“Be kind to people, but ruthless to systems” is one of those deceptively gentle aphorisms that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a hand grenade wrapped in a thank-you note.
What it insists upon, quite rightly, is a moral distinction that our age finds unbearably difficult to maintain. People are fallible, frightened, often doing the best they can with the intellectual furniture available to them. Systems, by contrast, are not frightened, not confused, and not deserving of sympathy. Systems are designed. They embody incentives, hierarchies, exclusions, and often cruelties, all carefully engineered and then defended with a priesthood of jargon.
To be kind to people is to recognize that most human beings are, in a sense, hostages: born into economic arrangements they didn’t design, bureaucracies they cannot meaningfully challenge, traditions they are punished for questioning. It is both vulgar and lazy to mistake the victim for the author of the crime.
But to be ruthless to systems - ah, there is the rub. That requires intellectual courage. It means refusing to sentimentalize institutions simply because they are old, powerful, or cloaked in moral language. It means interrogating isms like horrendous fascism, or better but still potnteitally authoritarian communism, or rape the Earth for profit Capitalism, or not so good and quite good versions of socialism without worshipping them, or scrutinizing both wonderful and horrible religion without indulging it, or deconstructing and examining the state without blindly saluting it. Ruthlessness here does not mean cruelty; it means clarity. It means following an argument to its end, even when that end threatens someone’s livelihood, prestige, or cherished illusion.
The quote is also a rebuke to two common forms of cowardice. The first is the conservative bully who attacks individuals because it’s easier than dismantling the machinery that produced the injustice - lord knowns we get plenty of those in our comments. The second is the liberal hand-wringer who preaches kindness so fervently that it becomes an alibi for never confronting power at all. Kindness without ruthlessness is merely politeness in the face of oppression.
In short, this maxim is an instruction manual for moral adulthood. Love people enough to understand their predicament. Hate bad systems enough to want them dismantled. And never, ever confuse being “nice” with being just.