system

The escalators in Moscow are long, and in the rush hour, people stand on both sides - so even if you want to walk, you can't. You can say 'excuse me' to the person in front, and even with difficulty squeeze past them, if you can tolerate the grumbling (and the squeeze). But then you only have to repeat the same performance with the person next in line, and then the person after that, and then with tens of people after that. The end result may be that you reach the top or bottom a few seconds earlier than you would have done, but you have made a lot of enemies.

So how do we teach the next generations to behave?

What about...

Set yourselves high standards: do not intentionally deceive, harm, undermine or otherwise disadvantage others. Explore the likely consequences of your actions before embarking on them, weigh up the likely good and harm that may be caused by anything you do and never undertake actions which violate, directly or indirectly, the basic human rights of others.

Look around you constantly for behaviour which violates these principles - in particular the last. Be ready to withdraw your support from such behaviour, to express publicly your disapproval and to lend your positive support to any actions meant to put an end to violations.

Try to take small steps towards a world where instances of deception, harm, or undermining and disadvantaging others are made less likely and more difficult to bring about.

... as a bare minimum. But it would be kind to the next generation – and more honest as well – if we added a few notes of caution to this list.

So here we go ...

Expect to find a world where there are far too many instances of deception, harm, intentional undermining and disadvantaging of others for you to be able to be aware of them all, let alone to take a stand on all. Do your best to allocate your time and energies between these issues, while still retaining enough optimism and sanity to have the drive to carry on.

Be aware that you will meet small and large instances of corruption and deception around every corner, and that mostly the rest of the world will not stop in its tracks to be shocked, let alone to address them. Be aware that unless you too are prepared not to stop in your tracks, you are likely to be left behind by the steaming engine of world progress.

Proclaim the noble principles above with passion and with eloquence, by all means: you will be generally revered if you do so. But do not expect to take them seriously or follow them to the letter. In fact, it is probably advisable, for your own security and sanity, to follow the crowd, rather than the principles.

If in doubt: compromise. You are certain to have to do so if you want to get anywhere in the world, at least in a worldly sense. Be ready to turn a blind eye to injustice, to tolerate deception, to venerate the wealthy and the powerful, and to court those in positions of power or influence. They are likely to return the favour - and you may need those favours.

Above all: never doubt or undermine the unwritten rules that keep the system going and the engine of world progress steaming forward. Hold the written rules up to inspection, one by one; doubt them a little and even undermine them, mostly with your tongue in cheek. But do not try to halt the engine of progress; do not seek to undermine the institutions that the engine put in place; do not wonder if the place might be a better one without the institutions; and do not even entertain the thought that the unwritten rules were unwritten according to the wrong unwritten principles.

The Principle of Emergence
“…the ant queen does not direct an army of drones. Drones take direction from a small set of simple signals released by other drones. A drone collecting food leaves behind a special scent, and other drones that pick up that scent will follow the path to the food source. The most direct path to the food becomes the most successful and so pragmatic behavior helps drones to “determine” the best path to take. No one drone knows where the food is or has a map of the terrain, nor does the queen: the emergent system is smarter than the individual members of the colony and acts as an effective decision-making process.”
That's fine for a system. Very good, in fact. Of course you can forget about ant-rights, and you can forget about systems outside that system - like Africa, Antarchia, or the year 2088. Ants, at least, are limited (for the moment) by their physical capabilities: British ants can't reach the food sources of African ants. But if they ever could, and if they became capable of carrying home far more than they could ever consume themselves, building themselves ant-butter mountains, ant-European fortresses, ant-weapons of mass destruction to keep the other anthills under their control...
Which little British ants would be prepared to stop the march to the food source?

...but of course, if those who 'really make change happen' were all to leave the system and 'make change happen' - then we could really make change happen. And maybe the fact that they are able to stay within the system at all means that they do not want real change to happen, merely cosmetic change.
The difficulty is in knowing how many of those 'compromised' changers might (leave the system and) support real change if they felt it had a chance of happening; and also in knowing how compromised their desire for change really is.
Can you build a snowball outside the system? How big will it be? ... and can you know that?
If you can't (and you can really know that you can't) - is it then better to join the compromised snowball that others are helping to build? Rather than risk becoming debris.

Extract from Martin Luther King's speech to West Michigan University in 1963:
'Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word "maladjusted." This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities.
But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence...
In other words, I'm about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment--men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos. Who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."...
Whole text available here

Every pragmatic argument says you should work from within the system if you want to change it. The system is too big and strong to be fought from outside, and from the inside you can harness that strength and turn it back on itself. But while inside, you have to play by the rules. And what if you can't do that?
Those who can are the people who really make change happen. The others get spat out and turn into society's debris.