“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.
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