We tend to think of meritocracy as a system that has a lot of tests — the more rigorously a society filters people, by tests, applications, credentials, fellowships, the more meritocratic it is. But this gets the purpose of meritocracy backwards. The point of meritocracy is not to determine who deserves the largest prizes, but who is best able to handle the most important responsibilities.

A society has a finite supply of extraordinary talent — people with intelligence, energy, conscientiousness, charisma, creativity, and judgment under fire. At the same time, it has a large number of extremely consequential decisions to make. The fundamental moral premise of meritocracy is that a society will produce better outcomes for everyone if those weighty positions can be filled with the most talented people.

If talent is scarce, so is time — human careers, like human lives, are finite. If talented man-years are the scarce resource, then a meritocracy should be a desperate race to detect exceptional ability as early as it can reliably be identified, invest heavily in developing it, and then put it to work as quickly as possible.

Singapore’s system of elite scholarships, inaugurated in 1971 under Lee Kuan Yew, is an example of this intuition. It did not merely award scholarships to top test-takers. The state identified exceptionally promising young people, paid to educate them at the world's best universities, brought them into government, and deliberately accelerated their careers, with the expectation that they could be appointed to general or permanent secretary rank in their 30s. The underlying wager was that as a small country, the working lives of these talented people represented a scarce national resource, and the state should not patiently wait for them to acquire decades of seniority before allowing them to matter.

This is a strange contrast with our contemporary system of so-called meritocracy. We have increasingly elaborate and expensive methods of identifying and rewarding talent— a gauntlet of admissions, credentials, fellowships, and professional experiences that grows ever longer. Even where it is not frankly corrupt, this system increasingly depends on accumulating years of experience within insular elite institutions. And even after entering the professional world, this pathway leads at best to well-paid technical positions without consequential authority, at worst in endless postdocs sequestered from social impact entirely.

It is difficult today to imagine college presidents appointed in their 40s, as they were in the 1960s, or the Air Force having a 28-year-old brigadier general, as it had in WWII. Einstein, who discovered special relativity at 26, or Watson, who discovered the molecular structure of DNA at 25, would today be junior grad students. Of course, age and experience have value too, and it’s not a bad thing for a field to have elder statesmen. The problem is that a generation ago, giving a highly capable 35-year-old command of a division or a university was unusual but perfectly conceivable, while today it sounds almost absurd.

Yes, there are worse things in the world than to become a highly compensated technical employee. But if the only reason to identify unusually talented people is to determine who gets the biggest salaries, if their talent is not identified early and put to social use, then the moral argument for meritocracy becomes increasingly hollow. If all we’re doing is rewarding people for desirable traits, then we might as well identify unusually tall people and hand them cash prizes.

A society that believes talent is scarce should be intensely concerned about wasting it. It should attempt to identify it before competitors do, spend heavily on its development, and give it opportunities to demonstrate itself in the field. And then it should be willing to rapidly increase their responsibilities if they succeed and remove them promptly if they fail. Above all, it should care deeply about maximizing the amount of time during which its best people are doing important things.

The argument for meritocracy is not that talented people deserve to be rich. It is that everyone else benefits when talented people are put to work. We have built an elaborate machinery to identify merit, certify it, rank it, and accumulate bureaucratically legible signals of it. But having admired, cherished, and showered merit with prizes, we have not learned to put it to use. Letting merit sit idle is not meritocracy.

But most striking of all is the fact that the best way these wealthy parents could think of to advance their children was to pay just under a million dollars apiece for the privilege of paying tuition at the likes of USC. Rather than illustrating the power of shadowy webs of money and privilege, this scandal illuminated the impotence of money, the inability of these products of privilege to secure their children’s future through any means other than propitiating middle-tier educational institutions.

The professional-managerial class (PMC) comprises highly educated professionals who work in fields like law, medicine, finance, and corporate management. Unlike traditional elites who can pass down family businesses, land, or powerful social networks, the PMC's only transferable asset is often their earning potential–which must be painstakingly re-earned by their children through similarly grueling educational and professional hurdles. A lawyer cannot simply place his child in a prestigious law firm; the child must go to law school, pass the bar, and climb the corporate hierarchy. A doctor cannot train his child as an apprentice and hand over a medical practice; however much knowledge the child might pick up around the office, he must endure the rituals of medical school, residency, and board certification. Even managing directors at banks cannot secure corner offices for their children without those children first proving themselves through internships, entry-level positions, and years of corporate ladder-climbing.

