What's the clash with meritocracy? Disinterest?
Interesting to see Mennos classified here as "radical pietists" when I normally read of them as being "fancy anabaptists", where fancy is the opposite of radical in that it's a pejorative for an overly conformational* relation with the world.
FWIW, I've run across a "protestant ethic" ascribed also to the Starovery (russian "old believers"); my current explanation is that whenever a marginal group finds the traditional low-risk cursus closed (whether due to exclusion by the external majority, or to disapproval by their in-group) they tend to reinvest in speculative ventures (and as long as they're doing so jointly, they ought to have sufficient diversification to thrive under this allocation?).
EDIT: a deeper Q from Pietism: to what extent must an organisation behave in ways that are comprehensible to its rank and file? (1984 argues that it's important enough that comprehensibility should override consistency?)
EDIT2: * in order to get "in the world" vs "of the world", we possibly need english prepositions, and definitely need to read John classically, as if the world is clopen and therefore not out of the world equivales in the world. What about the boundary of the world? (yet another open question for Algebraic Theology)