In the span of roughly eighty years — the length of a long human lifetime — the Roman Republic transformed itself into an imperial dictatorship.

If you had told a Roman senator at the beginning of the first century BCE that his grandchildren would live under a single ruler, the idea would have seemed unthinkable. The Republic had been founded explicitly in rejection of kings. For nearly five centuries — more than twice the length of the American experiment so far — Rome governed itself through representative institutions, legal norms, and a shared commitment to civic participation.

The Republic was flawed, unequal, and often brutal. But it was recognizably a system of self-government.

And then it wasn’t.

Rome did not fall because an external enemy overwhelmed it. Nor did it collapse in a single dramatic moment. Instead, it eroded from within — through a long sequence of accommodations, exceptions, and rationalizations. Each step seemed reasonable on its own. In accumulation, they proved catastrophic.

This history raises an uncomfortable civics question. What obligations do citizens of a republic have to preserve self-government — and what happens when those obligations are gradually surrendered?

Eternal Vigilance

The phrase “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance” is often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, though its precise origin is debated. Regardless of authorship, the idea captures something the Romans learned too late: freedom is not self-sustaining. It does not persist simply because it exists. It must be actively maintained.

The Roman Republic did not unravel overnight. It weakened through patterns that, in retrospect, feel eerily familiar.

Political violence, once unthinkable, became normalized. The murder of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE marked a turning point. What had been shocking became precedent.

Unwritten norms eroded. Formal laws remained on the books, but the informal restraints that gave them meaning were abandoned. Power was exercised more aggressively, justified by necessity.

Factional loyalty overtook civic identity. Romans increasingly defined themselves by allegiance to political camps rather than by commitment to the Republic itself.

And constitutional principles were repeatedly suspended during moments of “emergency”. Each crisis justified extraordinary measures. Power, once centralized, was rarely fully relinquished.

None of this required villainy. It required only decent people failing to recognize the cumulative consequences of their accommodations.

Rome’s citizens did not wake up one morning and choose tyranny.

They chose convenience.

Stability.

Familiar leaders.

Short-term relief from conflict.

Security against perpetual enemies.

Over time, their vigilance weakened.

Early Warning Signs

One of the earliest warning signs appeared in how Romans treated dissent.

The principle often paraphrased as “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend your right to say it” — while not directly from Voltaire — captures a hard-won civics insight of liberal societies. It separates emotional reaction from moral commitment. It asks citizens to protect the system that allows disagreement, even when disagreement feels threatening.

The Romans understood this in theory. Their public life prized debate, rhetoric, and persuasion. But as polarization intensified, political opponents were no longer seen as fellow citizens with differing views. They became enemies — obstacles to be silenced rather than interlocutors to be engaged.

The shift from I disagree with you to you must not be allowed to speak marks a dangerous inflection point in any republic. It signals a collapse in civic imagination — an inability to see opponents as part of a shared political project, of a shared humanity.

The Decline of Civic Virtue

Underlying these developments was a deeper erosion: the decline of civic virtue.

What sustained the Roman Republic for centuries was not merely its constitutional design, but the civic society habits of its citizens. Roman culture emphasized qualities such as pietas (duty to the common good), gravitas (seriousness about public responsibility), dignitas (honor in public conduct), and virtus (moral courage in the face of difficulty).

As historian Mary Beard has noted, Roman citizenship was not just a legal status. It was a daily practice.

Citizens did not merely consume governance. They participated in it. They understood that being a good person was inseparable from being a good citizen.

What is worth dwelling on is how that understanding came to be. These virtues were not spontaneous. They were cultivated deliberately — through education, through public ceremony, through the visible modeling of civic behavior by those in positions of authority. Roman fathers took their sons to the Senate. Orators were studied not only for their arguments but for the character they embodied. The Republic understood, at its best, that self-government was a practice before it was a principle — something exercised in daily life, not merely invoked in crisis.

When that cultivation stopped, the principles remained on paper while the practice quietly died. A republic whose citizens no longer exercised civic virtue was, in a meaningful sense, already hollow — waiting only for the right pressure to collapse inward.

By the time formal institutions collapsed, the ethical foundations had already weakened.

How Republics Fail

This history is not valuable simply because it offers direct analogies or simple lessons. It is valuable because it reveals a pattern: republics fail not only when laws are broken, but when citizens cease to care about the norms that give those laws meaning.

Being good, in these contexts, is not limited to private virtue.

It includes attentiveness to shared systems. A willingness to tolerate disagreement. A refusal to sacrifice process for short-term outcomes. An understanding that self-government depends on citizens who remain engaged even when engagement is uncomfortable.

This is not about politics in the narrow sense. It is about ethical orientation.

Do we prioritize winning, or sustaining the conditions that make winning meaningful?

Do we withdraw when civic life becomes frustrating, or do we recognize frustration as part of the cost of freedom?

A Critic’s View

A reasonable critic might object at this point. They might argue that invoking Rome is too convenient — that the analogy flatters our anxieties without truly addressing them. Every generation, after all, believes itself to be living at the decisive moment of historical decline. The rhetoric of civic emergency has been weaponized so frequently, by so many factions, that it has become difficult to distinguish genuine structural concern from theatrical alarm. One could argue that institutions are more resilient than we fear, that democratic societies have absorbed worse shocks than the present, and that the very persistence of this hand-wringing across centuries suggests it reveals more about human psychology than about political reality.

To be fair, there is something to this argument. Vigilance can shade into catastrophism. The language of decline, wielded carelessly, can itself corrode democratic confidence — persuading citizens that the system is beyond saving before it has actually fallen. Fear, as much as complacency, has historically served those who would concentrate power.

But this objection, while worth taking seriously, ultimately reinforces the original concern rather than dismantling it. The fact that alarm has been misused does not mean alarm is never warranted. And the Roman case is instructive precisely because its citizens had every reason to believe their institutions were resilient. Five centuries of self-government is a powerful argument for durability. It turned out to be insufficient. The lesson is not that decline is inevitable — it is that a history of durability was never the protection Romans imagined it to be.

Decline disguised as Pragmatism

The Roman experience reminds us that democratic decline rarely announces itself. It arrives incrementally, disguised as pragmatism.

It also reminds us that historical memory carries ethical weight. Unlike the Romans, we are not without precedent. We can study Athens, Rome, Florence, Weimar Germany, and countless other cases where self-government gave way to concentration of power. This knowledge imposes a responsibility — not to predict outcomes, but to remain attentive to patterns.

George Santayana’s warning is often quoted but rarely absorbed: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Remembering, in this sense, is not about memorization. It is about moral attention.

The ethical duty of democratic vigilance is quiet and unglamorous. It does not confer status. It rarely feels urgent until it is too late.

But it is foundational.

Self-government is not preserved by constitutions alone. It is preserved by citizens willing to notice erosion, resist normalization, and remain engaged even when doing so is inconvenient.

Rome’s fall was not inevitable.

It was cumulative.

That distinction matters more now than it ever did then. Because we have the benefit of knowing how the story ended. The Romans did not.

© The Good Human Practice | Published every other Thursday

If this resonated, I’d love to have you as a free subscriber — and forward this to a leader who is reflecting on clarity and character in how they make their decisions.

The Good Human Practice is a biweekly reflection on living with purpose, not just profit — written as I try to reconcile what’s happening in the world with what the great traditions teach us, and what I believe it means to live and lead well.

There are no tidy conclusions here. Only honest reflection and contemplation.

The inner work of leadership has a counterpart. If you’re also navigating high-stakes decisions and want frameworks for the outer clarity, I write separately about that in a free Substack newsletter: theuncertaintyedge.com

There is a photograph taken from space during Apollo 17 in December 1972. Most people have seen it but few have truly absorbed it. It shows Earth as it appears from space — a small, luminous marble suspended in absolute darkness. No borders. No armies. No flags. Just a single, fragile object drifting through an indifferent universe.

The astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who saw something similar on his return from the Moon in 1971, described an experience so overwhelming it permanently rearranged his understanding of reality. “You develop an instant global consciousness,” he said, “a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.” What struck Mitchell — what strikes nearly every astronaut who has seen Earth from space — was not the planet’s grandeur. It was its smallness. Its obvious, undeniable vulnerability. Ron Garan, who spent six months aboard the International Space Station, described looking down and feeling what he called “orbital perspective“ — a sudden, disorienting awareness that the thin blue line of atmosphere separating all of human life from the empty void was almost nothing. “It was such a contradiction,” he wrote, “between the beauty of it and the sad state of affairs on the surface.”

Years earlier, the philosopher and futurist Buckminster Fuller had arrived at the same intuition from his armchair. In 1963, he published the Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in which he offered a metaphor so precise and so devastating that it is perplexing that we have not taken it more seriously in the half-century since. We are, Fuller argued, crew members aboard a spaceship. The ship is extraordinarily well-designed, equipped with self-sustaining systems of breathtaking complexity — atmosphere, water cycles, soil chemistry, food chains — all interdependent, all finite, all operating without a spare parts depot anywhere within reach. There is no resupply mission coming. There is no backup vessel. And yet, Fuller observed, we are running the ship as though it were not fragile, as though its systems could absorb anything we choose to do to them, as though the decisions made in one compartment could never possibly affect the passengers in another cabin.

Fuller’s insight was not mere poetic licence. It was engineering logic. On a spacecraft, everything connects to everything else. The question he was asking — and that we have still not adequately answered — is this: how do you maintain a ship indefinitely when the crew refuses to understand that it is a ship?

I’ve been circling this question for longer than I can precisely date. It didn’t arrive as a revelation. It arrived the way most important things do — incrementally, through accumulation. A conversation about where food actually comes from. Reading about the water systems that make agriculture in one region possible and noticing, for the first time, that I’d never thought about water as something finite. Watching a news story about flooding in Pakistan and realizing, in the same moment, that I was watching it on a device whose manufacture I knew nothing about and whose supply chain I’d never once considered. None of these moments rearranged my life the way Edgar Mitchell’s view of Earth rearranged his. But together, over time, they made a certain kind of comfortable ignorance harder to sustain. The ship became real to me — not as metaphor, but as the actual operating condition of the actual world. And once you see it, the passenger posture starts to feel less like comfort and more like a choice you are actively remaking every day.

This question rings more urgent with every passing year, and the evidence accumulates in ways that should be definitive but somehow remains easy to ignore.

