The System Is Not the Disease
Fallibility, Blame, and the Human Condition
What if the greatest error is believing that our systems are the source of our failures — rather than the places where our failures become organised and made visible?
Fallibility is intrinsic to human behaviour. To err is human.
In Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Systems, chapter 6, there is a simple and yet highly insightful observation:
“Fallibility is intrinsic to human behaviour. As Alexander Pope (1688–1744) put it, ‘to err is human.’” (p. 161)
No matter the degree of confidence or capacity a person has, sooner or later they will miscalculate, allow bias or tribal thinking to cloud their judgment, or simply make a mistake. We humans will always find space to fail.
There is something liberating about this. Most errors are not life-threatening, nor critical to our well-being. Yet to err is also to find humility and embarrassment sitting on your doorstep, waiting to remind you that none of us are “all that.”
I value the places where I fail — for it is there that I learn. Of course, this is easier when the cost is merely inconvenience. But perhaps that is the point: if we learn well in the small, daily errors of life, we may spare ourselves something more significant later.
That is — until someone else brings their error to your doorstep and tries to force it through your door.
“From the perspective of the brain, you are right all the way up until the point that you realise that you are wrong.” (Ibid. p. 161)
The humility required to acknowledge just how wrong we can be is something special — and like most great challenges, we avoid it until it is pressed upon us.
Yet almost immediately after error comes blame.
We encounter suffering, corruption, injustice, failure, or disorder — and instinctively we search for something to hold responsible. We blame religion, politics, capitalism, socialism, wealth, poverty, institutions, governments, churches, science, academia, or ideology. And sometimes that blame is entirely justified: human systems can become corrupt, oppressive, and destructive, and their structures can magnify individual failures into collective harm.
I know this from experience. When I went into prison, maintaining my position that the story which placed me there was not accurate from my perspective, I endured years of being called a liar, in denial, or mentally unwell. There was continual pressure to concede. Then one day, space was given to me. A specialist asked simply: “What actually happened, from your perspective?”
When I told them what had not been permitted to be brought up in court — about the one making the accusations — they changed their entire projection of me. Instead of demanding I accept someone else’s version of events, they asked:
“What mistake did I make? And what was my part in this process that I can take responsibility for?”
That question changed everything.
Instead of being forced to defend myself against what I knew to be false, I was given space to examine my own agency. I discovered something profound: blame says “you are the problem.” Responsibility asks “what part of this is mine?” Those are not the same thing.
Once I stopped defending myself against the errors of the system, I could finally focus on myself. Freed from the necessity of defence, I could look at my own humanity — my shortcomings, my blind spots, my genuine mistakes. It was both liberating and deeply humbling.
When we are under blame — or when we are the ones doing the blaming — we sit furthest away from the possibility of learning, reflection, and growth.
To this day, the most liberating moment came at my final parole board — where I received acknowledgment both of what I had endured, and of the way I had endured it. I emerged a better person — though harder, and less naive.
I tell you this to position myself as one who knows firsthand how easily failure and error can come to define our existence. I also tell it to make this clear: systems fail us. We fail each other. And at times we do grievous harm to one another.
It is precisely there — in the face of harm and injustice — that we look to systems, cultures, religion, politics, business, or society and ask: Who is to blame?
But there is a deeper question we rarely pause to consider:
Are these systems the source of our corruption — or are they the places in which our human nature becomes organised and visible?
Religion can become an instrument of domination.
Politics can become an instrument of power.
Capitalism can become an instrument of greed.
Socialism can become an instrument of coercion.
Academia can become an instrument of intellectual tribalism.
Science can become an instrument of ideological certainty.
Secularism can become dogmatic.
Theocracy can become murderous.
Yet the remarkable thing is not simply that these systems fail. It is that radically different systems reproduce remarkably similar human behaviours.
It is tiring to hear one ideology blame another for society’s ills. It is particularly tiring to hear religion or God blamed for the evil within the world.
I have heard it said: “If God is good, why is there evil?” That is a fair question. But there is another question equally worthy of being heard: If human beings are capable of goodness, why do we so often fall short?
Christian thought does not offer a flattering view of human nature. It suggests that we are not as we ought to be before our Creator. I know this is not a complete answer. But the focus here is not the origin of evil — it is the human habit of blame in the face of failure.
Within the whole dynamic of human failure, error, and harm — the common denominator is us. We could do so much better. But it is always easier to point outward than to exercise self-determination and agency.
This does not mean systems are irrelevant. Institutions matter precisely because they provide human tendencies with structure, authority, scale, and continuity. A corrupt person may cause harm; a corrupt institution can reproduce that harm long after the original person is gone.
But here is the harder truth: changing the system does not automatically change the human being who builds its replacement. We remove one tyrant, and another occupies the space. We overthrow one ideology and construct another — as if the act of changing labels will somehow alter the human condition. Even the noblest idealism eventually fails in the hands of humanity. It is simply the way we are.
We condemn the corruption of one institution — and establish another, populated by the same fallible beings. We change the nouns, while leaving the human verbs entirely untouched.
And these are the verbs that remain:
Control. Possess. Dominate. Conform. Exclude. Justify. Blame.
Perhaps this is why we so readily externalise our failures. If the problem is religion — I need only leave religion. If it is capitalism — replace capitalism. If it is politics — change the politicians. If it is the wealthy — redistribute wealth. If it is the institution — dismantle the institution.
But if the deeper problem lies within human fallibility itself — there is nowhere external to run. This may be uncomfortable to hear — but you and I are part of the problem. That is simply the reality.
This becomes especially visible in criticisms of religion. An atheist may point to religious violence, theocracy, and crimes committed in the name of God — and conclude that religion itself is a principal source of human evil. That criticism deserves to be heard, not dismissed. Religion has unquestionably become a vehicle through which human beings have committed terrible harm.
But there is another possible conclusion:
Religion may not be the source of the corruption — so much as one of humanity’s most powerful manifestations of it.
The same human impulses toward domination, tribalism, certainty, self-interest, and violence — can manifest through religion. But they can also manifest through politics, economics, nationalism, secularism, academia, and almost every other structure human beings construct.
When confronted with a world containing suffering, predation, death, and apparent disorder — our first instinct is almost always: Who is to blame?
Even our attempts to understand the universe are touched by the same fallibility we are trying to explain. Science can describe the world extraordinarily well — but it does not necessarily resolve every existential question of meaning, value, responsibility, and being. That is not a failure of science; it is a recognition of its proper scope. And we, as flawed and existentially invested creatures, remain out of our depths in the face of the unknown.
I am not attempting to answer the great theological questions this raises. I cannot. It is beyond my capacity to see outside my own lived experience without bias. Nor can any argument create certainty about God’s existence — that remains a matter of faith, conviction, and revelation. Nor does any of this excuse religious or institutional evil.
But it does challenge the confidence with which we identify one particular human system as the root of all corruption.
Because perhaps the uncomfortable truth is this:
The system is not necessarily the disease — simply because the disease becomes visible through the system.
For myself personally — my confidence is not ultimately in religion as a human system, any more than it is in politics or economics. My confidence is in Christ — precisely because I do not have sufficient confidence in human beings to believe that humanity can construct its own salvation.
And so I leave you with this question:
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