Right Thing, Right Now: Justice in an Unjust World

by Ryan Holiday

Are we going to be perfect? Get it right every time? Doubtful. We will lose our bearings in this life. We will be tempted off the path. We won’t always be as certain as Agrippinus. But when we falter, when we get lost, we can look up at that celestial point. We can check in with our conscience.

Admiral Rickover had tried to teach Carter that the right time for the right thing was always right now.

The longer you stand out on the edge of a diving board, the harder—and less likely—it becomes for you to jump. You get in your own head about it. You come up with reasons. You lose your courage.

Justice is a kind of endless passing of torches, an unfinished march that started long ago that each generation joins and continues in its own way. Or doesn’t.

The Stoics said we should try to see every person we meet as an opportunity for kindness.

What about a smile? What about noticing a job well done? The holding open of a door? A favor rendered? The choice to invite, to pick up the tab for lunch, to compliment, to encourage, to volunteer, to hand your box of leftovers to the man begging on the street corner, or give your spouse a bouquet of flowers? You never know what low moment you might be rescuing a person from. You never know how they’ll pay this forward. But in a sense, it doesn’t matter—at least that’s not why we do it. We do it because it’s the discipline we practice. We do it because being kind is the more courageous thing in a cynical world.

At the end of his life, as he lay dying, Marcus Aurelius had one regret, one thing he was still chastising himself for. The times he had lost his temper, the times he had been unkind. And when we survey our lives, we will think the same thing. We’ll forget all our reasons. We’ll forget all the causes. We’ll forget what had been done to us. All we’ll wish is that we’d been a little nicer, a little less clever, and a lot more kind. Well? Well, it’s not too late.

Most social change is a result of a similar kind of rude awakening. Someone sees something and decides to do something.

The problem is that it’s so easy to stay in our bubbles. To not see what we don’t want to see. We don’t do the math—on what it would be like to live on such a wage, on where all these raw materials are coming from, on where our money is going. We ignore the smell…or let people cover it up for us. (There’s a joke that the Royal Family thinks the world smells like fresh paint.)

We cannot fix what we won’t face. We cannot stop what we refuse to acknowledge.

Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…” You know the one. First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

When you shrug at the suffering of someone else, you invite it, inevitably, on yourself and pe...

It’s a very natural human impulse to not get involved. It’s almost by definition the easier option. There is even a way that virtue can justify

it: I’m just minding my own business. I’ve got my own troubles. I don’t want to make things worse. I don’t know if I am qualified. It’s a complicated situation. It’s really expensive. I’ll just wait and see.

History tells us what happens when people let evil act with impunity, when suffering is ignored or allowed to happen. It doesn’t work out well…including for the people who turned away or dallied when they could have made a difference.

We may not succeed, especially right away. But each time someone stoops to help someone in need, each time a society involves itself in a problem that affects just a few of its members, they’re not just strengthening the muscles of the heart but building new muscles too.

By indifference, you also commit self-harm…but by the time you realize it, it will be too late.

As they say, we have to start somewhere. But the problem is that if we are too ambitious, too lofty—or some would say, too naive—we may not get anywhere.

Reeling from a personal crisis and a sense of despair about the world, a woman wrote to the psychologist Carl Jung. His advice was to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing,” that if she took the smallest, most viable step in front of her, she would always be making progress, always be doing something meaningful.

“It doesn’t matter,” an adult tells him. “You’ll never even make a dent in this.” “It matters to this starfish,” the boy says, as he rescues another one. To the person you’re saving, to the person whose burden you are lessening? There is nothing “small” about it. When the Talmud says that he who saves one person saves the world, maybe that’s partly what they meant—because you certainly save that person’s whole world.

The difficult undertakings in the world all start with what is easy.

The great undertakings in the world all begin with what is small.

Picking up trash that we come across. Helping a friend get back on their feet. Raising good kids. Boycotting tea that’s contributing to the slave trade, as countless activists did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Say not that small’s the sphere in which we move,” the abolitionist poet Mary Birkett Card wrote of all the women who couldn’t vote but could make a dif...