Everything Connects to Everything Else

Consider the Middle East. What began as a complex political and humanitarian crisis — most acutely in Gaza, but rippling across Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Iran and the wider region — has not stayed in the Middle East. Disruptions to agricultural supply chains, displacement of farming populations, blockages in critical shipping corridors, and the spiraling cost of fuel and fertilizer have contributed to food price instability that reaches into supermarkets in Toronto, Liverpool, and São Paulo. When a region that contributes significantly to global agricultural markets enters a sustained crisis, Spaceship Earth’s food supply system registers the stress. The passengers in the forward cabins feel it differently from those in the rear — but no section of the vessel is truly sealed off from the others. A conflict that many in the wealthy world experience as a news event viewed on a screen is, in its consequences, a material fact in the lives of people who cannot otherwise find the region on a map.

Or consider what the world’s industrial appetite — driven by wealthy and developing nations alike — has done to the ecosystem. The particulate matter and carbon dioxide released from coal-burning power plants and industrial zones do not respect national airspace. They enter the jet stream. They deposit themselves into weather systems thousands of miles from their origin.

• The United States, still among the world’s largest per-capita emitters, continues to debate whether climate commitments are compatible with industrial competitiveness.

• India, navigating the legitimate tension between lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and meeting emissions targets imposed largely by nations that already completed their own carbon-intensive industrialization, is expanding coal capacity even as it invests aggressively in renewables.

• Australia exports coal at record volumes while its own coastline is eroding.

• Canada extracts bitumen from the oil sands while its western provinces burn.

• The European Union imposes a carbon border tax while its member states quietly reactivate mothballed coal plants during energy crunches.

There is no clear villain in this story — which is precisely the point. The wildfires devastating British Columbia, the flooding across Pakistan, the desertification spreading across the Sahel — these are not just local catastrophes. They are the accumulated downstream consequences of decisions made in legislative chambers, boardrooms and shopping centres across the entire planet, each nation pointing at the others, each waiting for someone else to move first, all of them passengers on the same Spaceship Earth, watching the dials on the instrument panels edging into the danger zone, and still refusing to ease up on the throttle.

Or consider the smartphone in your pocket. Or the electric vehicle hailed as the future of clean transport. Both depend on cobalt. More than seventy percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. A significant portion of it is extracted through what human rights organizations have documented as artisanal mining operations that routinely involve child labour, coerced labour, and conditions that international law classifies as forced servitude. The global transition to renewable technology — the same transition we urgently need to address the climate crisis — is, in its current form, partly underwritten by human bondage in Central Africa. In other words, one of the proposed engineering solutions for the ship requires creating a catastrophe in another section of the hull. And the consumers funding it, on the whole, would rather not know.

I include myself in that. A few years ago, after reading about cobalt supply chains, I put my phone down and felt, briefly, the full weight of what I had just learned. Then I picked it up again. I have bought two phones since, one an older used version. I tell myself I held onto each one longer than I might have. I’m not sure that’s enough. I’m not sure what enough would even look like. But I notice I’ve stopped pretending the question isn’t there.

These are not distant abstractions. They are the operating conditions of a single interconnected system — Fuller’s spaceship — whose crew has largely convinced itself that they are not aboard a spaceship at all.

How did we arrive at this peculiar state of awareness? Why do people who are, in most respects, decent and intelligent and well-meaning continue to live as though these connections do not exist?

Iggy Pop’s song The Passenger, produced by David Bowie and released in 1977, offers one answer — not as argument but as portrait. The song has been interpreted in many ways, and my reading is simply this: it describes what it feels like to move through the world without agency, to watch it pass by with heightened but passive intensity, to find yourself carried along by a vehicle you did not choose and cannot steer. The passenger sees the city’s ripped backsides, the hollow sky, and finds in them a kind of beauty — which is, admittedly, not nothing. But the passenger is not driving. He has no destination. He has, somewhere along the way, relinquished the wheel.

This is not a portrait of malice. It is a portrait of abdication — and it captures something deeply real about the psychological posture many of us have adopted toward the systems that largely govern our lives. We know, in some abstract sense, that our choices have consequences. We know the ship is real. But the ship is so vast, and the mechanisms of cause and effect so slow and so mediated by distance and complexity, that it becomes possible — almost natural — to experience oneself as a passenger, watching a troubled world slide past the window, finding what comfort one can in the view. This abdication is understandable. The world’s problems are genuinely complex. The individual feels genuinely small against them. And there is a particular seduction in motion without responsibility, in being carried along rather than steering.

But seeking comfort is different from embracing complacency. And there is a point at which the passenger’s detachment ceases to be understandable and becomes its own kind of moral failure. Fuller was clear on this. The crew member who refuses to learn how the life-support system works, he argued, is not innocent by virtue of ignorance. On a spacecraft, ignorance is a luxury that the physics of the situation cannot afford.

From Passengers to Hostages

And yet the passenger metaphor, troubling as it is, may still be too gentle. Because a passenger, at least, is simply uninvolved. What the band Genesis described in their song Land of Confusion, released in 1986, is something more alarming.

The song talks of bewilderment — a narrator haunted by the spectacle of a world coming apart at the seams. To me this second verse cuts deepest, the one that has matured from period commentary into something that feels almost prophetic:

Oh Superman, where are you now

When everything’s gone wrong somehow?

The men of steel, the men of power

Are losing control by the hour.

The lyrics name a condition Fuller would have recognized immediately. The passenger is not merely passive. The passenger is waiting. Waiting for a figure of sufficient power and clarity to arrive and impose order on the chaos — a Superman, a strongman, a technological salvation, a leader who will absorb the complexity and return things to a condition of manageable simplicity. To a golden age of the past that existed only in myth and imagination. And while the waiting continues, the ship drifts. Decisions get made. Not by the crew. Not through any process that involves the crew’s active knowledge or consent. But by whoever has moved to usurp the space the waiting crew vacated.

This is where the metaphor shifts from passive to something darker. When the systems that were supposed to manage the ship — democratic institutions, international agreements, regulatory frameworks, functioning civil society, multilateral cooperation — are steadily captured by interests that have no stake in the welfare of the whole, then passengers do not merely drift. They are held in place. The ship has not been abandoned. It has been hijacked.

This hijacking doesn’t require villains in any satisfying cinematic sense. It requires only that the people making consequential decisions about the ship’s systems — energy, food, technology, finance — are structurally insulated from the downstream consequences of those decisions. That the costs land somewhere else. On someone else. In someone else’s lifetime. The genius of the arrangement is that it doesn’t need our active cooperation. It only needs our distraction, our exhaustion, and our willingness to accept the gap between what we know and how we live.

And here the analysis becomes uncomfortable, because that last sentence is also about me. I try, where I can, to close the gap. The food I buy, the suppliers I choose when I have the choice, the awareness I try to maintain of what things actually cost before the price is set. None of it is dramatic. None of it is sufficient. But I’ve come to think the alternative — deciding that marginal action is too small to bother with — is how the gap becomes permanent. The passenger tells himself the controls are too complex to learn. The crew member reads the manual, imperfect and incomplete, and tries anyway.

We, the passengers, did not board a hijacked vessel. We boarded a vessel that has been gradually, incrementally, systematically taken from us while we were looking out the window.

And yet, it is true that this analysis is too convenient, that it flatters the public and excuses the consumer. After all, people are not merely passive victims of capture. They are active participants in systems they find comfortable. The person who demands cheap electronics without asking what makes them cheap; the voter who rewards leaders who promise simple, painless solutions to deep, structural problems; the citizen who opts out of political life because political life is exhausting and complicated. These are not hostages in any straightforward sense; they are, at least partly, collaborators in their own constraint. The chorus of Land of Confusion acknowledges this directly, which is why it has not aged the way purely political songs tend to:

This is the world we live in

These are the hands we’re given

Use them and let’s start trying.

To make it a place worth living in.

This is not a demand addressed to leaders. This is a demand addressed to all of us.

Fuller made the same point, less melodically but no less forcefully. He was not interested in blame. He was interested in function. A spaceship does not care about the emotional reasons why its crew has neglected the life-support systems. It simply registers the neglect and responds accordingly. The question of whether the crew was deceived, or distracted, or simply tired, is philosophically interesting but operationally irrelevant. The systems are failing. The manual has not been read. And the time for comfortable complacency is over.

The View That Changes Everything

Edgar Mitchell returned from Apollo 14 in February 1971 and later spent much of his life reflecting on the meaning of that experience. The Overview Effect, a term coined by Frank White in 1987, has been described by a diverse group of astronauts including Russian Yuri Artyukhin, Saudi Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, and American Ron Garan. Together, their accounts describe Earth as a single, finite, interconnected system.

The tragedy is not that the view from space is unavailable to most people. The tragedy is that the view is available — through satellite imagery, through the testimony of those who have made the journey, through the patient work of climate and other scientists who have spent careers mapping the connections — and still the passengers sit with their faces turned toward their own windows, watching their own small portion of the ripped backside of the city slide past, finding what beauty they can in the hollow sky.

Fuller ended his book with a characteristic provocation. He noted that the ship had come equipped with everything necessary for an indefinitely long and comfortable voyage. The design was sound. The systems were elegant. The resources, properly managed, were sufficient. The only thing the ship had never been provided with was an operating manual — a document that made clear to every member of the crew what kind of vessel they were aboard, how its systems were connected, and what their individual responsibilities as crew members actually entailed.

He meant his book as a first draft of that manual.

Here is what the manual would need to make clear, if we were to rewrite it today: we are not passengers. We were never passengers. The passenger identity — comfortable, aesthetically engaged, morally uninvolved — is a role we adopted, partly through seduction and partly through exhaustion, and it has cost us more than we have as of yet been willing to acknowledge. The ship is real. The connections are real. The child mining cobalt in the Congo, the farmer watching his crops fail in a country most of us could not locate on a map, the firefighter in a Canadian forest fighting fires that won’t stop — these are not news stories. They are fellow crew members, in sections of the vessel we rarely visit, dealing with the consequences of decisions made collectively by all of us and for which none of us seem to be accountable.

Superman is not coming. We need to remember that these hands we have been given are the only hands available.

© The Good Human Practice | Published every other Thursday

If this resonated, I’d love to have you as a free subscriber — and forward this to a leader who is reflecting on clarity and character in how they make their decisions.

