Loyalty and duty

God is the universal partner. 

God always joins us in our creative endeavors. His role as the universal joiner in creativity serves to enable individuals to function as though they are in relationship. That enablement makes available to every individual, as they engage in creative undertakings, the prerogatives of relationship. 

To enter into an undertaking in the context of a relationship is to adopt the motives of duty and loyalty. It is to recognize how the seat of creativity sits in the relationship between people, not the isolated genius of solitary titans of imagination. The motive resides in the drive not so much to maximize one's own wealth as it is to live up to the agreements and obligations and responsibilities, implicit and explicit, one has cut with one's fellows and with one's covenantal partners. The strength always ultimately resides in the institutional engine and in the institutional repository of value, not any particular object or skill. 

Motives of loyalty and duty are different in kind from motives of incentives. An incentive describes how one's actions-as-behavior will result in their acquiring some thing they feel has value; a loyalty or duty describes how one's actions-as-conduct will result in their feeling valuable in themselves. 

Loyalty and duty result in value that translates easily into autonomy and dignity; material wealth translates into self-sufficiency and the ability to end relationships. The money payment for a transaction ends the mutual obligation implied in the interaction. In creative ventures the real reward is in the self-esteem that comes of having built something from nothing. 

When the social order is stable it's a good strategy to accumulate material wealth; when the social order is unstable it becomes more important to fortify one's relationships with those who honor loyalty and duty. 

That is why creative ventures do not fare well when the principals are all being paid high salaries. High individual compensation gets in the way of the formation of creative teamwork. 

The love of God and the golden rule – loving your fellow as yourself, loving the stranger as yourself – both speak to the bonds of relationship, the bonds of loyalty and duty.