A false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a just weight is His delight. (Proverbs 11:1)
Balance. It’s the foundation of wisdom, morality, and meaningful progress. Yet, when I look at the state of modern institutions—religious, political, and educational—I see that balance has been utterly abandoned. Institutions that once served as pillars of society have devolved into echo chambers, either preaching mercy without justice, justice without mercy, or losing sight of both entirely. This skewing of reality has left us divided, angry, and utterly detached from truth.
Today, as I lie sick in bed with nothing to do but scan articles and their comment sections, I am struck not just by how troubling this imbalance is, but by how dangerously entrenched it has become. Many of us became more aware of it after 2016, even more so after 2020. Yet here we are in 2025, and the cracks have only deepened—I am beyond fed up.
This imbalance, left unchecked for decades, has transformed religion into a feel-good exercise, politics into a battleground of blame, and education into a conveyor belt of conformity. At the heart of it lies a society that has forgotten how to think critically, feel compassionately, and reconcile opposing ideas.
I do not write this post from a place of sickness-induced emotion or even opinion, but from a state of near disbelief at how truly and utterly disgusting society around the globe has become. Institutions that once served as the bedrock of wisdom, morality, and progress have degraded into hollow fortresses of division and hypocrisy. The failure is not just evident—it is pervasive, seeping into every corner of our culture and leaving humanity blind to the balance and truth we so desperately need.
We must heal this fracture before it consumes the very foundations of our humanity. But before we can begin, we must first confront and understand its origins.
Religious Institutions: Mercy Without Justice
One of the deepest fractures in society lies within our religious institutions. To begin healing, we must first understand how these institutions have shifted from fostering spiritual accountability to offering hollow platitudes that fail to address the complexities of real-world suffering.
Religion, for all, should be a refuge of morality and spiritual growth. Yet, many religious institutions have traded hard truths for comfort. Sermons now echo with messages of love and mercy, but justice—the other half of God’s character—is often absent.
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)
This verse reminds us that justice and mercy must coexist. Mercy without justice becomes permissiveness, allowing sin and harm to flourish unchecked. Justice without mercy becomes cruelty, punishing without the possibility of redemption.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian who stood against the Nazi regime, warned against what he called “cheap grace.” He wrote:
Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves… grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.
When we preach mercy without holding people accountable to justice, we cheapen the profound nature of grace and diminish its transformative power.
Political Institutions: Justice Without Mercy
The political arena reveals another aspect of the fracture—one where the relentless pursuit of justice has been stripped of empathy and mercy. To heal this divide, we must first understand how politics has devolved into a battleground that prioritizes blame over solutions.
Justice is shouted from every platform. Mercy and empathy? Rarely found. Instead, politicians on both sides weaponize justice to tear down their opponents, never to build up society.
Thomas Aquinas once said:
Justice without mercy is cruelty; mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.
Politics today has lost the balance Aquinas described. Instead of seeking solutions, it thrives on division, demonizing the “other side” while refusing to acknowledge the humanity of those with opposing views.
The result? Polarization thrives, the middle ground—the place where understanding and reconciliation happen—has all but disappeared. Issues are oversimplified, turning complex realities into binary arguments that do nothing to solve the problems they claim to address.
Educational Institutions: The Loss of Both
Education, the foundation of critical thinking and progress, has not escaped the fracture. To reclaim it, we must understand how it has moved away from fostering curiosity and nuance, becoming instead a conveyor belt of conformity and intellectual laziness.
Perhaps the most disheartening failure lies within our educational institutions. Once bastions of critical thinking, they have become factories of intellectual conformity. Schools now train students to regurgitate approved narratives rather than explore the nuances of truth.
John Stuart Mill warned against this in On Liberty:
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
Education has abandoned the principle of teaching students to understand opposing views. Instead, it reinforces echo chambers, leaving young minds ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of reality.
Scripture also speaks to this failure.
It is good to grasp the one and not let go of the other. Whoever fears God will avoid all extremes. (Ecclesiastes 7:18)
Our schools have let go of the balance between knowledge and wisdom, leaving students with information but no understanding, opinions but no humility.
The Middle Way: A Call for Balance
The only stable place to stand is the middle way—the path of balance and reconciliation. This concept is not unique to one culture or religion. In Zen philosophy, the middle way represents the harmony between extremes. In Christianity, the narrow path that leads to life (Matthew 7:14) mirrors this same principle.
The middle way requires us to acknowledge that morality and intelligence are not opposites—they are partners. It demands that we reject the false dichotomy that says we must choose one or the other. True wisdom lies in reconciling both.
Albert Einstein once said:
Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.
Thinking requires the humility to admit what we don’t know and the courage to explore the complexity of what we do.
The Consequences of Staying Lost
When we abandon balance, we lose more than just civil discourse—we lose our humanity. Polarization thrives, intellectual humility dies, and moral arrogance reigns.
• People confuse knowledge with wisdom, forgetting that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” (1 Corinthians 8:1).
• Justice becomes vengeance, and mercy becomes weakness.
• Truth becomes fragmented, with each side clinging to their piece while refusing to see the whole.
Why I Stayed Gone
After a decade in higher education, I left my career academia to care for my mother. After her death several years later, I didn’t go back. That choice wasn’t just about grief; it was about clarity—a clarity that, perhaps, reflects poorly on me, but one I cannot ignore. Stepping away allowed me to see how the institutions I once trusted—education, religion, even politics—had become hollow. They no longer sought truth or balance. Instead, they churned out opinions devoid of understanding and judgments devoid of grace.
I couldn’t return to a system that perpetuated illusions like these—illusions that have seeped so deeply into public discourse that morality and intelligence are now seen as mutually exclusive, that faith and reason cannot coexist, or that having an opinion—no matter how uninformed—somehow equates to holding truth. These are the very misconceptions that institutions have fostered.
Colleges claim to be sanctuaries of knowledge, but they have instead become echo chambers for intellectual arrogance, moral posturing, and shallow virtue signaling. Meanwhile, primary and secondary schools merely train students to be cogs in that system, setting them up to mistake conformity for critical thinking. I saw the cracks forming from within, and stepping away allowed me to see the full picture: education has become less about seeking truth and more about entrenching division.
I could not be part of a system that sacrifices wisdom and understanding for ideological conformity, further deepening the fractures we so desperately need to heal. Perhaps humorously, and definitely ironically, the very reason I felt I could not return is the message I want to instill today: that we must reject division, embrace nuance, and restore balance to reclaim what we have lost.
Reclaiming Balance and Truth
Understanding the fractures in our institutions is the first step, but healing requires more. It demands that we reject division and extremes, embrace balance, and rebuild on a foundation of truth, justice, and compassion. If institutions won’t restore balance, we must do it ourselves. Scripture calls us to this responsibility:
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. (Romans 12:2)
Renewing our minds means rejecting the false choices society offers us. It means embracing both justice and mercy, morality and intelligence. It means seeking the truth, not in fragments but in its fullness.
To those feeling disillusioned, I urge you to step back and seek the middle way. Reclaim the balance that institutions have lost. Build your foundation on wisdom, compassion, and truth—not on the skewed realities of those who profit from division.
The road to balance is narrow, but it is worth walking.
The Twin Tree Project 