The Good Human Practice is a biweekly reflection on living with purpose, not just profit — written as I try to reconcile what’s happening in the world with what the great traditions teach us, and what I believe it means to live and lead well.

There are no tidy conclusions here. Only honest reflection and contemplation.

The inner work of leadership has a counterpart. If you’re also navigating high-stakes decisions and want frameworks for the outer clarity, I write separately about that in a free Substack newsletter: theuncertaintyedge.com

In law school many years ago, I was taught that justice is blind. Not as a metaphor, but as an aspiration — a hard-won counterweight to centuries of rule by those who stood above the law because they claimed to be its source. The blindfold on the figure of Justice is not a decoration. It was meant to be a declaration: before the law, the identity, wealth, power, and status of the person in the dock are irrelevant. What matters is what was done, and what the law requires.

That principle — so simple, yet so difficult to achieve, and so easily lost — is now under systematic assault. Not from the margins. From the centre. Not by those who argue a law is unjust and must be changed — that is a position with genuine philosophical standing. But by those who accept the law’s protection for themselves while claiming, with apparent seriousness, that it was never intended to constrain them.

I want to bring the full weight of the philosophical and moral traditions to bear on that claim — and to show, across every serious tradition of thought humanity has produced, that it is not merely wrong. It is incoherent. And it has a name.

The Logic of the Exemption Claim

The structure of the argument is worth examining. When a person accused of breaking a law appears before a court, three defences are available in any rational legal tradition.

The defendant may argue:

• I did not do what is alleged; or

• The law is unclear or unjust; or

• I acted under duress or justifiable necessity.

What no coherent tradition has ever recognized as a legitimate defence is the following: I did it, the law is clear, the law is just — but it was not intended to apply to me.

This is not a legal argument. It is the raw assertion of superiority dressed in borrowed jurisprudence. It is, philosophically speaking, self-defeating.

You cannot appeal to a legal system to exempt yourself from that legal system.

You cannot use the authority of law to abolish law’s authority over yourself.

The moment any individual claims exemption on grounds of personal or group exceptionalism, they have destroyed the very concept they are invoking.

St. Augustine saw this clearly in the fifth century. Remove justice, he wrote, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? The only thing that distinguishes legitimate government from organized crime is law applied consistently, without exception, binding ruler and ruled alike. Remove that, and not only have you elevated the powerful above the law, you have reduced the state to a criminal enterprise that happens to have won. Augustine understood that the libido dominandi — the lust for domination — is the deepest corruption available to human institutions: the impulse that rebrands injustice as order, extraction as merit, and exemption as excellence. Power invents categories of superiority — in our era they are the job creators, visionaries, disruptors — that are simply updated versions of the ancient aristocratic claim that they are a different order of being, and your rules are not meant for them.

St. Francis of Assisi, born into precisely that kind of privilege in thirteenth-century Assisi, walked away from all of it — not as resignation but as proclamation. When he kissed the leper, he was not performing charity from a position of superiority. He was dismantling the social architecture that maintained the fiction of fundamental human inequality. His response to the exemption claim would not be anger but something more eviscerating: pity. For Francis, the person who believes themselves exempt from the obligations that bind all others has not achieved freedom. They have achieved a spiritual poverty that no material wealth can fill. The libido dominandi is ultimately self-defeating — a grasping that empties rather than fills.

What Every Tradition Says

The Stoics grounded the rule of law in logos — universal reason, which they held to permeate all of nature and all humanity equally. Marcus Aurelius, writing from the pinnacle of Roman power, embodied this in practice. His Meditations are, in one reading, a prolonged struggle against this exemption-instinct — the temptation to believe that power confers freedom from ordinary moral obligations. For the Stoics, the person who claims exemption has not achieved power. They have surrendered to the libido dominandi — the lust for domination — mistaking impunity for strength.

The Bhagavad Gita approaches the same problem through dharma — right action, the moral order that holds the universe together. Whatever a great person does, Krishna says, others will imitate. Whatever standard they set, the world follows. Dharma is non-negotiable precisely because it is structural: wealth, lineage, and achievement count for nothing against the demand of right action. The Gita is entirely unimpressed by status as a moral exemption.

The social contract literature makes the incoherence most visible. Thomas Hobbes argued that law exists because without it, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The person who claims exemption from law while benefiting from the order it provides is a free-rider — consuming the security that everyone else’s compliance produces, while refusing to contribute to it. The billionaire who claims exemption from regulation depends, for his very wealth, on the legal frameworks he refuses to honour. He is consuming civilization while undermining its very foundations.

Rousseau is more direct. When a powerful actor asserts that law does not apply to them, they are substituting their particular will for the General Will — claiming that their private interest supersedes the common framework that serves everyone. This is, for Rousseau, the definition of tyranny, not in the crude sense, but in the philosophical sense. The corruption of law from an expression of collective self-governance into an instrument of elite exemption.

The Lived Argument

Philosophy finds its ultimate test not in argument but in life. Gandhi’s Satyagraha — truth-force — rested on a critical insight: those who benefit from a legal order cannot selectively exempt themselves from its obligations. When Gandhi challenged unjust laws imposed on Indians by the British colonial powers, he did not simply declare these laws did not apply to him. Instead, he challenged them openly, accepted their legal consequences, submitted to imprisonment, and invited the full weight of legal application as a way of exposing their injustice. His challenge to specific laws was a profound act of respect for the principle of legal universality. He accepted the consequences of his actions. The contemporary exemption-claimer does not.

Nelson Mandela’s relationship with law is more complex, and more instructive for that complexity. He was a lawyer who became an outlaw, imprisoned by a system he refused to recognize as legitimate. And yet, emerging from twenty-seven years of imprisonment, he did not abandon the rule of law. He championed it — with full knowledge of how savagely it could be abused — because he understood that the alternative is a world governed entirely by power. His defence at the Rivonia trial was precise: he had fought against white domination, and against black domination. Against all domination. The universality was the point.

The Present Crisis

These are not abstract arguments. They address, with precision, what is happening now — when platform owners achieve a form of sovereignty beyond democratic accountability, when regulatory fines become merely the cost of doing business, when financial and political power are deployed to ensure that the long arm of the law never reaches those with sufficient resources to repel it. What St. Augustine called a kingdom becoming a gang.

But the exemption claim does not stop at corporate gates. It has migrated into the halls of democratic government itself. And then further — into the international order, where the most powerful states now openly repudiate the very rules they helped design, demanded others to follow, and used as justification for intervention and war when compliance became inconvenient. The form differs. The logic is identical.

When that lesson — that law applies to the powerless and insulates the powerful — is learned widely enough, the social contract does not merely weaken, it loses the one thing that made it work: the belief that it is real.

The rule of law was not handed down from the top. It was won, incrementally, at great cost, against precisely the same exemption claim that is being made today. The Magna Carta in 1215 established for the first time that even a king was subject to law — that sovereignty was not exemption from legal accountability, but accountability’s most visible test. Brown v. Board of Education in the US in 1954 exposed the central hypocrisy of a system with formal legal equality and actual legal inequality: law that applies differently based on your race or who you are is not law in any morally meaningful sense.

And the Nuremberg trials, perhaps the most important legal moment of the twentieth century, established something that had never been established before — that individuals could be held criminally accountable for acts committed under official legal authority. The defence “I was following orders” or “I was following the law” was explicitly and permanently rejected. No individual, however powerful, can shelter behind the authority they have abused. These were not inevitable victories. They were chosen — by people who insisted that the principle meant what it said.

Grounds for Hope

History offers genuine grounds for hope, because the exemption claim is ancient — and it has, without exception, eventually been defeated. Solon cancelled the debts of Athens and freed the debt slaves. The Magna Carta forced a king to submit to law. Gandhi defeated an empire. Nuremberg held individuals accountable for crimes committed under legal authority. Mandela built, from the ruins of apartheid’s legal architecture, a constitutional democracy grounded in the equal dignity of all persons.

None of these victories were foreseeable, nor were they inevitable. All of them were won by people who refused the counsel of despair — who insisted, against the evidence of the immediate moment, that the arc of moral history bends not because it must, but because of the weight of enough people who choose to bend it.

The blindfold on Justice is not a given. It is a choice. It requires maintenance, vigilance, and the willingness of enough people in each generation to insist — against every pressure and every inducement to look away — that the law means what it says, says what it means, and that it applies to everyone equally.

Every generation receives this question. Ours must answer it now.

This is an abridged version of a longer essay. The full piece examines the philosophical traditions in greater depth, engages with the Kierkegaard objection about transcendent exemption, and traces the rule of law through its great watershed moments — Magna Carta, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Nuremberg trials. If you would like the full version, free of charge, send an email to info@samsivarajan.com and I will send it directly to you.

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Sophocles wrote Antigone in the fifth century BCE, but he was describing a situation that has no expiry date. Creon, the king of Thebes, decrees that Antigone’s brother — a traitor to the city — will be left unburied, denied the funeral rites that Greek religion considered sacred. Antigone buries him anyway. Not because she is reckless or underestimates the consequences. She does it because the alternative — compliance, silence, going along with something she knows to be wrong — would require her to become someone she is not willing to be. Creon responds, not by seriously debating her or engaging in her argument. Instead, he simply criminalizes her position, portrays her defiance as a threat to public order, and has her sealed in a cave to die.

This is the position many of us find ourselves in now. Not choosing between two evils — that is a different myth, a different trap. This is Antigone’s position: caught not between bad options, but between the world as power insists it must be, and the world as conscience insists it should be.

The world as it actually is, with its clinical justifications for violence, its institutions that have stopped working the way we were told they would, its weaponized language that makes honest speech feel dangerous versus the world we were raised to believe in, the one we still want our children to inherit.

That tension — between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be — is what I have been pondering. It is, I think, one of the defining psychological conditions of this moment.

To be honest, this is why I started this newsletter. It is my therapy, my confessional, the salve to my conscience. And what gives me hope is my chats with people who gave me positive feedback about this initiative, who share the same feelings, mostly of impotence and helplessness. People principled but silenced by the weaponization of words and assaults on reputation. All of us who refuse to go gentle into that good night. All of us who want to rage, at least in our own way, against the dying of the light.

I have found myself returning, with some urgency, to some of the world’s great intellectual traditions — not for consolation, but for help: to find support for thinking clearly, acting with integrity, and remaining genuinely human when the conditions around us seem designed to make that harder, if not impossible.

The first and perhaps most important insight these traditions offer is a distinction that sounds simple but is, in practice, enormously difficult to maintain.