Lincoln, like Clarkson, started incrementally, even pragmatically. He did not initially set out to free the slaves or remake

America along the principles the founders had set out but failed to live up to. He was not sure that was even possible. Instead, he began his political career with something much smaller—all he hoped to do was stop the expansion of slavery into new territories.

Look, it would be wonderful if causes succeeded because they were right. It would be wonderful if pioneers and barrier-breakers were supported because people cared about fairness and representation. But they don’t and that’s not how the system—or history—works.

Israel’s journey was a long one, born of many sacrifices—sacrifices that continue to this day—nor was it a perfect geopolitical solution, which is why consequences from that decision continue to this day as well. But the fact is that Israel almost certainly would not exist without Jacobson’s intervention.

You help others. They help you. You are better together. That’s how it works. That’s how justice gets done.

Stalin was not a good man. He was a necessary ally to win World War II—as the United States understood. Hitler learned this the hard way, driving Russia into the arms of Britain and America—the Allies—when he broke the nonaggression pact with Stalin and invaded his former ally.

The side with the most allies usually wins. It’s a simple as that.

You can disagree with many of a person’s beliefs. You may even hate some of the people you have to ally with.[*] But to get good things done, you’ll have to come together. That’s a fact.

It’s also a fact that you will come to love some of the people you thought you would hate. Or better, that you might convert to love some of the people who were previously driven

by hate. That’s the wonderful thing, by allying, by coming together, we are bring...

It was all very simple, they said. This was the way of the world, where “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Talk about saying the quiet part out loud.

Power rules the world. It is very hard to achieve justice without it. It’s very hard to stop injustice without it. It’s very hard to do anything without it.

Even when the status quo is unjust—in fact, often precisely when the status quo is unjust, there are people who are benefiting from it. Naturally, they’re going to resist change. Nearly everything we see in this world is ultimately explained by this power imbalance.

Power is partly why one side of town is pretty and well manicured and the other isn’t, it’s why one

group is bailed out and the other isn’t, why some crimes are punished severely and the others get a slap on the wrist, why the rich start the wars but the poor die in them, why some issues are talked about and others aren’t—these are all the result of intense power struggles, where someone or something asserted its ...

Some of these battles were settled—fairly or not—a long time ago, some are still raging right now. It is never preordained that justice will prevail. It is, however, almost cert...

Good ideas, good causes, fair notions—they are not just adopted auto...

than not, they have to be rammed down people’s throats. Leverage must be acquired. An overwhelming coalition of allies must be assembled. Walls have to ...

“Reports are not self-executive,” Florence Nightingale would remind herself and her staff. Just because you knew what needed to be done, just because you had cogently argued for the right and fair and desperately necessary solution, just because innocent lives depended on it didn’t mean it was going to happen. No, you needed competence to execute…and you needed friends in high places. You needed funding. You needed

public support. You needed to be able to force it through. Most of all, you needed power.

Too many activists think there is something noble about being outsiders. They think the whole system is corrupt. They think the system is the problem. They’re not wrong—there are real problems. But because of their idealism and purity they’re not able to do anything about those problems, and so they themselves are par...

The opposite of power is powerlessness. Is that what you want? You can resign in protest. You can call them all bastards. You can damn the whole world as corrupt and broken. Just know that, in so doing, you may put yourself out of the running to be of service to anything but your sense of superiority.

Could he have accomplished more if he’d been a little more pragmatic? A little less idealistic? Could he have played the game a little better? The reality is that people who get things done have to be both.

That’s one of the ways you get allies—by looking like someone they can do business with.

Because we’re not talking about how things should be. We’re talking about how they are. This is a real condition in front of us, not a theory. A fact, not a hypothetical.

What you’re doing is important—important enough that you have got to be pragmatic about it. If there was ever a cause good enough to deserve success on its merits, it would have been