As Woods recognized, the money and fame that came with celebrity made it easy for him to fulfill his temptations. But we Americans who can only dream of such money and fame also possess an unparalleled ability to satisfy craving upon craving. Ours is the richest country in the history of the world, and our core values derive at least as much from consumer capitalism as from Christian faith. Advertisers are forever conjuring up new desires and promising us that their products will satisfy them. Our cravings, however, are endless good news for big business, not such good news for human happiness.
When Woods said he “stopped living by the core values” he was “taught to believe in,” he was referring not to Christian values but to the Thai Buddhist values instilled in him by his mother, who was in the room with her son in Florida in a show of support. When he vowed to change his life, it wasn’t to turn to Christianity but to return to Buddhism. He actively practiced Buddhism from childhood, he said, but “drifted away from it in recent years,” forgetting its crucial observation that craving is overcome not by self-indulgence but by self-control. Buddhism “teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint,” he said. “Obviously I lost track of
what I was taught.”
