Repentance & Opportunity For The Sackler Family, Hunter Biden, And The Capitol Rioters

If you’re lucky like me, you’ve had truly great friends and family whose virtuous acts throughout a lifetime enable and live on in others around them. Without accumulating great wealth or power, they are the ones who, at the end of the day, make societies thrive and function. They carry forward the angelic message of peace to people of goodwill.  

One such person was my friend, Fran Blair, quoted above, whose funeral I recently attended and whose great lifetime deeds from teaching, mentoring, and loving were extolled there.

Working on the intersection between public policy and charity, I started thinking about those who have acquired power, wealth, or fame through questionable behavior. Have they lost the opportunity to join Fran and others in building a better order and promoting unity among us? Hardly. In fact, sometimes their past actions, however immoral, provide them with greater future opportunities than are available to the rest of us.

The crucial step is meaningful repentance, a concept that may sound old-fashioned. Yet by admitting wrongdoing, perhaps even accepting punishment, and donating personal financial gains to charity, they can not only immediately do good but, more importantly, set an example for others to follow.  

Let’s take three examples from today’s news:

Members of the Sackler family.  Whatever each family member’s individual responsibility, the Sackler family owning Purdue Pharma is well aware that the company engaged in marketing that led to many deaths and an opioid crisis from which the nation continues to suffer. What if, instead of fighting to protect their family’s money in the Supreme Court and elsewhere, they simply admitted error and gave away their wealth to the extent that it was not taken away in lawsuits? Those donations could make tens of thousands of lives better, and their repentant actions could serve as a warning against irresponsible behavior by other businesses. Do these family members really think that passing on that wealth to some descendants would serve society better?

Hunter Biden. Regardless of the level of illegality in Hunter Biden’s tax underreporting and use of his father’s name to make money in Ukraine and China, the actions remain reprehensible. Yes, many others in political life do the same things. So, what? Suppose he would throw in the towel, admit to legal and moral guilt, accept whatever punishment was meted out, and donate his net worth to charity. He would set an example and, I think, be restored to a position of respect within the community. If members of Congress called him to testify, he could turn the table and encourage his accusers to join with him in figuring out how to set a higher moral and perhaps legal standard for their own relatives who might be similarly tempted. Instead, by continually fighting a battle to avoid responsibility for his past actions, he keeps alive a national debate that threatens his own father’s presidency and adds to the national sense of distrust in government.

Capitol Rioters & Fake Electors.  Among the people who participated in the Capitol Riot or became fake presidential electors are many, I believe, who were sincere, even if totally misled, in their efforts. Beyond pleading guilty to violations of different laws simply to minimize sentencing and legal fees, they now have the unique ability to help deter future similar attacks on democracy. Explaining how they were deluded, sincerely confessing regret, admitting the great harm to the republic, and informing others how to avoid those mistakes would represent truly repentant acts that would help restore order to our fragile society. These former conspirators now have a power and a voice that nonparticipants in these nefarious affairs do not have. Individually, such future efforts might more than offset the marginal harm that their past actions did to the country.

Unfortunately, the Sackler family, Hunter Biden, the Capitol rioters, and fake electors engage in behavior all too common today. In looking forward, they continue to set their own individual well-being far above that of their many neighbors. They continue their past sins of commission with future sins of omission by failing to address the future good they could achieve.

No matter what evidence is laid before them, they lapse into a state of denial—a “never admit guilt” cultural norm sold everywhere by our legal, political, and secular communities. Yet, by almost any calculus, the personal benefits from those acts of self-preservation would be of far less societal value than acts of repentance.

One of the great gifts of so many religions has been their increasingly forward-looking calculus. In books of the Bible, for instance, God increasingly becomes forgiving rather than revengeful, allowing the individual and community to advance from whatever its past state. The religious focus on compassion has a strong economic component to it, as it compels us to use resources where they can be most helpful. In a related way, the notion of repentance looks forward to possibilities, to restitution with society more than punishments.

I don’t want to claim that repentance is ever easy or that any of us are free from sins of omission. No matter what our past, I just wish that we engaged more in the same societal calculus going forward that Fran Blair did in setting out her life’s objectives and giving us a model to follow