Grief at injustice is the appropriate response of a moral being to what they are witnessing. It is healthy. It is evidence of a conscience still functioning. Despair about existence is different — it is the collapse of the capacity to act, to love, to hope at all. It destroys not just you, but your ability to be useful to anyone or anything beyond yourself. The Stoics, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Taoist tradition converge on this point from very different directions: you can hold the darkness without becoming it. That is not a platitude. It is a daily practice.

The Discipline of Not Being Consumed

Marcus Aurelius ruled an empire during plague, military catastrophe, and political betrayal. He wrote his Meditations privately — never intending them to be read by others — as reminders to himself about how to remain functional and moral under conditions designed to erode both. His Stoic discipline was not indifference to suffering. It was a refusal to let horror colonize his inner life so completely that he would become useless to the world.

The Stoics made a foundational distinction between what destroys us and what instructs us. Suffering is not meaningless. It reveals, with terrible clarity, what we are made of and what we most value. The impediment to action, Marcus wrote, advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. This is not an invitation to passive acceptance. It is the most radical form of non-capitulation available: the refusal to allow external events to determine who we are.

Hannah Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany and spent eighteen years stateless, understood this in stark political terms. Her analysis of the Eichmann trial produced a conclusion that disturbed everyone who heard it: Eichmann was not a monster. He was a bureaucrat. He did not think. He followed orders. He processed paperwork. He subordinated his moral imagination entirely to a system and told himself this was professionalism. Arendt called this the banality of evil — the recognition that most institutional atrocity does not require malice. All it requires is the abdication of genuine thinking on the part of individuals.

The antidote she proposed is simply this: think. Genuinely, uncomfortably, honestly. Keep asking what is really happening to actual human beings. Not the propaganda but the real-world impact on people. That question, when stubbornly maintained, is itself a form of resistance.

Acting Without Making Inner Peace a Hostage to Outcomes

In the Bhagavad Gita, the great book of the Hindu religion, Prince Arjuna collapses before the great battle at Kurukshetra. He sees arrayed against him people he loves — his cousins, his teachers — and he says: I cannot do this. What is the point of any victory built on such death and grief?

This is precisely the paralysis that accompanies all of us watching values you care about dismantled by the very institutions that were supposed to defend them. The Gita’s response, through Krishna, is not that it does not matter. It is far more demanding insisting that you act from duty and love, without making your inner peace hostage to outcomes you cannot control. The world’s disorder does not pause while you process it. You still have to show up. And the quality of your showing up is entirely up to you.

The Tao Te Ching adds something else — a different kind of confidence, grounded not in sentiment but in observation. Water is fluid, soft, yielding. But water wears away rock. Every system that sustains itself through dehumanization or the erosion of human rights and values must devote increasingly vast resources to maintaining that system. Eventually, the cost becomes unsustainable. Like the rock that is worn away. Empires that seemed permanent — Imperial Rome, Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, the Soviet Union — collapsed. Not always through dramatic revolution, but through the patient, relentless pressure of human dignity refusing to disappear.

Hope Is Not Optimism

Arendt’s most hopeful concept is natality — the idea that every human birth represents a new beginning, a capacity to initiate something that has never existed before. Because human beings are constantly being born, the world is structurally incapable of being finally closed. Every foreclosure on human possibility is temporary. Every generation arrives with the capacity to begin again.

Adam Smith, an economist but also a moral philosopher, observed that human beings are wired not merely for survival or pleasure, but for moral recognition. We want not just to be loved but to be worthy of love. We want not just to be seen but to be seen as good. That hunger for moral seriousness does not disappear under pressure. It sometimes even intensifies. Its very persistence — across cultures, centuries, and every system that has tried to extinguish it — is evidence about what human beings fundamentally are beneath every ideology that tries to tell them otherwise.

What all these traditions converge on, despite their profound differences, is this: you are not required to fix the world. You are required to act faithfully within it. You are permitted — even obligated — to feel grief. It is proof you are still a moral being in a world that wants you to go numb. And the person who maintains their humanity during the dark period is doing invisible, load-bearing work that makes eventual renewal possible.

Hope, understood this way, is not optimism. Optimism is a prediction about outcomes, outcomes you cannot control. Hope is an orientation toward action. You can act hopefully — persistently, faithfully, from your deepest values — without knowing how things will turn out. That is the only kind of hope the traditions take seriously.

Or, in the words of Princess Leia of Star Wars fame:

Hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you can see it, you will never make it through the night.

This is an abridged version for those short on time. The full essay goes considerably further — exploring how to act with integrity under personal attack, the obligation to speak versus the wisdom of silence, what the traditions say about dehumanization and hypocrisy, and a fuller philosophical case for hope. It also includes practical exercises and reflective practices drawn from Stoicism and behavioral science. If you would like the full version, free of charge, send an email to info@samsivarajan.com and I will send it directly to you.

A note from the editor: This week we wade into philosophy provoked by current events — not to take political sides, but because the question being raised in public by world leaders goes to the very heart of what it means to be a good human. When powerful people tell us to accept the world as it is, we owe it to ourselves — and to those without power — to think carefully about what that actually means.

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney backed the recent U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran — a move he said he supported “with regret” and which he acknowledged may be “inconsistent with international law” — he offered a phrase that deserves more scrutiny: Canada, he said, is “taking the world as it is, not passively waiting for a world we wish [it] to be.”

There is something genuinely wise in this. The Stoics would recognize it immediately. Marcus Aurelius, who governed one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known, wrote constantly in his private journals about the discipline of accepting what we cannot change. The Stoic concept of the dichotomy of control — the hard-won wisdom that we should direct our energy only toward what lies within our power — is among the most liberating and practical of insights in the history of philosophy.

So Carney is right, up to a point. Impotent rage at the state of the world helps no one. Clear-eyed pragmatism is not the same as moral failure. We cannot operate through wishful thinking.

But here is where the wisdom ends and something more troubling begins.

When Pragmatism Becomes a Blank Cheque

Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz went further. In the same week, he suggested that international law’s protections should not apply to Iran, arguing that such frameworks have “relatively little effect” when a state is determined to violate them. In the words of one German newspaper, it was “a long farewell to international law”.

This is not Stoic wisdom. This is something else entirely — the logic of the powerful dressing itself in the language of pragmatism.

Let us test this logic honestly. If “taking the world as it is” is the highest standard of statesmanship, then consider significant world events from history through that lens:

• In the 1930s and early 1940s, Adolf Hitler was simply the world as it was. The Holocaust and all of its horrors was happening. The world, largely, looked away. And those who counselled non-intervention — Neville Chamberlain, American and Canadian politicians, European leaders — did so using the very same language of realism and practicality that we are hearing today. Appeasement was the policy of people who prided themselves on being serious and pragmatic. Taking the world as it is.

• In 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was overthrown in a CIA and MI6-orchestrated coup — because he had the temerity to insist that Iranian oil benefit the Iranian people. The world accepted this too. It was simply taking the world as it was, with a realpolitik rationale attached. And the consequences of accepting the world as it was in 1953 continues to play out in 2026.

• In Chile in 1973, Salvador Allende — the democratically elected president of his country — was overthrown in a military coup actively supported by the United States government. Allende died in the presidential palace as troops stormed it. What followed was seventeen years of dictatorship, torture, and disappearance under General Pinochet. The world knew. Washington had, in fact, helped plan and execute it. And the world accepted this as the way things are — because Allende had been inconvenient to powerful interests, and pragmatic realism demanded that inconvenient democracies be sacrificed.

And here is the uncomfortable question the logic poses right now, today: if “taking the world as it is” is the governing principle, at what point do we stop applying it? When a major power annexes a neighbouring democracy, should its allies and partners simply accept that world as it is? When civilians are rounded up in cities without due process, should we take that world as it is, too? Or do we insist that here we must go back to the rule of law?

The “take the world as it is” principle, applied consistently, demands acquiescence to every exercise of raw power. Which is, of course, exactly what raw power has always wanted.

And it does not stop with history.

Hannah Arendt gives us perhaps the sharpest blade for cutting through this particular evasion. Her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann — one of the chief architects of the Holocaust — produced a concept that names precisely what is happening when serious people invoke realism as moral cover: the banality of evil. It is too easy to simply dismiss Eichmann as a monster, to place him safely beyond the boundary of recognizable humanity. Arendt refused that simplistic path. What she found instead was a terrifyingly ordinary bureaucrat, driven by careerism and an inability — or unwillingness — to think independently. He had replaced moral judgment with procedural compliance, with orders, with the logic of the situation, with taking the world as it was. Arendt's devastating insight is that the great atrocities of the twentieth century were not perpetrated by ideological fanatics alone, but by intelligent, ordinary people who declined to exercise judgment. They did not make trouble. They accepted the world as it was. And in doing so, they made everything possible.

What Marcus Aurelius Actually Said

The Stoics are frequently invoked by the powerful and the pragmatic. But Marcus Aurelius was not simply a philosopher of acceptance. He was, above all else, a philosopher of justice — and he understood that the two must be held in radical tension.

In Meditations, he wrote of justice not as a policy preference or a useful diplomatic norm, but as one of the four cardinal virtues — alongside wisdom, courage, and temperance. For Marcus, justice was not external. It was not a treaty or a court ruling. It was a quality of the soul. It described how a person of character treats other people — all other people, regardless of their power, their usefulness, or their nationality. [We’ll leave aside for the purposes of this article his wars against the Germanic tribes or the prevalence of slavery in Rome.]

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The Stoics taught that virtue — wisdom, courage, justice , and temperance — was the only true good. Everything else — wealth, power, political advantage, the favour of allies — was what they called indifferents. They might be useful, but they could never justify abandoning virtue. A Stoic emperor who set aside justice for geopolitical convenience would have recognized, in his private journal, that he had failed himself.

Marcus also wrote about our obligations to one another as members of a shared human community — what he called the cosmopolis, the city of all rational beings. The Stoics were the first systematic universalists. They did not believe justice applied only to your tribe, your nation, or your alliance. It applied, radically and uncomfortably, to everyone.

Augustine and the Band of Robbers

St. Augustine of Hippo, writing in the fifth century CE as the Roman Empire was itself fracturing under pressure, posed one of the most challenging questions in the history of political thought. In The City of God, he asked: if a state abandons justice, what distinguishes it from a criminal gang?

