Right Thing, Right Now: Justice in an Unjust World

by Ryan Holiday

“My whole theory about life,” Will wrote back, despite the fact that he himself had effortlessly graduated from Harvard, “is that glory and accomplishment are of far less importance than

the creation of character and the individual good life.”

Marcus Aurelius himself faced some version of this. He was young and talented, selected for great things at an early age. As a result, he could have vied with Alexander the Great for conquest. He could have tried to build more than Augustus. He could have tried to be more brilliant than Cicero, to have more fun than Tiberius. He had t...

“Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being,” he writes, “remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation.” Cribbing from Plato, he tells himself to concentrate on one thing and one thing alone: to do what is right and to behave like a good man. Not winning battles. Not making money. Not making his mark. But doing good, being good. Being fair. Being decent. Being honest. Being dependable.

There are lots of talented people out there. People who can do and have done incredible things. They break records on the field.

They make discoveries in the laboratory. Their businesses employ thousands. Their art dazzles us. But when it comes to what kind of people they are…well, suddenly they’re not so unique. They’re a run-of-the-mill asshole. Another shark. Another backstabber. Another hypocrite. Another walking cliché. Another cautionary tale.

Each of us has to make a decision right now about where we are going to put our efforts, what we’re going to work toward. Because what a person measures, goes another expression, gets managed.

But it is a decision rooted in justice, that makes the world a better place. Virtue has to be our compass, goodness has to be our goal.

The man who wrote in Meditations that doing the right thing today was far more valuable than posthumous fame managed to get both.

Our politicians refuse to disclose their income or conflicts of interests. They meet in secret. Their publicists spin and deflect. Their lawyers obscure and protect. Why? So they can get away with stuff, of course. So they can keep prying—that is, judging—eyes away from what they know would not go over well with the public, with their investors, with the law.

“There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a vice,” Joseph Pulitzer famously said, “which does not live by secrecy.” Or as the Bible put it, evil hates the light.

If it makes you ashamed, if you wouldn’t want to be seen, you’d dare not do it in public, if you leave it only for the night…what does that say? Imagine the changes we would see if more of life was subjected to this test. If businesses were proud of how their products were made and what their supply chains looked like. If customers could stomach where their food came from. Even if some people didn’t care (or complained because things cost more), it would still be the right standard to hold ourselves to.

“Never hurt a man who is working for his living.”

Part and parcel of justice is the understanding that other people are sovereign individuals with dignity and value, and that because of these things, we must treat them well. Respect is justice. It’s something everyone deserves. Whether they’re important or not, how we treat them says everything about who we are.

How we treat people in ordinary circumstances is one thing. How we treat them when we’re tired, when we’re stressed, when the weight of the world is on our shoulders…when

when someone has just screwed up, just cost us something serious. This says so much.

“It seems ridiculous,” Albert Camus wrote, “but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.”

He smiled and let it go. He was kind to a woman who was repeatedly unkind to him. He didn’t cheat in business, politics, or on his wife. He was decent to the people who worked for him.

In a world of awfulness, of injustice, of cruelty and corruption, ordinary decency stands out. Miep Gies, the friend who ran errands for Anne Frank’s family as they hid from the Nazis, said that these small acts of friendship, of honesty, of kindness are like turning on a small light in a dark room. It’s something anyone can do.

Professionalism. Duty. Commitment. Putting the citizens, customers, audience, patients first. And not just in our chosen line when everything is wonderful, but when the chips are down—when the line’s a razor’s edge. This makes you extraordinary.

It’s true, maybe nobody will notice. Maybe it won’t make a difference. Maybe you won’t get credit. Maybe you’ll even piss your boss off. But? The alternative should be unthinkable.

If your profession doesn’t have a code of ethics? Make one. To not have one is a recipe for moral dilemmas, for slip-sliding, if only unintentionally, into gray areas. How could you possibly do right if you don’t know what right is? How could you possibly do your job well if you haven’t defined it?

We have to resist that. Just because everyone else does it a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the right way. Just because it’s the way it’s always

been done doesn’t mean we should go along with it. Just because the offer seems harmless, or is done without pressure, doesn’t mean that they’re not trying to corrupt us, not trying to mess with our moral compass.

Trying to keep your hands clean earns you enemies. Your decision implicitly rebukes theirs. And they may be stronger, craftier, or more vicious than you. But what matters is that at the end of the day, you comported yourself with dignity and self-respect.

This meant that he didn’t have much of a fortune to pass on to his daughter, he admitted, but he was passing her something he believed could never be stolen, “an honorable reputation and a good name.” It was her job, as it is all of our jobs, not to spoil that heritage.

