we didn’t have cell phones or computers. So the distractions of modern day didn’t exist. But we did enmesh ourselves in the important things: working and going to school.

It’s pretty simple. Now, I was at a major university last week giving a talk, and it just overwhelmed me. I was in this gigantic hall, and there were hundreds of students there, and it was loud, and I didn’t even really know what they were doing. Then, when I went outside into the greenway, they had all these tents set up, like it was a fair or something, I don’t even know what it was. There were just hundreds of students out there, and I thought, “Dear God.” You know, I went to a campus that was thirty acres, so you could walk to any class in five minutes. So they had a fifty-five-minute class, you had to move quickly, but you could easily make it. These campuses are large and they’re quasi–entertainment centers, and it’s very hard to reconcile that I’m trying to entertain myself and learn at the same time.

So I think you have to extract yourself. Back then the nerds would do it. They wouldn’t have any problem! But generally you can’t do both, and I see that in people as they work in companies and start making more money, it becomes all about vacations, sports, golfing on the weekend instead of going to church. So I think an individual contra mundum has to make a conscious effort to say, once in a while I go to a movie or a sports event, and there’s nothing wrong with any of that, but that’s not my life.

For example, my friend Adrian Bejan, who’s a professor, says our life is reading, discussing, writing, trying to help other people who come to us, and trying to improve our own thinking. That’s the world we live in. And I’m not saying that’s good for everybody, maybe for most people it’s not. But they ought to be doing a little bit of it. For example, I gave a talk recently, and I was passing out books, and to this one man, I said, “Oh, here, you can have one of these autographed books.” And he said, “I don’t read.”

I thought, whoa. Most people, if they didn’t read, they would take the book and not say anything, and I thought, wow, that was shocking. And his wife came up and said, “I read. Let me have that book!”

So, people will say that they’re engaged in continuous learning, and they’re thinking outside the box. Well, thinking outside the box mostly is not thinking, it’s just some reaction. Thinking takes time and effort. To develop good thoughts takes a lot of work.

There was a comment by Jay Bhattacharya, who’s the NIH director now, that, “Science is hard. It doesn’t come on the fly, and it doesn’t come easy.” Well, isn’t that an analogy for life? Nothing comes easy to us. God didn’t say, “Here, I’m going to hand you all this on a platter so you can go to a football game.” He said, “I’m going to make you work for it, and you can make sense of it all, but you’re going to work hard and it’s going to take time.” So I think we need to reorient people away from this secular life, which overwhelms you. I mean, as you just brought up, one iPhone can pretty much take over your life. And for too many people, it’s already done that.

Our modern secular world is one hundred percent distraction, even to the point that you can’t go to mass on Sunday because the NFL game is now coming out of Ireland, or you really wanted to golf, and that’s when you had time to do it. And then you’re just in the dark world of complete chaos.

AD: Yes. I heard it described as “frenetic leisure,” and I thought that captured it so well. It does feel very frenetic. I think leisure is certainly a part of life and it’s not a negative in and of itself, but when it becomes our sole object and we view the normal work, the important things you mentioned, that we should be enmeshing ourselves in, when we view that as a distraction from the things we’d rather be doing, I think that can be really dangerous.

I have three children, and one time I had a friend say to me, “I can’t imagine being a working mother. It seems like your whole life would just be working and then taking care of your children.” And after I recovered I thought, “Well, I mean, what else would you be doing?”

It was funny. But it also wasn’t funny at all, because I do think—and this is nothing against this friend of mine—that all of us, or particularly younger people, fall into this trap of thinking, “Oh man, I have this work obligation. Oh man, my kid is sick. But I really wanted to go do this fun thing, and now my life is getting in the way!” But, this work is your life. And I have to remind myself of that all the time, too.

RL: That’s the salient point right there. This is your life. And when you’re in your early twenties to your mid-forties, it consumes you, but that’s what you do. And there’s always a desire to have some relief, and most people, through family or friends, can get a little relief here and there, but that’s about it.

So you have to love children, you have to love family life. And during that timeframe, this is your prosperity. You’re raising these children who could make unforeseen contributions to the world.

Think of anybody at age five to thirty. You can’t predict what they’re going to do in the future. What you can do is nurture them and encourage them to do the best possible things. And they can be small.

A really good mom is not a small thing. It’s a big thing, because it’s going to impact the life of those children for the next sixty, seventy years. I think we should stress the importance of being a good mom and dad. It’s a lot more important than having three dogs.

Sorry, I’m not a dog person! But it drives me crazy that people actually think they’re going to have dogs instead of kids now. Maybe there’s some benefit—I don’t personally understand it—but it’s not the benefit of having a loving person that will be with you for your entire lifetime.

AD: It seems like we want less and less and less asked of us. And children ask a lot of us. Dogs bring us pleasure without asking anything of us.

RL: If you are very successful, there are a lot of demands on your time, and there are demands from people. They never stop. We should actually relish this, because that’s exactly what we were intended to do.

Someone asked me, and this happens periodically, “I don’t understand why you’re engaged with these schools, because your children graduated a long time ago.” And I said, “Well, because this is what I do. I have a certain amount of knowledge and resources, and I want to take that to the next generation to the extent I can. It’s what I do. It’s what I like to do.” They can’t understand it. It’s like, “Well, you could be on a yacht, you could be traveling to Europe.” And I say, “First of all, I don’t like going on vacation!” Because when we were young, we never went on vacation, so we were never acclimated to that life. I like going to work, I like contributing in any way I can, because that’s the way I grew up.

So, back to your point, in family life, this is what you’re made for. Nobody talks about this anymore.