“Without justice what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?” — Augustine, The City of God

Augustine was not näive about power. He lived through the sack of Rome. He understood catastrophe. But he refused to accept that power without moral principle was simply “the world as it is”. He insisted that the city built on justice — what he called the City of God — made an unrelenting demand on every human conscience, regardless of what the earthly city was doing around it.

For Augustine, as for the Stoics, there was no version of the good life that could be built on the normalization of injustice. When institutions fail, the answer is not to abandon their underlying principles. The answer is to hold the principles more fiercely — and to refuse to let the language of realism become a cover for moral abdication.

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The World as It Is, Right Now

The temptation is to locate these arguments safely in the past. But when the same logic is being applied today, in real time, we would be dishonest not to name it.

The Jeffrey Epstein network — now the subject of court findings and documented evidence of industrial-scale child sexual abuse involving some of the most powerful figures in finance, politics, and media — has been largely absorbed into the background noise. Investigations have stalled. Files have been sealed or delayed. The powerful have, for the most part, moved on. To take the world as it is, apparently, is also to accept that children were abused systematically by the well-connected, and that this is simply the way things are.

In the United States, immigration enforcement operations have resulted in civilian deaths, legal residents detained without due process, and communities living in fear. The language used by those who defend this is — again — the language of realism. This is the world as it is. Don’t protest. Don’t lecture. Accept the facts on the ground.

And then there is the publicly threatened annexation of Canada and Greenland — sovereign nations, treaty partners, democracies. The response from many world leaders, other than those directly affected, has been, effectively, silence. Realism. Taking the world as it is.

It is worth pausing on that last point. The very nations whose leaders are now counselling us to accept the world as it is are among those whose sovereignty is being openly threatened by the same logic. If “the world as it is” is good enough for Iran, for Venezuela, for Cuba, it will have to be good enough for Canada and Europe too. Political pronouncements have a habit of applying in directions their proponents did not intend.

The Real Stoic Task

None of this means we can fix everything or protest every injustice from every rooftop. Carney’s instinct toward pragmatism is not wrong in itself. The Stoics really do counsel us not to exhaust ourselves over what we cannot control.

But the Stoic dichotomy of control cuts in a different direction than “take the world as it is” might suggest. What is always within our control — always — is our own moral response. Whether we speak. Whether we bear witness. Whether we name what we see. Whether we use the word “injustice” when injustice is happening, even when it is inconvenient, even when our allies are the ones perpetrating it.

Accepting the world as it is cannot mean accepting that justice is merely a framework to be applied selectively — to our enemies but not our friends, to the weak but not the powerful, to yesterday’s atrocities but not today’s.

The moment it does, we have not become realists. We have simply become the next group who chose to look away. The transactionalists.

First They Came

The German Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, who himself spent seven years in Nazi concentration camps, left us one of the most enduring warnings in modern history. It speaks directly to the logic of taking the world as it is:

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then 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 out for me

— Martin Niemöller

Niemöller was not describing monsters. He was describing ordinary, pragmatic people — people who took the world as it was, who didn’t want to make trouble, who told themselves that each individual outrage was not their problem. He was describing, with devastating precision, the incremental logic by which civilized societies sleepwalk into catastrophe.

The moment we accept that justice is a framework where the rules only apply to others — for the weak, for the enemy, for the inconvenient — we have already begun the journey he described. And by the time it becomes our problem, there is no one left to speak.

The Good Human Project is a exploration of what it means to be good in today’s world. Through practical insights, real-world examples, and actionable tools, we’re building a community dedicated to developing and practising goodness in modern life. One conversation at a time.

A note to the reader: This week’s newsletter tackles uncomfortable territory — the gap between our democratic principles and our partisan practices. It’s not about left versus right. It’s about whether principles matter at all, or if they’re just convenient tools we deploy against our enemies and abandon when they implicate our allies. Some examples will challenge comfortable narratives on all sides. That’s the point.

This is Part 2 of a 2-Part Essay

Recap from Part 1: We examined the central paradox of our time: the gap between our stated principles and our partisan practices. Through examples ranging from free speech (Charlie Hebdo vs. Palestinian protesters) to political violence (BLM protests vs. January 6th), conspiracy theories (Pizzagate vs. Epstein), and corruption (Trudeau vs. Trump), we saw the same pattern: principles deployed as weapons against opponents, abandoned when they implicate allies. We explored why democracy exists as enlightened self-interest, how the ‘rules-based order’ is selective fiction, and where our ‘protect the children’ advocates went when real abuse was documented. The question remains: Do we have principles, or just partisans? [Read Part 1]

The Boiling Frog

There’s an old urban legend about boiling a frog. Drop it in boiling water, and it jumps out immediately. But place it in cool water and slowly turn up the heat, and it boils to death, never noticing the gradual change until it’s too late.

We are the frog. We have been swimming contentedly in the water. But the water is getting dangerously hot.

Each compromise seems small, individually justifiable.

Just this once, we will ignore corruption on our side — their corruption was worse.

Just in this case, we will excuse violence from our allies — they had legitimate grievances.

Just this time, we will abandon free speech — this speech is dangerous.

Just this time, we will abandon the application of laws — the threat to our way of life is too much to abide by the laws that gave us our way of life.

Just today, we will overlook abuse when it implicates the wrong people — we need to focus on more important battles.

Erode. Erode. Erode.

And suddenly we’re living in a society where truth is whatever serves our narrative, where justice applies selectively based on politics, where abuse is condemned or ignored based solely on who’s accused, where democratic principles are abandoned whenever they become inconvenient for our side.

This is how civilizations decay. Not through a single catastrophic failure, but through the steady accumulation of small corruptions — each one rationalized, each one excused by pointing to the other side’s equal or worse behavior. Over time, corruption becomes normal. Principles are dismissed as naïve. Power, pleasure, and tribal loyalty replace restraint and responsibility.

This is the lesson of the late Roman Empire. Nero didn’t destroy Rome in a night, fiddling away while Rome burned. But he embodied a culture that had already learned to tolerate and even celebrate excess, cruelty, and spectacle over virtue. The fire became a symbol — not the cause — of a society that had lost its moral centre.

The ancient Roman historian Livy said:

Rome was originally, when it was poor and small, a unique example of austere virtue; then it corrupted, it spoiled, it rotted itself by all the vices; so, little by little, we have been brought into the present condition in which we are able neither to endure the evils from which we suffer, nor the remedies we need to cure them.

And it’s the deeper warning in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah: not a tale about isolated sins, but about what happens when a society stops caring whether its actions align with its stated values — when people know the difference between right and wrong and choose wrong anyway because it’s easier, more profitable, or more loyal to the tribe.

The water is heating in real time. But most of us are too busy defending our team to notice the temperature rising.

Trust Dies in Selective Light

We talk endlessly about declining trust in institutions. The numbers are sobering: media trust at historic lows, fewer than one in five Americans trusting government, courts seen as politically captured, academia dismissed as biased by half the population, science rejected by millions even during a pandemic.

But the bigger question is why should we trust institutions that don’t uphold their stated principles?

• Why trust media that applies different editorial standards based on political alignment?

• Why trust courts that seem to judge based on political leanings rather than evidence and the law?

• Why trust politicians who weaponize morality when convenient and abandon it when costly?

• Why trust any institution that treats principles as tactics rather than standards?

Our current institutional crisis isn’t primarily about misinformation or polarization or social media echo chambers. It’s about hypocrisy. When people see principles applied selectively — free speech for us but not them, due process for our side but not theirs, accountability for opponents but not allies — they don’t just lose faith in specific institutions. They lose faith in the idea of principle itself.

They conclude, often correctly, that moral outrage is just another weapon, that justice is just another word for power, that principles are simply the stories we tell to justify doing what we wanted to do anyway.

And once that conclusion takes hold, once people believe the game is rigged and principles are meaningless, democracy itself becomes impossible.

The Only Path Forward

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we probably can’t solve this at the societal level, at least not quickly, perhaps not ever. The incentives are too strong, the tribal identities too entrenched, the fear of losing our privileges too steep. Institutional reform will be necessary but insufficient. Cultural change will take decades.

But we can start at the individual level. And, ultimately, that’s where all real change begins.

The path forward requires something almost impossibly difficult: applying your principles consistently, especially when it hurts, especially when it costs you, especially when it means criticizing your own side or acknowledging merit in your opponents’ position.

The test of a principle isn’t whether you apply it to your enemies — it’s whether you apply it equally to your allies, and vice versa.

If you defended free speech for Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, you defend it for Palestinian protesters.

If you condemned BLM violence, you condemn January 6th violence.

If you were outraged by Pizzagate conspiracies, you are outraged by the actual abuse documented in the Epstein files.

If you criticized Trudeau’s corruption, you criticize Trump’s.

If you criticized Russia’s pre-emptive attack on Ukraine, you criticize the US’s pre-emptive attack on Iran.

And vice versa, for all of the above.

Before you speak, before you post, before you condemn or defend, ask yourself one question: “If the parties were reversed, would I still hold this position?”

If the answer is no, if your position depends on who’s involved rather than what they did, then you don’t have a principle. You are a partisan — you have a team preference. And that’s fine — we all have tribal loyalties. But we should at least be honest enough to admit that’s what we’re defending, rather than pretending we are standing on principle.

The ability to say “My side got this wrong” might be the hardest practice in modern political and community life. But it’s also what separates someone with actual principles from a partisan. Not the lazy “both sides are bad” equivocation or the in-vogue “what-about-isms”, which is just another way of avoiding accountability. But the specific, uncomfortable acknowledgment: “I generally support X, but in this particular case, they’re wrong and Y is right”.

This requires rejecting selective outrage, noticing your own emotional patterns. When are you outraged? When are you dismissive? What’s the pattern? If you’re consistently outraged when opponents misbehave but dismissive when your allies do the same thing, you’re engaged in performative outrage, not genuine moral concern. You’re signalling tribal loyalty, not defending principles.

The hardest truths are always the ones that undermine our preferred narratives.

Maybe your side wasn’t entirely victimized.

Maybe your opponents had legitimate grievances.

Maybe the reality is more complex than your tribe’s talking points.

Maybe people you admire did terrible things.

Maybe principles you champion have been weaponized unjustly.

Maybe your team’s corruption is as bad as theirs.

Embracing this discomfort, sitting with these uncomfortable possibilities, allowing evidence to change your mind even when it’s politically costly — this is the only path to actual understanding, to genuine principle, to anything resembling intellectual honesty.

