Pretty Words, Violent Systems

Unpacking the Lie of Doing Good While Causing Harm — from Global Aid to Personal Careers to Learning Design

Photo by Laura Vinck on Unsplash

I once worked with a client — a brilliant author — who wanted to turn her book into an online course. She came in with the belief that if she built the course, the audience would come. It’s a common assumption, especially in creative and service-based work. But it’s also a flawed premise.

At the time, I was early in my entrepreneurship journey, and I didn’t yet have the language or confidence to question that premise. What unfolded was a stressful and unclear development process. She didn’t have a real audience to speak to, which meant every content decision felt untethered. We created a model learner, but it wasn’t based on lived relationships — just projections. In the end, we built a course, but it lacked the vibrancy that comes from truly knowing who you’re building for and why they care.

This experience was one of the first moments that helped me see how often our struggles stem not from laziness or failure — but from beginning with an unexamined or inaccurate assumption. What I’ve come to understand, through my work and through spiritual teachings like Esther Hicks and Abraham, is that if we start from a flawed premise, we can’t arrive at the transformation we desire.

Whether we’re talking about global aid, personal careers, or educational design, one flawed premise continues to show up: the ends justify the means. We say we care about justice, sustainability, freedom — and yet we allow institutions, behaviors, and decisions that actively harm people and the planet, so long as they serve some “greater good.” But in truth, misaligned means can’t produce aligned outcomes.

Human life is vibrational. It's energetic. And when what we say, what we do, and how we feel are not in resonance, the results we get reflect that dissonance. I see it in my own life: when joy and trust are tangled with dread and doubt, the outcomes are equally mixed — surprise blessings alongside confusion and disappointment.

So, what happens when we build entire systems — or even entire lives — on these flawed premises? That’s what this post is here to explore.

We’ll look at three areas:

1. International Aid (USAID) – where good intentions mask imperial interests.

2. Careers and Security – where safety is sought in systems that require self-sacrifice.

3. Learning & Course Design – where check-the-box education fails to spark true growth.

My hope is to invite you to question what assumptions you’ve inherited — and to support the sacred, ongoing work of aligning our means with our ends, our actions with our values, and our design with deeper truth.

Part 1: The Flawed Premise of Humanitarianism Without Justice

I recently wrote a blog post sharing my take on the closure of USAID. You can read it here, but the gist is: I was glad to see it go.

One of the first comments I received accused me of spreading pro-Trump propaganda. The commenter was angry, arguing that USAID helps millions of people and that criticizing its closure was irresponsible, even dangerous. Their argument came from a place of urgency — people are suffering now, and we should do whatever we can to help them.

But underneath their response was a core assumption I want to challenge: that the ends justify the means.