The means of class reproduction

Like giant pandas, the PMC cannot reproduce without assistance. They cannot transfer assets, knowledge, and networks to their children; their path to reproducing their class status is mediated through an increasingly expensive and competitive educational gauntlet.

The institutions that gatekeep professional success are well aware of this dependency and have adapted accordingly. Schools and training programs have grown more costly and selective, exploiting the PMC's lack of alternatives. Elite private schools charge astronomical tuitions, not just for the quality of education but for the intangible promise of keeping children on the right track. Colleges have cultivated a culture of admissions anxiety, pushing parents to invest in test prep, extracurricular achievements, and strategic philanthropy. Meanwhile, professional training has become more prolonged and arduous: law firm associates work longer hours than their predecessors, medical residencies stretch further into adulthood, and finance careers demand grueling apprenticeships before any real upward mobility. Lengthened training is nothing but a wage cut by other means, with the gains going to incumbent institutions – teaching hospitals, biglaw partners, tenured academics.

There is an absurdity to the results – parents queueing up for private kindergartens so their children may fingerpaint in prestigious company, high school kids earnestly talking up the fashionable nonprofit they founded with parental funding, eight year olds diligently practicing dressage so that they may study at the best institutions. But zoom out and the picture is a grim one. The professional-managerial class has no reliable means of reproducing itself without being taxed by these institutions, and however high the toll, they must pay. Unlike traditional elites, who could hand down tangible assets or direct pathways to success, the PMC relies on a tenuous bargain with the educational and professional gatekeepers who hold their children's futures hostage. This is not merely a story of cost disease or competitive meritocracy – it is a structural flaw in the PMC's ability to sustain itself across generations. Their dependence on external institutions means that any surplus they earn through their high-paying jobs is gradually siphoned off by the very systems they rely on to maintain their class position.

The result is a class that, despite its high incomes and social prestige, is fundamentally unsustainable. Without the ability to directly pass down their status, and with institutions continuously raising the price of admission, the professional-managerial class finds itself locked in a cycle where each generation must start from scratch – until, inevitably, the system consumes more than the class can produce.1

One might argue that this system is a positive development – that wealth should not buy privilege and that a meritocracy ensures the most capable rise to the top. But the current arrangement does not reflect a functional meritocracy. A true meritocracy, like a wartime military or a rapidly expanding industry, seeks to identify and deploy talent quickly and efficiently. Our current system does the opposite – it draws out the process, layering on more obstacles and costs, not to identify talent but to extract wealth while certifying it. The gatekeeping institutions have no incentive to streamline the path to success; their interest lies in extending it, ensuring that both parents and children continue to pay into the system for as long as possible. Rather than elevate talented but less privileged students, it subjects them to the same protracted, expensive climb.

Don’t end the generation with nothing2

What, then, can be done? There are two potential responses. The first is to recognize that the most extractive forms of this parasitism occur in well-established, prestigious professions. Those who entered corporate law, hedge funds, or tech decades ago often complain that the industry isn’t what it was in the old days – before these fields became enshrined as "safe" paths to affluence. The safest-seeming ladders become the most overcrowded, and the longer a profession has been viewed as prestigious, the more entrenched and extractive its gatekeepers become. Therefore, the path to true professional success may lie not in competing harder for the increasingly unappealing rewards of established paths, but in seeking out the undervalued, unglamorous fields where merit still holds sway – the places not yet bled dry by institutional parasitism.

The second, more radical approach is to rethink what success looks like altogether. The culture has viewed professional careers – whether in law, medicine, finance, academia, or industry – as the pinnacle of sober aspiration: secure, prestigious, and rich in social capital. These are the ones with TV shows about their professional lives, the ones about whom teachers say “if you study really hard, one day you might become…” But the PMC is, at its core, merely well-paid labor, and is structurally unable to break free from its institutional dependence. Real, enduring success, then, comes from moving beyond labor into ownership of capital3. The next step up the ladder isn’t more credentials or higher salaries, it’s not even a brokerage account bulging with passive index funds. It’s the accumulation and stewardship of owned, actively managed capital and skills within families and communities. It means building businesses, investing in talent, and creating networks – forms of wealth that children can learn to manage directly, without the blessing of gatekeeping institutions4.

