Seven sinners

S&P 500 corporations sin way worse than Smoke and Stack from Sinners—and the Smokestack Twins stayed booked and busy in that department.

Yesterday, I posted a j’essay called BlackRocked, and a few folks reached out saying they were shocked to learn they own shares in BlackRock, Inc.,—a notorious corporate community collapser—through their retirement accounts.

We like to imagine that our 401(k) balances grow because we worked hard, made wise choices, and deserve the returns. But that’s not how the universe works.

Retirement account balances rise because they’re stuffed with mutual funds that own companies like BlackRock—corporations that exploit people and planet in the name of profits.

If you have a retirement account, chances are it uses your hard-earned wages to purchase index mutual funds—tiny ownership slices of the 500 or 1,000 most valuable corporations in the U.S., often tied to a famous benchmark called the S&P 500.

Which means we’re all way more complicit in advancing corporate values—which are only about profit and nothing else—than we think.

Make no mistake, BlackRock is no outlier. You don’t get to be one of the richest companies on Earth without fully embracing corporate values.

Your money is out here doing The Cupid Shuffle through the S&P 500, funding dozens of corporations that would burn down Eden for a quarterly dividend.

The United States Supreme Court has declared that corporations are people, giving them the rights and benefits of persons without the responsibilities of personhood. If corporations were actually people, they’d be psychopaths—unburdened by empathy, accountability, or remorse for the harm they cause. At the very least, we’d call them sinners.

In the New Testament’s original Greek, to sin means “to miss the mark,” like an archer whose arrow sails past the target. Thus, sin isn’t about moral failure — it’s about missing the whole point of this three-dimensional experience we’re sharing. It means living recklessly, unconsciously, creating suffering for ourselves and spreading it outward. As Eckhart Tolle puts it, sin “points to the dysfunction inherent in the human condition.”

So today, I offer you a tour through a modern corporate cathedral built not on holiness, but on sin.

These are the Seven Deadly Sinners of the S&P 500.

And chances are, you own a piece of every last one of them.

1. Greed — BlackRock

BlackRock buys up companies and extracts value by cutting jobs, raising prices, loading firms with debt, and squeezing every possible penny out of workers, consumers, and the environment. But the damage doesn’t stop at corporate balance sheets — it ripples directly into communities.

When BlackRock takes over a business, local jobs vanish, hometown stores shut down, and the social fabric thins out. They homogenize entire industries, wiping out small businesses that once served as economic anchors and cultural lifelines. And in recent years, they’ve taken that same predatory playbook to the housing market, buying up single-family homes, outbidding everyday families, jacking up rents, and transforming neighborhoods into rental empires designed to funnel wealth upward and extract it forever.

The result?
Communities hollowed out.
Families priced out.
Local economies destabilized.
Entire towns gutted by corporate “efficiency.”

BlackRock mismanages companies into insolvency and implosion — and then they walk away intact while everyone else pays the price. Greed becomes gravity: everything profitable gets pulled upward, and everything broken gets left behind.

Greed isn’t a glitch in their system—it’s the business model.

And the rest of us are collateral damage.

2. Pride — ExxonMobil

Exxon had the audacity and cosmic arrogance to discover climate change before most of humanity even heard the phrase… and then spend decades convincing the world it wasn’t real. And while they were busy gaslighting the planet, they were also polluting it: refinery leaks, pipeline ruptures, and oil spills so massive they permanently scar ecosystems and extinguish entire ways of life.

That’s not just greed.
That’s pride so swollen it becomes delusion.

Exxon believed it was bigger than science, bigger than nature, bigger than consequences themselves. But pride like that always rolls downhill—straight into our oceans, rivers, and lakes.

When you believe you’re above consequences,
you create consequences for everyone else.

3. Wrath — Raytheon

Wrath isn’t just fury — it’s the monetization of hostility. Raytheon is a defense contractor that manufactures the hardware of human suffering and then lobbies governments to keep the pipeline of conflict flowing. 

Their business model depends on neverending wars, on nations staying afraid, and on policymakers believing that diplomacy is weakness and destruction is strength.

Every bomb that drops has a stock ticker attached.
Every missile launched is a dividend paid.
Every burned neighborhood becomes an earnings call flex.

And the consequences ripple far beyond the battlefield: children displaced, cities reduced to dust, ecosystems poisoned for generations, cultures shattered, trauma passed down like inheritance. War destabilizes economies, fuels refugee crises, empowers authoritarians, and devours the very resources needed to heal the world.

The sin isn’t violence itself.
It’s the belief that violence is business —and that the suffering of millions is just another line item on a quarterly report.

4. Gluttony — Coca-Cola

Gluttony is the spirit of taking more than you need and calling it a lifestyle. Coke extracts groundwater from struggling communities, turns it into sugar water, wraps it in plastic, distributes it across the planet, and calls the destruction “refreshment.” But the damage doesn’t stop with the planet — it lives inside our bodies too.

