Restraint—Not Rage—Is the Measure of a Man

There’s a scene in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game where Ender, a child genius who has been pushed to save humanity, sits on a small boat and looks out over the water. He is exhausted, horrified by what he has done, and haunted by his gifts.

He has come to know his enemies and can see their motives, their cruelties, but also their moments of kindness. Ender understands them in a way that makes his violence against them in defense of Earth feel monstrous. He can see the good in them and still be forced to destroy them to prevent greater harm.

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them—I destroy them.”

That tension—that terrible clarity paired with deep sympathy—is the ethical knot the Western tradition tries to disentangle using our values and institutions. It is the anguished responsibility of seeing a situation with a wide lens, but opting for measured action for the sake of something greater.

What We Are All Thinking

I recently did a podcast on the Catholic school shooter and “school shooter psychology” broadly. A commenter wrote something I think we all feel deep down.

“I don’t want to understand them—I want to punish them.”

That thought is very human. We’ve all had it at one point.

But it is the weaker thought, because it trades the virtue of justice for the immediate relief of wrath. It feels righteous, but lacks the key ingredient demanded of us by our traditions: knowledge.

A Distributed and Terrible Burden

Conservatives are right to be furious right now. Anger at murder, at lawlessness, at cowardice disguised as some kind of stand against “fascism”...yeah right.

A righteous anger emerges. It shows that we still feel. It shows we still love. But if we are honest, the most dangerous thing we can do with that energy is to give in to fury without the restraints that have kept our civilization from becoming a perpetual blood feud.

Ender’s monologue is instructive because it demonstrates the maturity and hardness missing from our culture. In the novel, those qualities are compressed into the mind of a child prodigy. In our civilization, they are distributed across institutions and practices: evidence, jury trial, public record, appellate review, transparency, and the slow grind of adversarial truth-finding...

What makes Ender’s moment so profound is that it comes from the mouth of a child.

To know the good in a man and still condemn him to death is a terrible burden. However, we cannot deny it for comfort’s sake. Picture the sullen face of Ned Stark in the debut of Game of Thrones, performing an execution on a boy for deserting his post out of fear. The law is the law. He doesn’t want this to happen, but if it is to be done, he does his duty by delivering the sentence. “The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”

We must stand naked in the face of that reality and affirm what is good by choosing what is just.

We must all, as a people, understand before we punish.

Balance Within the Western Tradition

Our ancestors didn’t build institutions to slow things down for their own sake. They built them to produce knowledge and to cultivate the virtues that keep civilization alive. Courts compel us to view facts clearly, and to be detached, not governing through anger.

Juries imply that our moral intuitions are not simply known; justice is a discovery of applying facts to abstract moral principles.

Appeals remind us that justice requires humility—that even our best judgments may be wrong, and must be open to correction. These are not weaknesses. They are the hard scaffolding of a society that refuses to let vengeance masquerade as justice.

Why This Is a Strength

This ethic is not a sentimental compromise that gives way to evil in the name of compassion. “Toxic empathy” as it’s often called these days.

It is iron—tempered in a way that allows it to cut cleanly, rather than tearing everything to pieces. It’s a fine edge, not serrated.

Think of it this way: a mob or vigilante that lashes out in anger teaches fear; a legal system that punishes after a rigorous and transparent process teaches order.

One begets more violence; the other begets safety.

If we want our boys to grow into men worthy of the name, we must set this example for them. Show them grief that does not turn to hatred.

Show them the practical wisdom of a courage that restrains.

Show them that moral clarity means seeing both the darkness and the spark of humanity in an opponent while still choosing justice.

That is the inheritance we ought to pass down—hard, honest, and disciplined.

Yes, the institutions are slow. Yes, they are imperfect and often fail in ways that enrage us. They should be reformed where they are feckless, unaccountable, biased, or so lenient that repeat offenders are loosed on the public again and again. But reform must not hollow out our values and institutions of the very features that protect us from becoming what we despise.

A system that acts quickly without careful application of restraint cannot establish order, so it cannot establish the benefits of freedom. A people that takes vengeance because the courts moved too slowly will have only the temporary satisfaction of revenge and the long-term loss of legitimacy.

We can’t allow our grief to be weaponized.

Our anger must not be cheapened. If it is not justice, it is nothing.

David Rand is a Young Voices alum, featured in the American Thinker and the Mises Institute. He is the host of the Human [Re]Action podcast and works as a media and political consultant. Find him at David-Rand.net and HumanReactionPod.com.