Ultimately, the professional-managerial class must confront an uncomfortable truth: lacking capital of their own, they are at the mercy of the very institutions they rely on to maintain their status. The choice is stark – continue feeding a system that consumes, generation after generation, everything they produce, or look beyond it and start building something of their own. There is nothing wrong with being a professional, but it is not the end of the road. The future does not belong to the professionals, but to the children of those who see it as a stop on the way to something greater – true capital, true autonomy, and the ability to pass on value and skills to future generations.

Our bodies - to every hair and bit of skin - are received by us from our parents, and we must not presume to injure or wound them. This is the beginning of filial piety.

On Filiality

Today, secularism is dominant in the public square. But despite this, many of our most cherished philosophical ideas are still throwbacks to belief in souls.

Consider John Rawls’s famous “veil of ignorance” thought experiment. To think about how a fair society should be arranged, he said, put yourself in the position of someone about to be sorted randomly into a society. Without knowing your sex, age, race, or nationality, how would you want the society to be set up? Such an observer, he suggests, would naturally be risk-averse and want a society in which even the worst-off had equal liberties and which ensured the greatest benefits to the least-advantaged, in case they were “sorted” into the lowest-status roles.

Or consider the intuition of the “genetic lottery.” Since nobody chooses their own genes, it’s as though we were randomly assigned into bodies that happened to have varying genetic predispositions. Some may be predisposed to athleticism, others to genius, yet others to heritable diseases, all based on luck.

Both of these arguments crucially depend on the intuition that we have souls. Our minds exist outside our bodies, which are themselves merely like suits of clothes to which we are randomly assigned. And further, these souls just happen to exist, outside of time, outside of human agency. We may call ourselves scientific materialists, we may say that we no longer believe in an afterlife. But we’re still basing our philosophy on a mental image of cherubic souls lined up waiting to be randomly sorted into bodies - a superstition beyond the wildest claims of many actual religions.

An old philosophy can be as hard to quit as any other habit. Rawls considered himself an atheist, but he was formed in a Christian society and subconsciously expected that his readers would share his essentially religious framing. But if we consider ourselves scientific materialists, we need an account of personhood that’s truly built from a materialist foundation.

Let’s look at some raw facts. Our genes were not randomly assigned to us. We have the genes we have because billions of years of evolution and natural selection have sculpted life into numerous species, of which humanity is one. Our minds were not preternaturally created and hanging out in line before they were assigned to our body; our brains shaped by our genes along with our bodies, and neither took shape until the contingent chain of events leading to our birth. Or as Neal Stephenson flippantly put it in Cryptonomicon:

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

The lottery framework assumes that being an average human is simply what the universe owes us. It naturally encourages us to envy the “winners” and despise the merely average “losers.” But a truly materialist viewpoint reminds us what a gift it is to be merely human, how many millions of generations of trial and error, triumph and death, it took to culminate in this talking, walking, thinking, singing primate.

Earth was a lifeless rock for almost a billion years after its formation. For the majority of the history of life, there were no mammals. For the majority of the history of mammals, there were no humans. And if we look at the stars, we see a universe in which life, if it exists elsewhere, is vanishingly rare. A common man may be common in a crowd, but against the background of nature, against the silence of space, he is a masterpiece four billion years in the making.

Instead of a lottery, this framing focuses us on the idea of inheritance. Thoughtful people have long acknowledged the cultural and intellectual debt we owe to our predecessors. Few of us could build an internal combustion engine in our garage, yet thanks to generations of scientists and engineers, we can travel the world in comfort. Few of us have written a book, yet we have the accumulated wisdom of the world at our fingertips. Few of us have built so much as a doghouse, yet we live in a world of dams, bridges, and skyscrapers. Once we have put aside the idea of souls, we can approach our biology with a similar sense of gratitude.

