You’ve seen the open letters. “Tax me more,” they say. Billionaires at Davos standing with hands over their hearts, pleading with governments to take more of their money. How noble.
Here’s what you won’t find: extra canceled checks at the US Treasury.
The federal government accepts voluntary donations and has done so for over a century. That means billionaires can pay more any time they want.
But virtually none of them does.
Economists have a name for this gap between words and deeds. They call it revealed preference. The idea is simple: what you actually do reveals what you actually want. Everything else is noise.
We already know this. Our grandmothers used to say, “Actions speak louder than words.” Which brings us to a vital lesson:
Pay more attention to what people do than what they say.
Wait, that’s the easy part. What’s harder is:
Pay more attention to what you do than what you say.
Doing Good
Most of Western ethics is about thinking and talking. Trolley problems. Categorical imperatives. We’re meant to sit in an armchair and reason our way to the right and the good, and somehow we fancy ourselves as moral by having correct moral opinions.
But nobody becomes a musician by having opinions about music. Nobody learns to defend himself by commenting on combat. You have to practice. Whether in music or martial arts, you stink at first, then you stink a little less, and a little less still until you get proficient.
Virtue works the same way.
It’s not a conclusion you reach after stacking premises. It’s what you do, over and over, until it becomes who you are.
Practice over Politics
Now, too many people have forgotten this. So, what happens when we forget? What happens when we fail to practice integrity? Nonviolence? Or compassion? Too many people turn to politics.
Yet politics is just war by other means. And war runs on the logic of domination: If the other side doesn’t vote right, think right, or act right, we’ll force them to when we win the next election. That’s the rationale, at least, and it’s messed up. Sure, ballots are better than bullets, but that’s about all democracy has going for it. Otherwise, we get a lot of activism.
Yet activism is empty. It’s just agitation and outsourcing. Some team has decided how everyone else should live, shipping your values off to some distant capital. The project is to force everyone else to obey so that we all live by the One True Way.
That’s projection, not practice.
The opposite of activism is virtue. And virtue requires insourcing—assuming personal responsibility and then collaboration. Start with the one person whose behavior you actually control, and do something other people can feel.
Now. One approach invites enemies. The other invites collaborators. You can tell which mindset you’re in by asking yourself a single question: Am I hellbent on changing others, or am I trying to be the change?
The World Needs Repair
The old rabbis had a word for the second path. Tikkun. It means repairing what’s broken. The point of tikkun isn’t to win or to dominate. Instead, we set about mending things—ourselves first, then the world around us—bit by bit in whom we help, what we do, and what we leave behind. Repair lies in the harmonization of difference.
The old rabbis taught that the cosmos was shattered into different shards. But each of us preserves a divine spark, and we are tasked with putting together the shards. The goal is not to create a perfect whole, but instead to bring diversity and unity into balance.
E pluribus unum. Ex uno plures.
From the many, one. Out of one, many.
Even if the old rabbis were just making myths, living a life of tikkun creates meaning and, hopefully, leaves the world better than we found it.
Making Waves
Here’s something we shouldn’t forget.
Our human default is mimicry. We copy each other unconsciously, whether we want to admit it or not. That means our habits are contagious. But then again, so are our excuses, our complaints, and our victim complexes. That means we have to stay sensitive—both to what we are mimicking in others, and what people might mimic in us.
The change you want to see isn’t something you argue people into. It’s something you become. Others will experience your being and becoming like ripples on the surface of a pond. When you practice virtue, those around you are more likely to practice virtue, too.
So, be the person worth copying. Create waves that others can feel. And be sure to copy the wise and virtuous.
Eventually, we’ll do it together.
Because the more we become the change we want to see, the better the world will get.
I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.
