Spiritual Capital: The Oxymoron that Unmasks Homo Oeconomicus

Abstract

In an increasingly frenetic society, where the individual assumes the commitment with himself of managing to survive in a continuous competition with any other form of human life, after the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic that shook the world in the year 2020, there is without doubt a before and an after in human relationships and in the conception of personal and work life.Solidarity toward the most disadvantaged people, the sense of pity and of hope spread by the simple fact of continuing alive, from the reunification of families to workplaces, from social projects to fundraising campaigns in aid of the other, has reemerged. The fundamental certainty has resurfaced that who we are cannot be defined solely as homo oeconomicus, but rather as a being endowed with a deep spirituality, where values constitute roots and fronds. This work, of a qualitative character, with exploratory and comparative modalities in the reference sources, intends to be a small contribution to the analysis of those values that, starting from the personal sphere and transferred to the work context, can mark a great difference in terms of impact on any business or NGO activity with respect to a concrete territory, creating that “spiritual capital” that constitutes the first patrimony of an organization and its main engine, present in each phase of the activity, to the point of causing one to ask whether there exists a way to measure and evaluate its essential constituent elements.