Catholic Social Teaching (CST)

Our Compass for Putting Life and Human Dignity First

At TNG Worker Co-op, our moral foundation is built on Catholic Social Teaching (CST). While it may sound academic or ecclesiastical, its core spirit is simple: the dignity of the human person and of all living creation must always precede systems, technology, and profit.

Why Standard “Business Ethics” So Easily Drift

In the fast-paced corporate world—especially in the IT sector—relying on “industry common sense” or conventional “business ethics” carries a quiet danger. This is not because individuals lack goodwill. Rather, when placed inside the structural gravity of endless growth and shareholder maximization, even well-intentioned people find that “doing the right thing” gradually warps into “pushing the legal boundaries to extract profit.”

That is why we need an anchor and a compass rooted outside the short-term logic of the market—grounded in centuries of lived reflection on human dignity and the common good. For us, that compass is CST.

How CST Shapes Society from the Ground Up

CST is not an abstract theory or a top-down ideology imposed from centers of power. It is a practical, bottom-up framework that has empowered local communities, labor movements, and legal institutions:

• Foundations of the Social Market Economy: The European tradition of tempering market competition with strong social solidarity and public welfare draws deeply from CST.
• Subsidiarity as Law: The CST principle of “Subsidiarity” (empowering and supporting smaller, local communities rather than absorbing them into central bureaucracy) is codified into European law (Article 5 of the EU Treaty) as the guiding rule for how authority is distributed.
• Grassroots Cooperative Networks: From Italy’s social cooperatives to Spain’s Mondragon network, many of the world’s most resilient cooperative movements grew from the soil of CST, demonstrating that businesses can thrive by building a “society of work and mutual care, not of capital.”

Alignment with Contemporary Policy Research

Our cooperative approach aligns with modern economic policy research. For example, a 2021 study by Professor Takashi Iida (University of Tokyo), “Self-Help, Mutual Help, and Public Help: A Thought on the Role of Markets,” published by the Cabinet Office's Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in Keizai Bunseki (No. 203), critiques the rigid hierarchy that reduces social policy to “self-help first.” Tracing the subsidiarity principle through its classic formulation in Pope Pius XI's social encyclical Quadragesimo anno, the paper notes that its true purpose was empowering individuals and supporting smaller communities rather than imposing obligations from above. It further argues that by incorporating the perspective of service producers, markets are not limited to individual “self-help,” but can serve as a foundation for “mutual help”—enabling even those traditionally treated as passive recipients of public aid to participate as active contributors—within an institutional design that preserves redundancy.

How CST Governs Our Daily Practice (Orthopraxy)

CST is not a badge of moral superiority; it is a lived discipline (orthopraxy) that continually challenges our organizational structure, business model, and engineering choices:

• Priority of Labor over Capital: In line with historical social encyclicals like Laborem exercens, we assert that human labor is fundamentally prior to capital. Capital is merely an instrument of production; the working person is the primary subject. In our cooperative, we reject the shareholder-first model: every worker has equal ownership and an equal voice, ensuring that our business serves human flourishing rather than capital accumulation.
• Authentic Subsidiarity in Action: We practice subsidiarity by decentralizing authority. Decisions regarding project execution, working conditions, and resource allocation are made through democratic dialogue among the workers on the ground, rather than dictated by a top-down hierarchy.
• Solidarity and the Common Good: We do not operate as an isolated profit-seeking entity, but in solidarity with our local communities, vulnerable neighbors, and fellow cooperatives. This governs our transparent accounting, fair pricing, and commitment to building open-source software as a shared public commons.
• The Personalist Principle (Person-Serving Tech): Under CST, the human person must never be reduced to a mere “resource” or “data point” to be optimized. We build software that respects human cognitive limits, rejects manipulative or addictive feedback loops, and quietly serves human capability rather than replacing or alienating the worker.
• Integral Ecology (Care for Our Common Home): As Pope Francis reminds us in Laudato Si', honoring human dignity never means falling into arrogant anthropocentrism. Human well-being is inseparable from the health of the Earth’s ecosystems. In an era when bloated IT infrastructure and AI models consume vast amounts of energy and physical resources, we strive for lean, frugal, and sustainable software engineering.

How TNG Lives CST in the Digital World

We seek to practice this wisdom through small, concrete steps every day:

• Democratic Co-Working (Subsidiarity): As worker-owners, we democratically manage our IT projects, our working conditions, and how our surplus is shared.
• Humane Tech Development (Dignity & Solidarity): We maintain fair, non-exploitative workplaces and build ethical digital tools where even those in vulnerable positions are empowered as active participants.
• Serving Community and Earth (The Common Good): In an IT industry easily swept away by short-term hype and profit, we build durable, sustainable infrastructure alongside our local communities.

Humility, Vigilance, and the Fabric of Christianity

While CST and Christian values provide our moral foundation, we also recognize the sobering historical reality that even the noblest religious language or ethical ideal, when seized by the human ego (the “false self”), can easily be twisted into a tool for self-justification, moral superiority, and exclusion. Christianity itself is not a monolith of self-congratulation, but a vast, complex fabric woven across centuries of human light and shadow, struggle and prayer. Mindful of how easily anyone can fall into the trap of self-righteousness, we strive to pair daily action with contemplative humility—continually examining ourselves so that ego never distorts our commitment to solidarity and quiet service.

CST is our compass for cultivating an economy that honors both human dignity and the living world from the ground up. Join our cooperative circle as we work to bring this vision to life in technology.