Principles Either Matter or They Don’t

Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in selective light — when we illuminate our opponents’ sins while hiding our allies’ crimes in shadow. It dies when principles become weapons we deploy against enemies rather than standards we apply first and most rigorously to ourselves.

It dies when “protecting children” means attacking political opponents, not protecting actual children.

When “free speech” means speech we agree with.

When “law and order” means laws applied to people we don’t like.

When “justice” means our side winning.

We’re not in Nero’s Rome. We’re not in Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet. But it sure looks like we’re heading there, one rationalized compromise at a time, one justified hypocrisy at a time, one principle hollowed out for tribal advantage at a time.

The question isn’t whether our institutions will survive this erosion — they may or may not. The question is whether we will. Whether we as individuals can reclaim principle from partisanship, whether we can rebuild trust by actually being trustworthy, by actually meaning what we say, by actually applying our stated values even when it costs us.

It starts with each of us. It starts with the uncomfortable admission that if you can’t apply your principles to your own side, if you can’t acknowledge when your team is wrong, if you can’t hold your allies to the same standards you demand of your opponents, then you don’t have principles.

You just have preferences. You just have a team. You are just a partisan. You just have the tribal loyalty that has characterized human conflict for millennia, dressed up in the language of principle to make it feel more noble.

Fundamental principles either matter or they don’t. Either the standards apply to everyone, including and especially our allies, or they’re just convenient tools we deploy when useful and ignore when costly. Either we mean what we say about justice, equality, freedom, and truth, or we are just playing the same power games humans have always played, just using prettier words.

The choice is ours. The water is boiling. And the question is whether we will notice before it’s too late to do something about it.

A closing note

The Good Human Practice is a biweekly reflection on living with purpose, not just profit, in an increasingly noisy and fractured world.

This isn’t self-help. It’s slow, meaningful practice.

If this essay stayed with you, sit with it. Notice what it surfaced. Return to it when you need to.

If you’re interested in simple reflection tools to support this kind of inner work, you’ll find them here.

For leadership and decision-making work under uncertainty, I write a separate publication called The Uncertainty E.D.G.E.™.

A note to the reader: This week’s newsletter tackles uncomfortable territory - the gap between our democratic principles and our partisan practices. It’s not about left versus right. It’s about whether principles matter at all, or if they’re just convenient tools we deploy against our enemies and abandon when they implicate our allies. Some examples will challenge comfortable narratives on all sides. That’s the point.

This is Part 1 of a 2-Part Essay

The Cartoon Test

In 2015, gunmen stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing twelve people over satirical cartoons of Muhammad. The Western world rallied around a principle: freedom of speech is sacred, even when — especially when — it offends, it challenges, it exposes.

“Je suis Charlie” — “I am Charlie” — became a global rallying cry. We stood firm: in a democracy, no religious sensibility or any sensibility for that matter, however deeply felt, can justify silencing expression. The principle seemed clear, unambiguous, worth defending at the highest levels of government and culture.

This evokes the famous quote attributed to the famous French philosopher Voltaire: I may disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, the celebrated U.S. Supreme Court Justice made what is considered the definitive statement on freedom of speech in 1929:

if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Heady stuff. Noble sentiments.

Now fast forward to 2024. University students organized peaceful protests supporting Palestinian rights. Administrators banned demonstrations. Police arrested protesters, sometimes violently. Politicians around the world demanded crackdowns, sometimes callously. And remarkably, many of the same voices who championed Charlie Hebdo now called for censorship, for restrictions, for police crackdowns, for consequences from exercising the previously sanctified freedom of speech.

The principle didn’t change. The target did.

This is the core question of our time, the one that cuts through every political debate, every cultural battle, every crisis of institutional trust:

Do we actually have principles, or are we just partisans?

Is freedom of speech a cherished principle?

Or only when the speaker is from our team and only when the message is in line with our beliefs?

Does Oliver Wendell Holmes’ plea for “freedom for the thought that we hate” now fall on deaf ears?

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When Outrage Becomes Selective

Consider how we calibrate our outrage over political violence. In 2020, massive nationwide protests followed George Floyd’s murder. Most demonstrations were nonviolent, but some turned destructive, with property damage, arson, injuries, and a number of deaths. Police in many cities responded with riot gear, tear gas, “less‑lethal” munitions such as rubber bullets, and thousands of arrests. Elected officials from both parties condemned the looting and attacks that occurred, even as they differed sharply over how to characterize and respond to the broader protest movement. The dominant official line was that violence and destruction, even when attached to a grievance many saw as legitimate, could not be accepted in a democracy.

Then came January 6, 2021. A mob forced its way into the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 Presidential election. The attack left five people dead in connection with that day and its immediate aftermath, injured around 140 police officers, and sent lawmakers scrambling to reach secure locations. Yet some of the same voices that had urged the harshest crackdowns in the 2020 unrest now minimized the Capitol assault—portraying it as exaggerated, recasting parts of it as “legitimate political discourse” and calling for pardons or clemency for many of those prosecuted.

The contrast exposes a deeper question: whose violence is treated as an existential threat, and whose is granted the benefit of the doubt?

When Minneapolis protesters burned the Third Precinct police station in 2020, some, including President Trump and Senator Tom Cotton, branded it “domestic terrorism”. When January 6 rioters smashed Capitol windows in 2021, assaulted police, and hunted lawmakers, Trump called the participants “very special” and “patriots”, while media allies like Tucker Carlson dismissed them as “tourists”. The selective rhetoric highlights uneven standards for condemning unrest.

The principle — that political violence undermines democratic legitimacy and cannot be tolerated — should be absolute. But watch how it bends and twists depending on whose violence we’re discussing. The same act becomes noble resistance or unconscionable terrorism based solely on whether we agree with the cause.

And here’s what makes this so corrosive: both sides do it. Progressives who condemned January 6 as an insurrection found ways to justify property destruction during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. Conservatives who defended January 6th as legitimate protest had demanded harsh crackdowns on BLM demonstrations. The principle evaporates the moment it becomes inconvenient.

If you condemned one but excused the other, what principle were you actually following? Because it wasn’t opposition to political violence. It was opposition to the other team’s political violence.

The Conspiracy Gradient

In 2016, a conspiracy theory emerged claiming Democratic officials ran a child sex trafficking ring from a pizza restaurant basement. Pizzagate, they called it. No evidence. No basement, even. Yet the theory spread wildly, culminating in a man showing up with an AR-15 to “rescue” children who didn’t exist. We rightly dismissed this as deranged conspiracy thinking, dangerous misinformation that put real people at risk.

Then came the Epstein case. Not a conspiracy theory, but documented fact: a wealthy financier ran a sex trafficking operation involving minors. Flight logs. Witness testimony. Photos of powerful people on his island. Emails released (highly redacted) and slowly dripped out after much debate. No criminal convictions. No guilty verdicts. No push for justice for the victims. Evidence that would normally trigger the kind of moral outrage we reserve for the most heinous crimes.

Similarly, in the UK, parliamentary debates and media coverage rightly focused significant concern on grooming gangs of predominantly South Asian men, as highlighted in speeches citing racial targeting of victims and reports that documented local areas where certain ethnic groups were over-represented. Only passing mention was made to the fact that most child sex offenders nationally in the UK are white per 2020 Home Office data.

And yet ... where’s the outrage about the Epstein scandal? In North America or the United Kingdom? Where are the conservative pundits and influencers who built entire political movements on “protecting children”? Where are the conspiracy theorists who saw pedophile rings operating out of pizza parlors? Where are the righteous parliamentarians who spoke so passionately about the scourge of Asian grooming gangs? When actual, documented evidence emerges of the powerful exploiting the most vulnerable, when the conspiracy turns out to be real, the fury dissipates into awkward silence. With little consequence for the vilest of perpetrators.

The question isn’t whether these cases are equivalent; clearly not. One was fabricated, one was real. The question is why imagined abuse generated almost as much sustained fury and reaction as real extensive and documented abuse? Perhaps because Pizzagate targeted political enemies, while Epstein’s client list crosses party lines, implicating people on both sides of our tribal divide. When the truth becomes inconvenient, when it threatens our allies instead of just our opponents, suddenly we discover nuance. Suddenly we need more evidence. Suddenly we remember due process and presumption of innocence — legal principles we abandoned entirely when the accused were on the other team.

This is what happens when principles become tactical rather than foundational. We wield them as weapons against our enemies and holster them when they might wound our friends.

The Corruption We Choose to See

In 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accepted a free vacation on the Aga Khan’s private island. The Ethics Commissioner found he violated conflict of interest rules. Political opponents cried corruption. Calls for resignation echoed through Parliament and across media. The principle seemed clear: public officials shouldn’t accept gifts or benefits that could influence their decisions or create the appearance of impropriety.

Around the same time, Donald Trump maintained ownership of a global business empire while serving as President. Foreign governments booked entire floors of his hotels. His businesses received trademarks from China while he negotiated trade deals. His family members conducted business while holding White House positions. Fast forward to today: crypto ventures, NFTs, branded biblical branded merchandise sold while campaigning and governing. The scale dwarfs Trudeau’s island vacation by orders of magnitude.

For Trump’s critics, this was obviously corrupt, clearly disqualifying. For his supporters: smart business, fake news, witch hunt. Nothing to see here.

A good friend of mine embodied this divide: she vehemently defended Trudeau’s actions while denouncing Trump’s. She doesn’t see the inconsistency. That was the moment that convinced me that we have a problem of partisanship that triumphs over principles.

The only plausible difference is degree. But isn’t that splitting hairs? One cannot be half-pregnant; can one be half-corrupt? Or is it that the corruption we condemn depends entirely on who’s corrupt? That we don’t actually oppose corruption; we simply object to the other side’s corruption.

Democracy as Enlightened Self-Interest

I once had a high school history teacher who quoted Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all the others that have been tried”. But he didn’t stop there. He explained that democracy doesn’t exist because humanity achieved some enlightened state of moral consciousness. Democracy exists because it’s the best system we’ve found for managing human greed, selfishness and thirst for power. Done properly, it is a sustainable system. I didn’t understand then but over time I came to agree with this perspective.

Think about the mechanics:

• Democracy gives everyone a voice, which reduces the incentive for violent overthrow.

• It distributes power, preventing any single faction from complete domination.