We did not create ourselves. If we exist at all, it is because we stand on the shoulders of millions of generations. Every joint and sinew, every organ and cell, is the gift of an unbroken line of ancestors down to the decision of a mother and father to have children. Reasonable people may disagree about whether there is an afterlife. But the existence of this beforelife, the debt we owe to our ancestors for our very selves, is something that requires no faith at all.

It is the height of ingratitude to despise this inheritance just because we wish we were a few inches taller.

To be sure, this gratitude is not to deny the imperfections in our inheritance. Nobody knows the flaws of an old manor house like the children who grew up in it. Our biological legacy includes some obsolete features, like the appendix and the architecture of the mammalian eye. Our minds in many ways still retain the instincts of our tribal past. The work of adapting to an ever-changing world is never done. But instead of futilely railing against the unfairness of the genetic lottery, a materialist viewpoint highlights the ways that we can build on this inheritance for ourselves and our children.

The ethic of inheritance implies that we should treat our bodies as a gift - one that should be well-maintained and well-used. Building our physical health and mental faculties takes on the character of maintaining a beloved family vacation home. Nobody wants their gift to be left on the shelf; part of our obligation is to maintain our body’s health and use our lives to make an impact in the world.

We can also see choosing a spouse in a new light. We often think of dating in terms of status games, having fun, or impressing our friends and family. But it is also a decision about the traits we want our children to have - a decision that will resonate for all your future descendants. It is, in a sense, the most ancient and democratic form of genetic engineering.

Finally, every member of a family has an impact on its culture. We have the choice to build a family culture that improves on our own upbringing while extending its strengths. This is the culture that our own children will take as the normal background of their lives - until they make their own mark upon it in turn. This, too, is part of our legacy to future generations.

There is, as Darwin once put it, a grandeur in this materialist view of life. Casting off the long hangover of the idea of immaterial souls may help us correct some poorly formed intuitions. But it also provides a new appreciation of how precious an accomplishment complex life was, and places on us a renewed responsibility to steward this priceless inheritance.

A humane man, wishing to be established himself, seeks to establish others; wishing to achieve, seeks to help others achieve.

Analects 6:30

One of the most distinctive features of Confucianism is its focus on human relationships and how to navigate them well.  Confucius selected five archetypal relationships: ruler and ruled, father and son, older brother and younger brother, husband and wife, and friend and friend – and carefully discussed how to think about these relationships and how to make each of them flourish.

This focus on individual one-to-one relationships seems an odd fit with Confucius’s global ambitions.  Why would someone trying to bring a lasting peace amidst the chaos of the Warring States, someone whose disciples who ended up as government officials in several kingdoms – care so much about something as narrow as individual relationships?

We often separate people into two categories: those with world-spanning ambitions, and those who just want a quiet family life.  The former work with abstractions – crafting national grand strategy, creating scientific breakthroughs, founding dynamic companies.  The latter work their 9-5, coach their neighborhood little league, spend time with their family, and just want to grill.  But this is a false dichotomy.  Every leader has his team, every scientist stands on the shoulders of giants, and startup CEOs spend much of their time hiring and managing their team.  If Confucius emphasized relationships, it’s because developing and maintaining relationships is key for anyone wanting to make a dent on the universe.

One reason is that relationships are a key part of our education in how to be human.  Through life, we naturally occupy different roles in relationships, and each one changes our perspective on life.  You learn something from how to be a good son or daughter; when you become a parent, you learn something different about what it means to be a good father or mother.  You learn something about being a subordinate at work, but when you become a manager, you learn new skills you didn’t realize existed.  So, like a tycoon putting making his heir work in the mail room and sales office before inheriting the firm, Confucius exhorts us to pay attention to our relationships, and perform each role as best we can, as part of learning how people work together and how to serve their needs.

Focusing on individual relationships also helps keep us grounded.  Many philosophies have promised dazzling utopias while leaving a trail of human misery in their wake.  Others, like the Shakers, exhorted their adherents to abandon their everyday commitments to join a utopian commune.  A flawed movement will first reveal its flaws, and an inhumane philosophy will first reveal its inhumaneness, in its concrete effects on people around them.  Our closest relationships, then, can help ensure that we’re truly facing the challenges of dealing with flawed, complex reality rather than glossy abstractions.  As Eric Hoffer wryly observed in The Ordeal of Change, “it is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor.”

