Raising thugs vs. raising a society
I came across an Instagram post today from a man complaining about his "good" upbringing, and I got the sense he's really struggling with navigating a world that doesn't play by the same rules. Bad treatment, bad faith, all of it.
I get it, honestly. Holding yourself to high standards is hard precisely because it means holding others up to that same level while constantly being let down by people who don't meet it. So what's the alternative?
His answer took me by surprise: raise your kids on alternating days ā one day good manners, the next how to be a "thug," how to take things into their own hands. Repeat.
Part of me understands where this comes from. In our part of the world, that instinct isn't always irrational. But I have a real aversion to the idea of a person deliberately un-becoming their humanity.. turning "beastlike" to survive. Being a thug, treating people badly on principle, even as self-defense, that still reads to me as beastly.
It made me think about what this means for a society, not just an individual. And I landed on something from our own tradition: a strong believer is better than a weak believer, and that a society is like a body; when one limb aches, the whole body feels it in compassion.
That, to me, is the actual answer. I don't need to become the Hulk to survive a hard world. What we need instead is a society that thinks sanely. One that defends its weakest members collectively, rather than asking each person to individually harden into someone unrecognizable. No transformation into a thug-minded agent required. Just a shared, deliberate effort to build something where good prevails, where high moral standards hold, and where justice keeps surfacing because enough people refused to let it not.