In Monday’s MLK Day post, The Arc Doesn’t Bend Itself, I wrote this line: Justice is what you practice when you can’t control the outcome.
That’s still the point.
Because it’s easy to quote King—“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”—and accidentally turn it into a lullaby. Beautiful words, soft landing. A way to believe progress is inevitable, which means my job is mostly to wait.
But the last decade has made one thing hard to ignore: injustice can be both obvious and normal. It can be rationalized, codified, rewarded, and taught as “how the world works.” Which creates a particular kind of psychological trap—one that a lot of thoughtful, decent people fall into:
You see the scale of systemic injustice.
You feel overwhelmed by it.
You feel helpless to influence it.
And then you feel guilty (or ashamed) for not doing more.
That’s not just a feeling. It’s another system.
It’s a system that converts moral clarity into paralysis. It trains people to either perform outrage, retreat into cynicism, or numbly opt out. It tempts us to believe that if we can’t fix the big system, nothing we do matters.
And that’s where I think we miss something crucial.
Systems Within Systems
Yes, there are systemic injustices in geopolitical, economic, and social systems. They’re real. They have momentum. They affect lives at scale.
But “the system” is not a single thing hovering above us like a weather system.
It’s systems within systems. Nested. Layered. Interconnected.
The big systems are built out of smaller systems—workplaces, families, neighborhoods, congregations, friend groups, group chats, professional communities, client relationships, school boards, hiring policies, purchasing habits, social norms, quiet agreements about what we’ll tolerate and what we won’t.
And here’s the part that matters: you are already participating in several systems every single day.
Not someday. Not when you have more time, more money, more influence, or a bigger platform. Today.
Which means the question isn’t “Can I change the whole system?”
The question is: Which systems am I in… and what am I reinforcing when I show up the way I show up?
Seth Godin has been pressing on this idea for a long time, and in This Is Strategy, he names it plainly: if you can’t see the systems you’re operating in, you can’t make wise choices inside them. You can only react. You can only cope. You can only repeat what the system already rewards.
But when you can see the system, you gain options. You can decide what game you’re playing. You can decide what you’re willing to reward. You can decide what you refuse to normalize.
That’s not naïve optimism. That’s how systems actually change.
Big systems rarely shift because everyone finally agrees on what’s right.
They shift when enough smaller systems change what becomes normal.
They shift when local norms change. When incentives change. When people start expecting different behavior, and start paying attention to different signals.
That’s the arc bending.
Not magically. Not automatically. Through practice. Through repetition. Through ripple effects that compound.
Here’s the honest tension I want to sit in with you:
The big system might be too big for you and I to control.
But you and I are not powerless.
You and I are not irrelevant.
And you and I are not off the hook.
Because you and I are participating in smaller systems every day that either reinforce injustice or resist it.
And most of the time, those smaller systems don’t change because someone makes a speech.
They change because someone quietly and consistently decides to practice justice where they actually have agency.
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In the rest of this post, I’m going to do two things:
Give you a simple map of five leverage points—places ordinary people bend systems without needing authority, permission, or a platform.
Offer a practical one-week “justice loop” you can run immediately—small daily moves that create feedback loops and real ripple effects.
Because if we don’t move from awareness to practice, the overwhelm system wins. It keeps us stuck in a loop of seeingand feeling without doing.
And I don’t think King meant for us to do that.
If you want the arc to bend, stop asking what “the system” should do—and start paying attention to the systems you’re already shaping with your attention, your language, your money, your access, and your norms.