Finally, relationships are one of the best sources of leverage in our everyday lives.  We often think of influence in terms of politicians passing laws or businessmen closing million-dollar deals.  But if you think about all the people you interact with throughout the day, even an ordinary person has countless opportunities to impact the lives around them.  Anyone who’s worked for a good boss – or a bad one – knows how much the behavior of a single person can determine whether coming into work evokes enthusiasm or dread.  Anyone who’s seen dysfunctional marriages and loving ones knows the difference between a marriage as a cage – a literal version of No Exit – and a marriage that empowers two people to become the best versions of themselves and tackle challenges together that neither could handle alone.

So it’s worth taking the time to think about each of your close relationships in turn.  What can you learn from each of them?  What’s going on in their lives, and what could you do for them?  How could you be a better son or daughter, a better boss or employee, a better friend?  What could your life be like if all your relationships were firing on all cylinders?

Zeng asked, “Can simple obedience to your father be called filiality?”

Confucius replied, “What on earth are you saying? If the Emperor of old had seven ministers who would remonstrate with him, he would not lose his empire even if he had no inkling of the Way. If a duke had five remonstrating ministers, he would not lose his fief even if he had no inkling of the Way. If the head of a great house had three remonstrating ministers, he would not lose his estate even if he had no inkling of the Way. A gentleman with a remonstrating friend would not lose his reputation; a father with a remonstrating son would not be ensnared by unrighteousness. So, with regards to unrighteous conduct, a son must remonstrate with his father, and a minister must remonstrate with his lord. And since remonstrance is a duty, how can simple obedience be considered filial?”

— On Filiality (孝经)

He never thought of himself as a hero. He liked his work, he liked his collaborators, and if he had any ambitions, it was to rise through the ranks and enjoy the esteem of those around him. But one day, a shocking discovery about the organization challenged everything he thought he stood for. He tried to ignore it—to pretend as if nothing had changed. But his conscience gnawed at him, until one day he realized he had to quit. He had no choice but to expose this injustice to the world.

This is one of the archetypal stories of our culture. From Martin Luther to Edward Snowden, we celebrate the whistleblower: the person who takes on great risks to quit their position, expose wrongdoing, and call on the public to act. When their stories are told, the whistleblower’s courage and good intentions are without question. Even a failed whistleblower is a prophetic voice against injustice. 

The familiar script of the whistleblower is founded on several important claims about how society works. The whistleblower makes information public in order to create a political response. In the immediate aftermath, journalists and politicians are trusted to use this information to further investigate and expose corruption, and to bring the powerful culprits to justice. By spreading that information widely, “people power” also comes into play. At the ballot box, voters can punish either the culprits themselves or the politicians who allowed them to operate. The whistleblower operates within the assumptions of Western liberal democracy—both its political mythos and its real institutions.

As soon as the whistleblower resigns, he is just another face in the crowd, without connections or influence, with only a bit of knowledge in his head. In practice, successful whistleblowers have therefore cultivated relationships with influential media figures as a critical step in spreading their message. 

Daniel Ellsberg gained whistleblower status when he published over two decades worth of documents on U.S. involvement in Vietnam and proved that several administrations had intentionally misled Congress and the media. He collaborated with The New York Times on the story, ensuring that coverage would fall under first amendment protections for the media. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, both renowned whistleblowers in the late 2000s and 2010s, relied on media allies to inject their messages into public awareness. In Assange’s case, he reduced the middleman role by founding WikiLeaks to publish documents independently.

Snowden’s exposure of global surveillance programs run by the National Security Administration and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance involved close collaboration with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and other journalists. These contacts allowed him to secure the publication of documents in The Guardian and other prominent publications. The 2016 leaks of the Panama Papers were large enough that they required the Süddeutsche Zeitung to enlist the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to review them. Without the ability to mobilize trained and connected media contacts, these prominent whistleblower operations could not have succeeded.

