Right Thing, Right Now: Justice in an Unjust World

by Ryan Holiday

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?[*]

“What is your vocation?” Marcus Aurelius asked himself. It wasn’t just ruling the empire or writing philosophy books, just as yours isn’t just making more money or getting the paperwork out on time. It was something more basic. “To be a good person,” he said.

Keep the people safe. Show up. Be honest. Care. Act like a fiduciary. Even if you aren’t legally obligated to be one, you must obligate yourself to a standard higher than the one trodden by the crowd. You swore an oath to yourself. Now keep it.

what we do with the talents we’ve been given, what we make of ourselves and the opportunities before us. Some grow. Some hide. Some reach their potential. Some don’t. And this is a matter of justice.

we owe it to our master—to the world—to make the most of the skills and abilities that we each have. Without people who did this, where would we be? There would be no progress. No greatness. No art. No innovation. No bravery on the battlefield. No social change.

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.

Do your best. Become what you can be. You owe the world that much. It makes a difference, even if others are indifferent to it: People who realize their potential employ other people, they inspire other people, open doors for other people, discover and make things of use for other people, create markets for other people, have a platform they can use to speak to (and up for) other people. The decision to participate in this system—for yourself and thus for other people? This is a moral choice.

consider the alternative. A system that crushes the incentives to fulfill one’s potential. A world where people don’t participate. They don’t care. They don’t try. How many breakthroughs don’t happen? How much change doesn’t happen? How much needless suffering is there?

The one who makes an agreement where no one saw a possibility, the one who restores faith instead of breaks it, who fully realizes the potential of their office or their powers—this is a person who is bringing about a small amount of justice in an unjust world.

By doing what other people want us to do, or think we should do—or by lacking the discipline to keep the main thing the main thing—we are costing the world something.

Oscar Wilde believed that each human being was a prophecy, that we had a destiny. Our job, he said, was to fulfill it. As he would write in The Picture of Dorian Grey, “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.” Yet too many people, he wrote, like that third servant, were afraid of themselves, of the task they had been given.

Will you become what you’re meant to be? Will you go where you are most needed? That is the question. To fail to answer it because you’re afraid is a betrayal of your gifts. It’s shortchanging the world.

What if it’s possible to do even more? We should try to realize the things that nobody thought were possible,

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp… Certainly that reaching, that stretching is what gets us closer to heaven.

what mattered, what people would remember, is that somebody stuck by their friends. Then Truman looked Acheson in the eye and said, “Dean, always be shot in front, never behind,” and told him to go back to his office. “We’ve got a lot of important things to do.” Truman believed in loyalty, even when it cost him. That’s why he went to the funeral, even though he suffered politically for it.

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. It cuts through the noise. It solves the dilemmas. Of the cardinal directions, justice is clearest—it points us north, shows us where to go. The weather will change. But the stars do not.

As the writer Budd Schulberg observes in his classic novel about drive and character, What Makes Sammy Run?: What a tremendous burning and blinding light ambition can be where there is something behind it, and what a puny flickering sparkler when there isn’t.

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. One takes you north, the other south, one leads you forward, the other backward, down, down to the depths.

we falter, when we get lost, we can look up at that celestial point. We can check in with our conscience. Follow it, and we’ll get where we need to go. This is the right bearing for you.

There can be only one way to fight the general evil of life: It is in the moral, religious and spiritual perfection of your own life. —LEO Tolstoy

We often know what the right thing to do is. The problem is timing. Is this the right opportunity? The right moment? To a person of integrity, though, the right time is obvious.

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

Discipline is a me virtue. Justice, one might say, is a we virtue. It’s about the κοινωνικαί—the common good. It’s one thing to be a person of personal rectitude, but what for? Because we want to make the world a better place. Because we want to contribute to the public benefit, as the Stoics advise. Because we care about other people—people who are like us, people we don’t like, people we will never meet, people who are not yet even born.

We come together to do good together. To do good for the less fortunate, for the struggling, for the persecuted, for those with different views, different needs than us. To be part of the solution and not the problem. To expand the definition of what’s possible, what’s solvable. To do for others what we wish had been done for us—and in so doing, do quite a bit for ourselves.

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. It’s impossible to conceive of how powerful this image would have been then, given that today we are children of the world it changed. We no longer question whether this lowly, pained slave is a human being, a brother to us all. But in the eighteenth century, this heartbreaking portrayal of the human costs of slavery hit people in the solar plexus, for the very first time disabusing them of many of the pleasant fictions that enabled their indifference.

Just as powerful photographs of a monk on fire or children in cages at the border can shift public opinion overnight, Clarkson’s diagram went off like an explosion. No longer could the horror be denied or ignored. No one could possibly claim this was just or fair or decent.

Slavery was a product of capitalism, and capitalism would be used to kill it. Clarkson tied slavery to the industries that depended on it, from textiles to coffee and tobacco. Most thoroughly, he went after the sugar manufacturers, a product inseparable from the brutal slave plantations of the Caribbean. “In every pound of sugar used,” one famous abolitionist claimed, “we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.” It’s not the kind of claim you want people to be able to make about your business! A famous poet branded tea a “blood-sweeten’d beverage,” and sales plummeted. Suddenly, one of England’s most widespread cultural practices was connected to heinous cruelty. Turning teatime into a political act, Clarkson leveraged the publicity into the first effective consumer boycotts. Entire towns across England gave up sugar in protest, hundreds of thousands of people stopped taking afternoon tea—or switched to green tea instead. And it was more than just virtue signaling, as companies began to change their labor practices in response, announcing in their advertisements that their sugar was “produced by the labor of FREEMEN.”