• It requires compromise, creating investment in the system’s survival.

• It offers peaceful transitions, providing outlets for change without revolution.

• It limits the inequality, so no one feels so hard done by that they need to overthrow the system.

To be clear, I am not arguing that our current version of democracy is what my history teacher had in mind.

Equally, I don’t see proper democracy as altruism. I characterize it as enlightened self-interest. A system that attempts to balance everyone’s rights, provides access to the key ingredients to a good life, maintains some semblance of equality. This isn’t misguided idealism. It’s the political equivalent of a balanced investment portfolio – designed to weather all kinds of conditions. It insulates society from internal shocks because no group is sufficiently denied to foment rage and rebellion.

But — and this is crucial —this only works if we actually believe in the principles that make democracy function. Principles like equal application of law. Like free speech even for those we despise. Like accepting election results even when we lose. Like holding our own side accountable when they violate democratic norms.

The moment we start treating these as negotiable, as principles we only apply to our opponents, democracy stops being a stable system of mutual self-interest. It becomes just another arena for tribal warfare, where the only principle that matters is winning, at any cost.

The Davos Admission

In his 2026 Davos speech, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said something politely devastating. He argued that the “rules-based international order” is a “partially false, convenient illusion”.

Read that again. A Western leader stood before global elites and admitted that the principles we claim to uphold — human rights, rule of law, democratic values, self-determination — are selectively applied depending on strategic interests. We have all known this, of course. We support Saudi Arabia (autocratic, human rights abuser) while condemning Iran (autocratic, human rights abuser). We champion self-determination in Ukraine but not in Palestine. We demand free speech for our allies and unabashedly silence our critics.

But we rarely admit it so plainly. We maintain the fiction that our foreign policy is guided by principles, not economic interests. We tell ourselves comfortable stories about standing for democracy and human rights while forming alliances with dictatorships and enabling atrocities when it serves our strategic and economic goals.

Carney’s admission, however refreshingly honest, raises a deeper question. If even our leaders acknowledge the hypocrisy, what happens to the democratic project itself? Can a system based on principles survive when we publicly admit the principles are just convenient fictions we deploy when useful and ignore when costly?

The answer matters because this same dynamic — principles as convenient tools rather than actual values and guides — has metastasized from international relations into our domestic politics. We are starting to see through the hypocrisy abroad, but we have been slower to recognize it at home, slower to see how we ourselves treat principles as weapons rather than standards.

Where Are the Protectors?

Here’s where the hypocrisy becomes almost unbearable. For decades, conservative movements built their political power on “protecting children”. They fought sex education in schools, claiming it exposed children to inappropriate content. They banned books that mentioned LGBTQ themes, arguing they sexualized children. They restricted bathroom access, warning of predators. They built entire legislative agendas around the idea that children needed protection from sexual content and exploitation.

Then the Epstein files emerged. Actual documented child exploitation. Wealthy and powerful men trafficking teenage girls. Evidence. Names. And the response from many of these same “protect the children” movements? Relative silence. No massive protests. No emergency legislation. No calls for criminal investigations into everyone who flew on Epstein’s planes or visited his island. Megyn Kelly, an ardent poster child for the anti-woke movement, said: “Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile. He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls... He wasn’t into like 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young, like teen types... that would look legal to a passerby.”

Semantics. Unbelievable semantics.

Why these contortions? Because Epstein’s client list crosses political lines. Because some of those implicated might be politically aligned. Because it turns out “protecting children” was never actually the principle — it was a weapon deployed against specific political and cultural opponents. When actual child exploitation emerged, involving people across the political spectrum, people in positions of power and influence, the principle evaporated.

This isn’t unique to conservatives. It’s everywhere, permeating every political tribe.

Progressives champion “believe women” philosophy until the accused is politically aligned, then suddenly demand extensive corroboration and due process.

Libertarians decry government overreach until it targets groups they dislike, then applaud state power.

Law-and-order conservatives back police and prosecutions until investigations turn toward their own leaders, then cry political persecution.

We don’t have principles. We have partisans. And we will defend virtually anything our team does while condemning identical actions by opponents. The principle is just the jersey we wear while playing for our side.

***

In Part 2 (coming on March 5th), we’ll explore how these small compromises accumulate into civilizational decay—the boiling frog syndrome. We’ll examine why institutional trust is collapsing, and most importantly, what each of us can do at the individual level to reclaim principle from partisanship. The path forward isn’t just about changing society; it’s about first changing ourselves.

A closing note

The Good Human Practice is a biweekly reflection on living with purpose, not just profit, in an increasingly noisy and fractured world.

This isn’t self-help. It’s slow, meaningful practice.

If this essay stayed with you, sit with it. Notice what it surfaced. Return to it when you need to.

If you’re interested in simple reflection tools to support this kind of inner work, you’ll find them here.

For leadership and decision-making work under uncertainty, I write a separate publication called The Uncertainty E.D.G.E.™.

A note to the reader

This isn’t a self-help guide, a manifesto, or a call to action.

The Good Human Practice exists as a quiet space for reflection — a pause to consider what it means to live with integrity and attention in a world that often feels noisy and fractured.

Each edition offers a single idea and an invitation to notice something differently. Not to fix you, but to help you see more clearly.

Picture yourself driving on a busy road.

A car suddenly cuts in front of you, forcing you to brake hard. Your heart rate spikes. Adrenaline surges. Before you’ve had time to think, irritation flares. Then perhaps anger, perhaps contempt.

In that moment, something small but important is happening.

You are not deciding whether to be polite or rude. You are deciding, almost instantly, how you will interpret another human being.

Are they careless? Entitled? Aggressive?

Or hurried? Distracted? Afraid?

Most of the time, this judgment happens before we’re even aware we’ve made it. And once made, it shapes everything that follows — our tone, our posture, our response, and often our memory of the event itself.

This is where grace enters the picture.

Grace - A Timeless Quality

Grace is one of those words we think we understand until we try to define it. We recognize integrity when we see it. Fairness has principles. Generosity can be measured. But grace? Grace is harder to pin down.

It exists in the space between expectation and reality.

Between justice and mercy.

Between what someone deserves and what they may need.

Grace is not softness.
And it is not passivity.

It is a way of seeing.

One reason grace feels elusive today is that our culture trains us toward speed and certainty. We are encouraged to assess quickly, categorize efficiently, and respond decisively. In such an environment, pausing to consider context can feel indulgent — even irresponsible.

And yet, without that pause, something essential erodes.

Consider a different scene.

A colleague dismisses your idea sharply in a meeting. The words land harder than necessary. The instinctive interpretation is simple: the colleague is rude, impatient, arrogant.

But what if that interpretation is incomplete?

Many of our most difficult behaviours are not signs of moral failure, but examples of genuine strengths pushed beyond their limits. This is an idea worth exploring further.

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Strengths Overused Become Weakness

The colleague who cuts others off may be driven by decisiveness pushed too far. The person who obsesses over details may be expressing care without balance. The partner who withdraws during conflict may be leaning heavily on independence or self-control at the wrong moment.

This doesn’t excuse harm.
But it complicates judgment.

Rarely does a content, secure person lash out without cause.

Behind sharpness often lies anxiety.

Behind rigidity, fear.

Behind withdrawal, feeling overwhelmed.

Grace begins when we allow for this complexity — when we resist the temptation to define a person by their most difficult moment.

A few years ago, I was standing in line at a grocery store. The line was moving slowly, and frustration was building. A woman ahead of me grew increasingly agitated. When she reached the cashier, she released her irritation in a stream of sharp words.

From further back, it looked like impatience meeting incompetence.

But when I stepped forward, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: the cashier’s hands were severely arthritic. Each movement was careful and painful. What appeared to be inefficiency was, in fact, endurance.

The angry customer lacked a single crucial piece of information. And that absence shaped her entire response.

This is one of the quiet truths at the heart of grace: we almost never have the full picture.

Philo of Alexandria captured this long ago: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Grace begins with the humility to accept how little we know.

This is where the paradox emerges.

We often associate strength with composure, certainty, and control. Weakness, by contrast, is something to be hidden, corrected, or overcome.

Grace disrupts that distinction.

True strength is not found in never showing weakness, but in recognizing vulnerability — both our own and others’. It requires the confidence to hold complexity without rushing to judgment. The restraint to respond with care even when defensiveness would be easier.

Grace does not deny accountability.
It widens the frame within which accountability lives.

To act with grace is to say: I will address what happened, but I will not reduce you to it.

In a culture shaped by outrage and public shaming, this posture can feel countercultural. We are encouraged to sort quickly — ally or enemy, right or wrong, worthy or disposable.

Grace resists that impulse.

Not because it ignores harm, but because it preserves the possibility of growth.

The cost of gracelessness is subtle but cumulative.

Relationships become brittle. Small misunderstandings harden into lasting resentments. Communities, online and in real life, fragment over disagreements that might otherwise have become opportunities for deeper understanding.

Over time, we learn to protect ourselves through distance rather than care.

Grace offers an alternative — not by avoiding conflict, but by changing how we hold it.

It asks different questions.

Not only: What happened?
But also: What might be driving this?

Not only: How do I protect myself?
But also: How do I remain human here?

These questions are not easy. They demand patience, emotional maturity, and the willingness to tolerate ambiguity. They ask us to slow down when the world rewards speed.

Grace is not a technique to be mastered.
It is a disposition that develops over time.

It grows through repeated moments of choosing curiosity over contempt, humility over certainty, care over performance. And, as I can firmly and ruefully attest, the key here is progress not perfection. Lapses are, unfortunately, part of the journey. But we keep trying.

Most of us can recall times when we were met with understanding rather than judgment — when someone allowed us to be more than our worst moment. Those encounters stay with us. They shape how we see ourselves, and how we learn to see others.

Grace does not change the world overnight.
It does not announce itself.

But it changes the texture of our lives. It softens what might otherwise harden. It keeps open doors that could easily close.

In a time when speed, certainty, and condemnation are rewarded, grace may appear inefficient.

But it is not weak.

It is demanding.
It requires restraint where reaction is easier.
Perspective where judgment is faster.

And perhaps most importantly, it asks us to accept that strength and weakness are often intertwined — in others, and in ourselves.

Grace lives in that tension.

And learning to remain there, without fleeing to simplifications, may be one of the quietest and most important forms of strength we have.