Coca-Cola is one of the largest drivers of global diabetes, childhood obesity, metabolic disease, liver dysfunction, and dental decay. Entire nations’ health profiles have shifted because of this one company’s products. Hospitals overflow while Coke’s marketing campaigns overflow with smiling families, as if the happiness they sell isn’t laced with disease.

This isn’t thirst.

It’s insatiability branded as joy.

5. Lust — Meta

Most people hear “lust” and think sex.

But at its core, lust is uncontrolled craving — the relentless hunger for stimulus, novelty, validation, and escape.

And Meta knows this better than anyone.

They didn’t just design a platform—they engineered a behavioral addiction machine. Every feature is calibrated to hook you: the infinite scroll, the little red notifications, the algorithm that learns your insecurities better than you know your own soul.

Meta intentionally feeds our cravings:
Craving attention.
Craving outrage.
Craving validation.
Craving comparison.
Craving distraction from ourselves.

They test addiction like it’s a science experiment, because it is. The longer you linger, the more ads they can sell. The more triggered you become, the more content you consume. The more you consume, the more your sense of self dissolves into their data models.

Meta doesn’t sell ads —it sells compulsion.

And lust at scale becomes an ecosystem of fractured minds: a society hooked on dopamine hits, trapped in loops of comparison, scrolling through curated illusions while reality — and our own consciousness — slips further away.

6. Sloth — Johnson & Johnson

Sloth isn’t just laziness—it’s moral laziness.

It’s refusing to act when you already know the truth.

It’s choosing comfort over conscience.

Johnson & Johnson perfected this sin.

They knew their baby powder was contaminated with asbestos, yet marketed it as safe enough for infants. And they knew — long before the public did — that opioids were powerfully addictive, deadly, and devastating. Their internal data, reports, and field studies showed skyrocketing dependency, misuse, and fatal overdoses. Doctors warned them. Whistleblowers warned them. The science was unequivocal.

But instead of pulling back, J&J pushed harder.

They funded misleading research, trained sales reps to downplay addiction, and aggressively marketed opioids as “low risk” and “safe for chronic pain.” They targeted the most vulnerable patients and the doctors least equipped to question the narrative. 

That’s not oversight.
That’s not ignorance.
That’s sloth — the spiritual decay that happens when a corporation decides that doing nothing is easier than doing right.

Sloth is when comfort becomes cruelty,
and when the cost of that cruelty is measured in ruined lives, orphaned children, hollowed-out towns, and a nation grappling with an epidemic J&J helped ignite.

7. Envy — Amazon

Envy is wanting what someone else has—and deciding you deserve it more.

Amazon envies every industry:
Books? Ours now.

Retail? Ours.
Groceries? Ours.
Pharmacies? Ours.
Cloud computing? Ours.
AI? That’s cute. Ours too.

But Amazon’s hunger doesn’t stop at markets — it extends to the labor and resources of the entire planet.

Amazon built its marketplace on an absurd global supply chain: goods manufactured by exploited workers halfway around the world, often earning starvation wages in unsafe factories, shipped thousands of miles on carbon-belching cargo vessels, sorted by warehouse workers treated like replaceable machine parts, and delivered to our doorstep in layers of plastic and cardboard we pretend is “recyclable.”

All so we can get a phone charger in six hours instead of twelve.

Amazon’s efficiency is an illusion —a convenience subsidy paid for by other people’s suffering and the planet’s life force.

Envy at scale becomes a business strategy: absorb, imitate, replace, erase —and charge Prime for the privilege.

The Eighth Sinner

There’s an eighth sinner underlying all seven:

Us.

We feed these corporations with every swipe, purchase, impulse buy, and retirement account we haven’t examined.
We didn’t choose these sinners, but they reflect our collective state of mind—and our collective silence.

Corporations follow culture.
Culture follows consciousness.
Consciousness follows choice.

And here’s the twist: we keep these corporations flush with cash through our retirement accounts, choosing profits over people and planet. The irony is that most of us will never actually get to enjoy that money because our system is mathematically destined to implode and is already near its breaking point. That’s why corporatism is the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history.

Everyone knows our infinite-growth economy is unsustainable — of course it is. We built a society around corporations that demand infinite fuel to sustain infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. You don’t need a “beautiful mind” to see the mathematical madness, and you don’t need to be a mystic to feel the tremor in your chest. Everyone senses our society’s instability on a soul level — that’s why folks are stressed out, clinging to their stuff, and hoarding whatever comforts they can.

The system is wobbling, and we’re at an inflection point. Everyone feels it — even if they lack words to articulate it. If we sit back and let corporatism collapse under the weight of its own greed, it won’t just take the economy down with it — it’ll take the planet out too.

Which means the wise move isn’t to hope the sinners change—they won’t.
It’s to evolve the quality of our consciousness.

If we evolve, our systems will evolve with us.
If we don’t, the sinners will keep sinning, and we’ll keep funding their spiritual malpractice.
We can’t stop the Seven Sinners until we wake up and stop living like the eighth.