He had invented the political logo, the political poster, and the consumer boycott. He popularized the political petition and built the first diverse political coalition.[*1] He used outrage to create cultural and, most significantly, legislative change. When Thomas Clarkson died at eighty-six in 1846, slavery had been dead in England for more than ten years, the slave trade for nearly four decades.

A small group of committed individuals can in fact change the world, and they don’t have to burn anything or anyone down in the process.

There, at the Seneca Falls Convention, the women’s rights movement—led by women who were all active in the abolitionist movement—was born. “The history of mankind is the history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” they declared, paraphrasing and improving on Thomas Jefferson with their own declaration. Their claims were not an exaggeration. Abigail Adams had in 1776 asked her husband to “remember the ladies” when the Founders drafted the laws for a new nation. Now, two generations later, women still could not vote and were forced to submit to a government they did not choose. Once married, a woman became “civilly dead,” with no right to her own property or wages. They had no right to the custody of their own children. The best jobs were taken by men, and women expressly forbidden from them—from even attending schools where they might become qualified for these jobs. They could not sit on juries. They did not have control of their own bodies. They were held to a different code of morals and made to doubt their own value, their own powers and self-respect, to keep them dependent and at the mercy of their male counterparts.

After the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, many waves followed, each one growing more diverse—economically and racially. In 1851, a woman named Sojourner Truth got up onstage and gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. Although later accounts would present it in Southern slave dialect, Truth—a native of New York—spoke in perfect English. “I am a woman’s rights,” she said with complete confidence. “I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?”

to her it wasn’t about one group or one cause but about equality and dignity for all—however long that took. “I have been forty years a slave and forty years free,” Sojourner Truth told an audience in 1867, “and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all. I supposed I am kept here because something remains for me to do; I supposed I am yet to help break the chain.”

a famous speech, which took its example from Cato, who died rather than serve Caesar, Pankhurst explained that she refused to accept the legitimacy of a government that so deprived its citizens. “You can kill that woman,” she said of herself and her resisters, “but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.”

Meanwhile, back in America, women stood in front of the White House—Silent Sentinels, they were called—through the rain and sleet and grueling heat, as well as beatings and catcalls and arrests. Each one who was taken away was replaced by another, carrying picket signs that said “Mr. President. HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?”

the poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper would explain in a New York church immediately following the Civil War, justice was not fulfilled if anyone was unequal before the law. “We are all bound together,” she said, “in one great bundle of humanity.” Our fates are tied up with each other’s, she understood, and the sooner people realize that, the better we’ll all be, the more we’ll all be able to do.

As women earned their right to vote, state by state, child labor laws were passed. The stranglehold that political bosses had on American cities began to loosen. The first welfare laws were brought into being. So were the first protests against genocide, in this case led by Alice Stone Blackwell, who thought that her feminist work was inseparable from her work supporting refugees from the Armenian genocide. “Men are saying perhaps, ‘Thank God, this everlasting woman’s right is over!’ ” Crystal Eastman, a feminist and suffragette, would say after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, “but women, if I know them, are saying, ‘Now at last we can begin.’’’

In 1955, Rosa Parks, trained in self-discipline and nonviolence and activism by the NAACP and the Highlander Folk School, refused to get up from her seat on a bus.[*2]

Freedom, he said, has a “ ‘we’ quality”—wanting it, striving for it, fighting for it helps not just yourself but everyone else. He wasn’t just fighting for his own rights or Rosa Parks’s rights but for the very soul of the nation, to demand that it live out the meaning of its creed and faith.

We would practice not striking back, if someone struck us.” In confrontation after confrontation, the authority of the police and the political power structure was diminished. The strength, the moral righteousness of the protestors was made unassailable, even as—no, because—the blows landed on their exposed bodies.

“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.”

Freedom. Justice. Love.

Justice is not a thing that happens, it’s something that is made, that is continuing to be made, even as you read this. By people who get together, by people who care. Sometimes because it affects them directly. Often and most beautifully when it does not.

People who want to leave the world better than they found it. People who see something and say something. People who make friends…and good trouble. People who are patient…but at the same time refuse to delay. People with a north star…bigger than themselves, bigger than their own interests. People with big plans…but start small, start with what they can do right now. People who don’t just stand there, who refuse to be neutral, who accept their responsibility. People who get things done. People who not only do their jobs but do them generously, selflessly.

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. Such is the power of each and every one of us in the moment we happen to be born. We have the power… …to care …to help others …to learn how to create change …to be generous …to build bonds …to stand up for the little guy. But it’s not a question of power, it’s a question of will. Will you?

you’ve got to be kind.”[*] Kind to strangers. Kind to people who you work with or work for you. Kind to someone who just made a mistake. Kind to both customers and vendors. Kind to someone you dislike. Kind to the future, to generations not yet born.

There is no leader ever who has not had to deal with frustrations. There is no smart person who has not had to suffer fools. There is no good person who has not been ill-treated or had enemies. This is just how it goes. But it is our authority, our intelligence, our decency that obligates us to be kind despite all this.

doesn’t always have to be some big thing. 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. We do it beca...

The knowledge demanded action. So go forth and find.

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer said from inside Hitler’s Germany. “God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”