Now, if you looked at a housewife in the fifties, it was pure drudgery. They didn’t have a car, they didn’t have a cell phone, they had to take care of the kids, maybe the dad worked long hours. Well, for a modern woman, you’ve got modern appliances, you got more money, probably have your own car. Being a mom is still very hard, but it’s not as hard as it was in 1950. Or 1900 for that matter.

I think sometimes looking backward helps. Lily von Hildebrand always stressed to me a couple of things. One was gratitude. We need to talk about gratitude all the time, because it’s easy to forget when we’re in this secular society. And the second thing she stressed was, if you want to change the world, change yourself. The more you think about that, the more you will realize she’s a hundred percent right. Because you can’t change anybody else, but you can influence them with your knowledge and your behavior. If that’s not improving over the course of a lifetime, then you’re not making the contribution that you could and you’re expected to make in life. When you think about people that you’ve known who are really good people making contributions, you admire them, you respect them, and they’re a very important part of your life, even if it’s in a small way. That’s what we should be encouraging.

Again, back to the grandparents, the great-grandparents, learn how they lived, learn the hardships of a hundred years ago. It was staggeringly difficult. Today, in a sense, everything’s easy, except living in the secular world. I mean, if you’re doing intellectual work all day and then you do the laundry, it’s kind of fun.

So, you have all these modern conveniences. It can’t really get a lot better if you think about it. But what can get better is our attitude, our ability to learn, our willingness to help each other at every level all the time.

There’s a comment in The Wealth of Nations that positive justice is saying, “I will improve your situation.” So if you think about every person you encounter, did you improve their situation, or were you just a grumpy, miserable person that wouldn’t help them on a bet? That would be an injustice. But positive justice isn’t monumental; it’s just an improvement. It might be a smile. It might be a word of encouragement. It could be anything. That’s something I think we need to stress, and it’s not new. But in the secular world that doesn’t exist. It’s about me. Everything’s about me.

AD: I will say, to your point, that our lives are so much better now by virtually every metric than they were for our grandparents and great-grandparents. A couple of generations ago, my family were all immigrants, so growing up my parents had very little patience for complaining of any kind from me. But all I see is study after study about how miserable we are, how we are more miserable than ever before, even though we have so much time. I mean, I joke with my friends all the time about how stressed we thought we were in college. What did we possibly think we had to do other than worry about ourselves and our own problems?

 

RL: I mean, think about this: the more physical things you have, and particularly if you have an attachment to them, they become a tremendous burden. Have you ever heard of a family office?

AD: No. What is that?

RL: It’s a relatively new term. Wealthy people have a “family office,” and it could be in their home, could be in a real office, and they might have a staff, it could be one or five people. And to some degree, they become a concierge to the family, take care of finance, whatever the family wants. And this is one extreme case, where the owner comes in and tells the staff, “I fired our crew on the yacht today. I need a new crew tomorrow, so go find it for me.” Why did he fire the people? It could be a good, legitimate reason or not, but the point is that the yacht’s now a burden, where you have a staff of people to take care of your leisure, your pleasure.

The more stuff you have, the more anxiety you create, because you’re worried about it. Will someone steal it? Will the hurricane kill your yacht? Someone has to look after your five houses around the country. It all becomes a burden. I was talking to a priest the other day about poverty and he said, “Well, I don’t have to worry about any of this stuff. I took a vow of poverty. I don’t own anything.” He didn’t state this, but my impression was he was saying, “I’m very free.”

I’m lean to a fault, and I love it. And I know sometimes it’s a fault because if I cook a meal for four people I don’t want anything to be left over. To me, that’s an achievement. Whereas many people I know cook twice as much, and then what do you do with the food? Mostly, you throw it away. To me, that’s offensive. We ought to do better than that.

Being lean has enormous advantages. It simplifies your life; it allows you to focus on the things that are really important.

AD: It’s funny because my family knows that to me, there’s no greater pleasure in life than being alone in my house with a garbage bag, just going around and throwing things out. Especially my children’s toys.

RL: Yes, jettison the things you don’t need. Maybe they can help someone else.

AD: This made me think of an interview that you did about your decision not to have cafeterias in your schools because of the massive overhead they require. And it’s interesting, as you know, I went to St. Thomas More, and I didn’t miss the cafeteria. My kids’ school has one, and it’s great, it’s fine. But I didn’t miss having it. I’m grateful I had the education I had at such a great value.

And you mentioned the priest, about how freeing it was for him to take this vow of poverty, and it was compulsory: “Hey, I can’t have anything.” But I’m sure families can replicate that to some extent, right? And businesses? Nonprofits? Do you have practical tips for people who want to live out that vow of poverty, so to speak, in their own lives so they too can be free of the burden of excess?

RL: I would say practice being lean: in the way you eat, in the way you handle food, in the way you dress. I mean, the idea of spending $200 for a pair of sneakers, … I just couldn’t do it. How do people who have no real money buy $200 sneakers? There’s something really missing in their life, that’s the reason they do it. I would encourage them to be lean, to get away from popular culture to the extent they can, to have some study, reading, have good conversations.

I just started reading this book a priest gave me and it was about Purgatory, and this woman was making hypothetical examples. She said, “Here’s a priest and I think he went to Purgatory and here’s why: he was always traveling around the country and he wasn’t taking care of his flock, which was his primary purpose.” It might be fun to travel around the country and do certain things, but first take care of the family, the kids, the responsibilities you have, and then if you can do more, that’s also good.

I mean, we all struggle with that all the time, but we also need to be very aware of it, to make the best decision we can.

AD: I think that is a fantastic note to end on, Mr. Luddy. Thank you so much. This was truly a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your taking the time to share all this insight with our readers.

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