A closing note

The Good Human Practice is a biweekly reflection on living with purpose, not just profit, in an increasingly noisy and fractured world.

This isn’t self-help. It’s slow, meaningful practice.

If this essay stayed with you, sit with it. Notice what it surfaced. Return to it when you need to.

If you’re interested in simple reflection tools to support this kind of inner work, you’ll find them here.

For leadership and decision-making work under uncertainty, I write a separate publication called The Uncertainty E.D.G.E.™.

A note to the reader

This isn’t a self-help guide, a productivity hack, or a set of steps to follow.

The Good Human Practice exists as a quiet space for reflection — a pause to consider what it means to live with purpose, not just profit, in a world that often feels noisy and fractured.

Each edition offers a single idea and an invitation to notice something differently. Not to fix you, but to help you see yourself — and others — more clearly.

There are no answers here. Only questions worth sitting with.

We live in an environment that places unprecedented demands on human attention. Consider what we’re up against:

• Our senses take in about 11 million bits of data every single second; yet our conscious minds can only process about 120 bits per second

• Humans produce the equivalent of 17 million terabytes of data in just one hour. We created more information in 2024 than was produced in all human history up to the year 2003 — a surge fuelled by the internet, AI, and the exponential rise of digital data

• In 2004, people averaged 2.5 minutes on a single screen before switching; by 2012, this dropped to 75 seconds, and today it’s just 47 seconds.

We are living in an era where focusing for even a single minute has become a challenge

At the same time, many of the systems that mediate our lives — social media, news platforms, recommendation engines — are explicitly designed to maximize engagement by amplifying strong emotional responses like fear, anger, and outrage. Their business models depend on advertising revenues, which means their algorithms prioritize content that elicits the strongest reactions.

None of this is accidental. It is the landscape in which we are trying to live, decide, and be good humans.

In this kind of world, it’s reasonable to ask whether goodness even stands a chance.

When we are constantly pulled toward reaction, certainty, and outrage, how can anyone be expected to act with patience, restraint, or care? When the loudest voices are rewarded and the fastest reactions are amplified, doesn’t being a good human begin to feel like swimming upstream?

The uncomfortable truth is that much of the time, it does.

That isn’t an excuse.

It’s merely an observation.

And it points to something deeper about what it means to be a good human.

Being A Good Human Means Striving, Even Against the Odds

Being a good human has never been about choosing what’s easiest. It has always involved striving — acting with care even when the easier option is to simply give in, to go with the flow.

Albert Camus captured this in his retelling of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, appropriately titled The Myth of Sisyphus. Condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again, Sisyphus is often seen as a symbol of futility. That man can’t prevail against the gods or the powers that be. Camus saw something else: the dignity of persistence. The decision to continue, even when the task feels endless and hopeless. This isn’t a bug of humanity but a feature — our will to exist, our drive to persist, to persevere, to overcome.

Human progress has always followed this pattern. Millions died before antibiotics existed. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but most scientists doubted it could ever be made clinically useful. A small team persisted anyway — and in so doing, changed the course of history.

Thomas Edison tried thousands of different filaments before finding tungsten, the one that would meet the necessary conditions for the light bulb. As he observed, “genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration.”

Persistence doesn’t guarantee success. But without it, success is impossible.

So what does this mean for those who want to live well — and be good — in an age that seems to reward the opposite?

It means accepting that this, too, is a kind of Sisyphean task.

Not one we can necessarily complete.

But one we can choose NOT to abandon.

To Thine Own Self Be True

Ancient traditions understood this. Stoic philosophers, Taoists, Hindu sages, and others lived through periods of upheaval and uncertainty of their own. They arrived at a sober conclusion: we cannot control the world, but we can take responsibility for ourselves, take control of our actions.

Epictetus, the Roman slave turned Stoic philosopher, put it bluntly: “Blow your own nose.” Do your part. Don’t wait for someone else to do it for you.

Others said it differently:

• “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” (Tolstoy)

• “It has often been said that a reformation should begin with each man reforming himself.” (Kierkegaard)

• “Be the change you want to see in the world.” (Gandhi)

These ideas are easy to quote but hard to put into practice — especially now.

The attention economy doesn’t just distract us. It shapes us. It nudges us toward reactivity, certainty, and moral outrage — all of which feel satisfying in the moment but proves corrosive over time.

But goodness has never been about winning the moment.

It has always been about choosing how we show up — repeatedly — even when no one is watching.

This isn’t a call to disengage from the world or to retreat from complexity. And it isn’t a prescription for what you should believe.

It’s an invitation to notice where your attention goes, and what it brings out in you.

For the next few days, simply pay attention to your attention.

Notice what draws you in.

Notice what agitates you.

Notice when you feel pulled to react rather than reflect.

You don’t need to change anything yet.

Just notice.

In a world designed to scatter our attention, that alone is a meaningful act.

A closing note

The Good Human Practice is a biweekly reflection on living with purpose, not just profit, in an increasingly noisy and fractured world.

This isn’t self-help. It’s slow, meaningful practice.

If this essay stayed with you, sit with it. Notice what it surfaced. Return to it when you need to. If it feels worth passing along, you can do that too.

For leadership and decision-making work under uncertainty, I write a separate publication called The Uncertainty E.D.G.E.™.

The Good Human Practice exists as a quiet space for reflection — a pause to consider what it means to live with purpose, not just profit, in a world that often feels fractured.

Each edition offers a single idea and an invitation to notice something differently. Not to fix you, but to help you see yourself — and others — more clearly.

There are no answers here. Only questions worth sitting with.

Imagine if we treated mathematics the way we treat goodness.

Imagine if we never taught children addition or subtraction, never showed them how to solve equations, never guided them through the principles of geometry — but still expected them to somehow figure it all out on their own.

Imagine if people were expected to learn to drive by osmosis, by reading about it in dusty textbooks, and not by watching others drive or getting behind the wheel themselves. Trying it out, making mistakes, being corrected and shown the right way.

It would be absurd.

Yet this is exactly how we approach the far more complex challenge of being good.

We assume that goodness is innate. That ethical behavior will simply emerge. That being a positive force in the world requires no instruction, no modeling, no practice.

This assumption — that we are born knowing how to be good — may be one of the most damaging myths of our time.

Let me illustrate with two train rides.

The first happens every day in our cities. A crowded subway car. An elderly person stands, swaying with each lurch of the train. Young people sit beneath signs that explicitly state these seats should be given to the elderly or infirm. No one looks up. No one moves.

Not out of cruelty — but out of habit.

When my wife was visibly pregnant with our daughter in the UK, she had the curious effect of putting everyone on the train instantly to sleep. People would “doze off” the moment she boarded, so they wouldn’t have to offer their seat.

The second happened during a visit to Japan with my wife and our six-year-old daughter. A suburban commuter train, early in the morning. A group of schoolgirls, around eight years old, sat chatting in their uniforms. An elderly couple boarded.

Immediately — without prompting — all the girls stood and insisted the couple take their seats. When the couple politely declined, saying they were only riding a few stops, the girls persisted. They refused to take no for an answer and the couple finally accepted.

Same situation. Radically different outcome.

Why?

I later learned that those Japanese schoolgirls hadn’t simply been told they should give up their seats. They had practiced it. In school, they role-played these exact scenarios. Good behavior wasn’t just explained — it was taught, rehearsed, and modeled.

Goodness, in other words, wasn’t assumed. It was cultivated.

When No One Teaches

The difference shows up elsewhere too.

When I was growing up, eating out at a restaurant came with clear expectations. We sat in our seats. We used indoor voices. We minded our manners. The message — mostly unspoken — was simple. Public spaces have rules, and being part of society means learning to respect these rules.

Fast-forward to February 2023. A family restaurant in Tinton Falls, New Jersey — Nettie’s House of Spaghetti — announced they would no longer serve children under ten. Their explanation was painful but unmistakable. Children were running through the restaurant, creating safety risks for themselves and for servers carrying hot plates. Parents, the owners said, seemed disengaged.

This isn’t a judgment about parenting styles or cultural norms. Children have always been children.

The question is simpler — and more uncomfortable.

If no one teaches the basic rules of shared life, how will the next generation learn?

And what happens when those lessons are never learned?

A child who never learns to regulate their behavior in a restaurant at seven may seem like a minor issue. But what happens at seventeen? Or twenty-seven? When the same lack of awareness shows up in workplaces, communities, and relationships?

Previous generations understood something we seem to have forgotten: goodness doesn’t sustain itself.

They built systems — imperfect ones — to support it. Families, schools, religious institutions, and communities all played a role in making values visible, practised, and reinforced.

Many of those structures have eroded. And while their decline has freed us from certain constraints — often rightly — it has also left a vacuum.

We have gained autonomy.
But we have lost structure.

We have gained independence.
But we have lost instruction.

The costs show up everywhere: rising anxiety, declining trust, social fragmentation, and a growing sense that something essential is missing.

Not information.
Not opportunity.
But orientation.

What these stories raise, for me, is a simple but uncomfortable idea: goodness is not automatic. It is learned.

Not through lectures.
Not through slogans.
But through example, practice, and attention.

Think again about those schoolgirls on the train. They didn’t act out of abstract moral reasoning. They acted out of habit — a habit shaped by what they had seen, practised, and absorbed.

Goodness, like any skill, grows where it is made visible and lived.

This isn’t a call to fix society.
And it isn’t a manifesto.

It’s an invitation to notice where goodness is being modeled — and where it isn’t. To reflect on what we absorbed growing up. And to consider, quietly, what we might choose to model now.

For the next few days, simply pay attention.

Notice moments when you’re unsure what the right action is.
Notice small opportunities for kindness or restraint.
Notice when you act automatically — and when you hesitate.

You don’t need to correct anything.
Just notice.

That, too, is a practice.

In future editions, I’ll explore different facets of this question — through stories, research, and reflection — not to prescribe answers, but to make what often goes unspoken a little more visible.

The goal isn’t to become perfect.
It’s to become more conscious.

That’s where goodness usually begins.

A closing note

The Good Human Practice is a biweekly reflection on living with purpose, not just profit, in an increasingly noisy and fractured world.

This isn’t self-help. It’s slow, meaningful practice.

If this essay stayed with you, sit with it. Notice what it surfaced. Return to it when you need to. If it feels worth passing along, you can do that too.

For leadership and decision-making work under uncertainty, I write a separate publication called The Uncertainty E.D.G.E.™.

Subscribe now