No one is saying you have to be a saint. Just try not to be a sellout. Try not to be “dyed purple,” as Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, speaking of the emperor’s cloak and the way the job seemed to change the people who wore it. Try to honor your code, your commitments, your conscience. Beware of the gray areas. Beware of the false promise of “just this one time.” Try to avoid temptations, try to ignore what other people around you are doing. Try to be at least cleaner than average. Cleaner than the people who came before us. Cleaner than we were yesterday.

You gotta know your weaknesses and make decisions so you can be strong. Because if we don’t, we’ll get ourselves into real trouble. The first time we see it, we’re horrified. New sailors on slave ships reacted with horror. The same goes for executives touring a sweatshop. Or the prison guard. The first taste of illicit money. But the third or the fourth time? After a while on duty? It just becomes part of the job. Our conscience is dulled.

Few of us can deal in filth without becoming dirty. Very few of us can compromise without being compromised.

She may have been a starving artist, well into her forties at that point, and could have used the money and the exposure. But it was not worth her integrity. It was not worth her soul. And by acting on her principles, she was striking a public blow against an evil that not enough people had yet condemned.

It was just one person, hardly a dent in a system that enslaved some four million men and women and children at that time, but that didn’t change what it would mean to that one person.

Integrity is living by what you think is right. Not what you can get away with, not what everyone else is doing.

For the most part, it’s not illegal to sell stuff to dumb people who don’t know any better. In only a handful of cases is breaking your word a crime. In fact, in America, lying—even egregiously so—is protected by the First Amendment. But just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

There is an expression: It’s not a real principle unless it costs you money. Integrity ceases to be an abstraction when life presents you the

opportunity to act on it. Integrity then becomes real. It is proven. You have proven yourself responsible and responsible to it.

That’s what Joan Didion said about self-respect—which is what integrity is rooted in. To be without it, she warned, “is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises

subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.”

A life of integrity will cost you. It will be difficult. And yet somehow we all know that to live withou...

The work he did, the inventions he created, the children he raised were an attempt to fulfill that obligation, that he wasn’t here on this planet for himself, but to be good and do good for others.

Yet each of us ignores this call in our way, if not outright, then in the way that Jimmy Carter did—a man whose life was shaped by his early reading of the parable of the talents as much as it was by the intervention by Admiral Rickover, who asked him pointedly why he hadn’t always given his best. When we don’t do our best, when we hold something back, we are cheating ourselves. We are cheating our gifts. We are cheating the potential beneficiaries of us reaching our full potential.

How could Eisenhower—an otherwise brave and decent man—leave Marshall hanging like that? How could he live with himself? The answer is the same way that we all do it. By not even thinking about it at all. By telling ourselves nothing that can be done. By telling ourselves that they’ll understand…because they’d do the same thing in our position. By telling ourselves it’s for the greater good. We put the small town where we’re from in the rearview. We break away from the people who discovered us now that we’re big shots. We leave

a friend hanging because they’re radioactive. We ditch a longtime supplier when someone offers a few pennies of savings. We rationalize the knife as it goes in. We turn our eyes away and let someone else do it. Loyalty is expensive. It’s inconvenient. It gets in the way. It’s messy, it’s complicated, it’s hard to explain.

Truman believed in loyalty, even when it cost him. That’s why he went to the funeral, even though he suffered politically for it. He was also loyal to his fellow citizens and the taxpayers, which is why he declined any of the opportunities for corruption that Pendergast may have slyly passed his way. He didn’t hedge his loyalty either—Truman could have just sent flowers. He was out front with it, not lagging, not hoping for a safe opportunity. And it’s why he stuck to Acheson as he stuck to Hiss, even if Hiss may well have been profoundly disloyal himself.

Nor should we skip over where loyalty can leave us—game theorists speak of the “sucker’s payoff,” which was perfectly expressed by Seneca when he said that “loyalty provides the disloyal man access to do harm.”

We don’t control what other people do. We don’t control whether we live in a time of mob justice. We don’t control the fact that these decisions are agonizing and complex and that there is no guidebook. We control what we do.

Loyalty is something we give. It’s not something we expect. Nor is it something we ought to expect to always be understood. We do it because it’s right.

Discipline can feel constraining, like it’s telling you what you can’t do. Justice is something different. It is an ideal to aspire to, something higher to aim at. That’s what a north star is. Something to reach toward. Something beyond the horizon, lifting our gaze up instead of down.

Cash is a bad north star…but an easy one to default to if you don’t have anything better. Ego. Fame. Power. Dominance. These things might lead you to the top…but they will also lead you astray. They corrupt. They corrode.

Loyalty. A love of the game. A desire to keep your hands clean. The confidence to compete fairly with the best. Integrity.

The Greeks had a word, pleonexia—self-serving—which they said was the worst kind of life. We might say that justice, virtue—being good and not just great—is the antithesis of this.