Right Thing, Right Now: Justice in an Unjust World

by Ryan Holiday

Courage, bravery, endurance, fortitude, honor, sacrifice… Temperance, self-control, moderation, composure, balance… Justice, fairness, service, fellowship, goodness, kindness… Wisdom, knowledge, education, truth, self-reflection, peace…

“Life is not meaningless for the man who considers certain actions wrong simply because they are wrong, whether or not they violate the law,” he once explained. “This kind of moral code gives a person a focus, a basis on which to conduct himself.”

The virtue of a person is measured not by his outstanding efforts but by his everyday behavior. —Blaise Pascal

“If it’s not right, do not do it,” Truman underlined in his well-worn copy of Meditations, “if it is not true, do not say it…. First do nothing thoughtlessly or without a purpose. Secondly, see that your acts are directed to a social end.”

“Speak the truth as you see it,” Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, “but with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.”

There is an old aphorism: It’s easier to be a great man than a good one. Certainly there are more of the former than the latter.

“Seest a man diligent in his business?” reads the Bible verse. “He shall stand before kings.”

One of Clarkson’s best recruits was a man named Josiah Wedgwood, a wealthy pottery magnate who worked for the queen. Wedgwood wasn’t just convinced by Clarkson’s arguments, he was able to translate them to the public in vivid imagery. It was Wedgwood who commissioned a logo for the group of activists, a drawing of a kneeling slave, clamped in wrist and leg irons, holding up his arms, begging for mercy. “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” reads the banner at his feet.

“We are all bound together,” she said, “in one great bundle of humanity.”

Freedom, he said, has a “ ‘we’ quality”—wanting it, striving for it, fighting for it helps not just yourself but everyone else.

“One of the things that I have learned over the years,” Diane Nash said, “is that you really can’t change anyone but yourself and what we did in the South was change ourselves from people who could be segregated into people who could no longer be segregated. The attitude became ‘well kill us if that’s what you’re going to do, but you cannot segregate us any longer’ and once you change yourself the world has to fit up against the new you.”

“Welcome to Earth, young man,” the novelist Kurt Vonnegut once wrote to a fan. “It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. At the outside you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of: Goddamn it, Joe, you’ve got to be kind.”

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

“Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?”

Benjamin Disraeli would explain, “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws…THE RICH AND THE POOR.”

“What are you going to do about it,” the activist Jacob Riis would write in his famous book How the Other Half Lives, “is the main question of the day.” After he learned, the answer for Roosevelt was simple: “I’ve come to help,” he told Riis, who became a lifelong friend. Indeed, for the rest of his life, Roosevelt would fight on behalf of the exploited and against entrenched and powerful interests.

Despite the expression “all politics are local,” we tend to think big picture before we think little picture. We think grand gestures, complete solutions instead of progress, instead of doing something for the people or suffering in front of us.

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

We can make the world better by coming together. By coming together, the world is better.

LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

Non angeli sed angli. Stop looking for angels. Start looking for angles.

Tyrants, bullies, and jerks are the enemies of justice. They cannot be accepted. They cannot be accommodated. Whether it’s an online mob or an economic system that exploits the impoverished, the belittling, bullying boss or government that persecutes dissidents or exploits its citizens, tyranny is tyranny. It puts us all at risk.

Theosophy,

seven blunders of humanity. Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Religion without sacrifice. Politics without principle.

“When you’ve done well and another has benefited by it, why like a fool do you look for a third thing on top—credit for the good deed or a favor in return?” Marcus Aurelius would ask himself.

“Life will not be a pyramid with an apex sustained by the bottom,” he explained, sounding like Hierocles. “But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.”

We don’t have to be the leader of some enormous movement to leave the world better. We can help one person. We can be generous, we can be loyal. We can keep our word, we can refuse to give up on somebody. We can be an ally. We can forgive. We can choose a second mountain. We can keep going back, chipping away at a big problem.

But this work of a lifetime is also the work that gives life meaning. Having been coated with the stardust of so much goodness, it’s our duty—and our joy—to sparkle others with it too. The future depends on it.

It’s not virtue signaling to push back against cruelty and indifference. It doesn’t make you a “social justice warrior” to speak out for kindness and fairness and inalienable rights. But even if it was, is anything better to be a warrior for than justice and or anything better to signal than virtue? What has to happen to your brain to be opposed to those things?

My study of history has led me to believe that there is a kind of dark matter inside the human race. It’s different from evil—which, of course, everyone is capable of—but it is a kind of dark oppositional energy that goes from issue to issue, era to era. It’s rooted in self-interest, self-preservation, in fear, in not wanting to be inconvenienced, not wanting to change, not wanting to have to get involved. It manifests itself a thousand ways, but once you know how to recognize it, you spot it everywhere.