In the opening chapter of his classic and immensely successful book of business advice, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote this:
“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”
Published in 1936, it is one of the best-selling books ever written, with over 30 million copies sold. Carnegie continues, “Criticism is dangerous because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.” According to Carnegie, the whole key for business dealings with people is to understand their pride and self-obsession, while leading them to your product.
The poor Missouri farm boy was getting his business wisdom out of a biblical worldview. And thus he begins with the fundamental depravity of man, our sin-nature. No wonder his book has had so much capacity to help people understand other people.
Pride is the foremost of the Seven Deadly Sins, the main problem of Adam and Eve when they desired the forbidden fruit. And we all deal with it on one level or another. Successful businessmen and entrepreneurs intuitively know they must appeal to a man’s selfish interest as they try to sell their products. And a customer is ultimately won over as a salesman caters to that interest.
The Bible tells us that the natural man is most motivated by a desire to serve and please himself – to “worship and serve the creature” (Romans 1:22-25). It warns us with the Ten Commandments, not to make idols unto ourselves, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Exodus 20:4).
Yet, in spite of the wisdom of biblical insight, modern man, supported supposedly by science in the form of evolution, has undercut a biblical worldview with a worldview based on the creation, nature, “the creature”. According to this more modern understanding, mankind is not a fallen sinful creature whose fundamental problem is depravity. Mankind has supposedly evolved upwards from lower animals and organisms with no need to be forgiven or redeemed. In this view there is no fundamental moral flaw because there is no God-given moral standard. Man can be perfected through education. Rather than understanding ourselves as broken images of our Creator, we routinely set up idols made in our own image.
Sinful mankind has removed God and made man inherently good. With evolutionism as a tool, man has turned upside down the truth about God and man. Evolution says that we are no longer sinners, but merely products of nature. And God is no longer the holy, sovereign Creator, but either non-existent or merely an impersonal force.
A strategy of Satan is to get people to compromise themselves morally, making them feel both addicted to and defeated by immorality. As mentioned in my January 2026 Newsletter (L.S.D. or G.O.D.) Aldous Huxley admitted that the alternative to evolution (God, the Creator Almighty) interfered with his sexual mores. Many others admit the same. And the documented strategy of communists to undermine traditional biblical morality in order to advance their materialist, godless ideology, is another case for this point.
Evil is in fact, relentless in this world. Thankfully, though, we know that in the end our Lord triumphs once and for all! In the meantime, as Christians we need to be equally relentless – as it says in the Scriptures, “with full assurance of faith” … “let us hold fast the profession of [our] faith without wavering” … “always abounding in the work of the Lord”…” confessing our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (Hebrews 10:22-23, 1 Corinthians 15:58, 1 John 1:9).
For all of Dale Carnegie’s good practical advice, the Bible itself goes much further in the discussion of truth. And it is the greatest “bestseller” of all time – the greatest seller in fact every year! And the more we understand and incorporate its truths into our lives, the better off we will be. That’s why people need to believe the Bible and put all its principles into practice.
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