Often, popular retellings of successful whistleblowers skip the actual process by which they achieved their goals, or the question of whether they managed to fundamentally change things at all. Instead, we get a fast-paced montage of news spreading across social media and café conversations, as everyone learns about the scandal and the people demand justice. 

But both the myths and the realities of the whistleblower operate on a common moral logic. One of the assumptions of the whistleblower is that it is better to quit an organization to maintain “clean hands” than to try reforming it from within. To work in an organization doing bad things is to be complicit in its wrongdoing. If you realize your organization is morally compromised, it becomes imperative to make a clean break as soon as possible. This is why we celebrate whistleblowers above those quietly trying to reform the system, and why whistleblowers consider their former colleagues—still compromised by association—valid targets of attack.

This logic seems to work on deontological grounds. If we assume that such involvement is an unacceptable evil, there is no choice but to leave and expose the wrongdoing. But does this actually lead to better institutions?

The move also conflicts with a number of moral instincts. Who is the better man: an executive in a corrupt company who effectively fights bad practices in his department, or one who quits in order to read Chandler novels by the beach? The latter has cleaner hands—he’s not drawing a paycheck from the dirty company—but he has also done nothing to mitigate the problem. Meanwhile, the executive in the trenches might actually do so by continuing to work within a corrupt environment. It’s hard to support an ethic that judges people by their association and not by their impact on actually making society better. 

Conflating virtue with disloyalty also has unintended consequences. To the extent that loyalty becomes suspect, especially in a highly dysfunctional or corrupt society, unprincipled rebels learn to claim that they’re merely fighting for justice. In reaction, institutions will naturally attempt to protect themselves by insisting on wasteful signals of conformity. Strictly applying the criterion of “clean hands” and of necessary disloyalty would mean an exodus of those who are scrupulous into marginal positions, while the unscrupulous enjoy a monopoly on the commanding heights of the economy and of the state. 

Of course, reality usually doesn’t play out like this. In practice, grudgingly or otherwise, we accept that it’s often the best option to use our position to improve an imperfect world. But this implies a different moral logic to that of the whistleblower—one concerned with function and with how to properly navigate relationships that are morally compromised without abandoning them completely.

In Warring States-era China—no stranger to unjust or incompetent government—Confucius taught an ethic of remonstrance. When confronted with wrongdoing by one’s superior, instead of dramatically quitting and exposing it to the world, he taught that the proper course of action is to firmly but respectfully correct him, with reference to shared values.

This approach also takes a great deal of courage. When the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty felt that the Confucian philosopher Mencius encouraged too much temerity in ministers towards rulers, he ordered Mencius’s writings expunged from the civil service exams and the removal of a tablet honoring Mencius from the Confucian temple. His minister Qian Tang opposed him. Before remonstrating with the emperor, he dragged his own coffin into court, saying “it would be an honor to die for Mencius.” The emperor ultimately relented, although with the caveat that new editions of Mencius’s work would remove some of the offending lines. Qian Tang himself became an exemplar of the sort of bold forthrightness that Mencius advocated.

This concept is not specifically Asian. One famous modern Western example was the mission-command (Auftragstaktik) philosophy of the Prussian and German militaries in the 19th century. Leaders were trained to allow their subordinates a high degree of independence in interpreting orders to achieve operational goals. Subordinates, in turn, had to maintain sound judgment and the trust of their superiors. This culture allowed commanding officers on the ground to override the specifics of their superiors’ plans, if circumstances no longer made them the best way to achieve an operational goal.

Similarly, lean manufacturing techniques—used all over the world—empower subordinates to make decisions on the factory floor, up to even halting production in the event of serious problems. Management is then tasked with applying and systematizing the feedback from line workers. These decentralized systems can be extremely effective at managing complex challenges, but an oft-unspoken prerequisite is a culture of trust and willingness to confront superiors with problems. Institutions adopting decentralized structures while lacking a culture of effective remonstrance are at risk of either anarchy as subordinates pursue their own agendas, or strategic blindness as subordinates bury problems rather than bring them for discussion. They therefore often resort to a centralized approach that is less efficient but more predictable.

