Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.

Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world.

even a prejudiced group of people would probably all insist on a racially equal society if they were asked to design in advance a world into which they would soon be born, without knowing which race life’s lottery would assign them at birth.

By manipulating millions of data points, I could weave stories about possible futures, and gather insights on which ideas were good or bad. I could simulate millions of shoppers going up and down the aisles of thousands of stores, and in my mind I pictured their habits shifting as a well-placed price cut subtly changed their perceptions of our client as a better place to shop.

For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so. For some, this is not a problem at all. A great lawyer or consultant can identify so closely with the client, or so strongly desire to be good at the job, or be so well compensated, that her purposes and interests and those of the client become one. But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.

Of course, humans can be cruel to people we know, too, but not as often—and we’re rarely as proud of it.

In the struggle for equality, we do well to remember that all people want to be known as decent, respectful, and kind. If our first response toward anyone who struggles to get onto the right

side of history is to denounce him as a bigot, we will force him into a defensive crouch—or into t...

It had been on my mind ever since allowing myself to call President Trump a “draft-dodging chickenhawk” during one of the DNC forums. While true, that statement was not in keeping with how I publicly speak about political figures, or anyone else, and afterward I reflected that this president was inspiring a loss of decency not just in his supporters, but also in those of us who opposed him.