What makes remonstrance work in practice? The foundation of Confucius’s social philosophy is that relationships are the central element of functional institutions. When relationships become adversarial or low-trust, it is only a matter of time before customs or laws start to decay as well. Laws can never substitute for proper, virtuous relationships.

The courageous remonstrator is not a rebel by temperament. The moment of remonstrance can be dramatic, as with Qian Tang, but it is the social capital built up over long collaboration that gives it weight. Even in the moment of confrontation, he rebels to the minimum extent possible. He forcefully expresses his views, but with respect, without implicitly questioning the superior’s position or character. Confucius counseled children: “Remonstrate gently with your parents when you must. If they are disinclined to listen, remain reverent but do not abandon your purpose” (Analects 4:18). By confining the disagreement to policy and explicitly reinforcing the ties of loyalty that already exist, the remonstrator maximizes the chance that the superior will treat the criticism not as an attack but as a sincere concern from someone sharing the same goals and values.

There’s a laser-like precision in this approach. Instead of publicizing your accusations and setting out in search of patrons who can help you oppose your former superiors or collaborators, you leverage the social capital you’ve spent years cultivating. The personal relationship allows you to direct the attention of someone in the institution who actually has the authority to reverse the decision. In a world teeming with anonymous disinformation, this is a powerful way to cut through the noise and reach one of a handful of people who can make a difference.

After the confrontation, the subordinate might still resign, especially if he senses that his case is falling on deaf ears. But resignation is not the moment of moral triumph. It is not the moment he steps out of the dirty institution and becomes pure again. The moral triumph is when he did his utmost to change the institution from the inside. Compared to that supreme effort, whether he chooses to retire afterward is a matter of personal taste.

Putting relationships at the center of moral focus also forces a person to think about which institutions to join. It makes it clear that joining an institution that has lost its way with the aim of changing it from the inside is a fool’s errand. Without shared values or real ingroup loyalty with your superiors, you have no leverage with which to make a moral stand. Lacking that leverage, your talents will simply be used to further the institution’s own ends, without providing any avenue for critique or reform. Confucius once praised an official for his keen sense of when not to join an institution: “A superior man was Qu Boyu! When government was virtuous, he served; when government was corrupt, he could roll up his principles and keep them in his heart.” (Analects 15:7)

Even among institutions with admirable aims, discernment is necessary. The remonstrance framework highlights how workplace relationships, especially deep, personal relationships, are a valuable source of capital. These should be weighed alongside compensation packages and workplace perks. A company with rapid turnover or an impersonal culture may otherwise be a good place to work, but the employee should be aware that he’s giving up his best chance to influence the organization.

The call to remonstrance is a powerful call to daily courage. While whistleblowing requires courage in extraordinary situations, remonstrance teaches us to practice the courage to speak up about everyday problems. In the risk-averse professional culture that predominates today, there is a tendency for workers to keep their heads down and not raise problems until they become unignorable. Similarly, there’s a mirror-image tendency of managers to let personnel problems simmer quietly until they suddenly put the problem employee on a performance-improvement plan as a prelude to firing. Until the crisis comes, such a workplace may seem nice. But it’s a niceness born of cowardice and mistrust. Remonstrance ethics naturally prizes both the courage to speak up and the culture of trust that makes it possible. It is the moral counterpart of the culture of continuous improvement that has become standard in advanced manufacturing.

Times change, technologies change, but human nature remains the same. No less than in Confucius’s time, we live in a world in which institutional wrongdoing is ever-present. The framework of remonstrance by the loyal first officer is a powerful tool for effectively correcting injustice in our daily lives. By cultivating respect and compassion in our working lives, we are building up a reserve of social capital that we can call on in moments of moral crisis. And by courageously speaking up to our superiors, we can effectively confront the decision-makers most likely to have the power and inclination to create lasting change.

And looking beyond the individual, the ethic of remonstrance envisions a culture of moral accountability, in which penetrating ethical questions are taken seriously in an environment of mutual respect and personal loyalty. It is our daily faithful presence in the institutions that would make such a world possible. Fighting injustice is no longer the preserve of a lonely few whistleblowers, but as a goal carried forward by a hundred hands.

A version of this piece was published at Palladium.