When You Do Not Agree with Society

Hello Sunim Thank you very much for taking my question.
When applying the middle way to our practice, it is said that we must strike a healthy balance between changing society and adapting to it.
So my question is what do you do when you do not agree with society and you do not want to adapt to it?
For instance, I do not agree with the politics that are about to change in my country, in the USA

and I do not want to adapt to the morals that I do not agree with in the political party that is the majority of the incoming president.
How do I apply the middle way to my practice in this instance?

So if the motivation to want to change the world of society rises as a sense of frustration or rage or anger, then you can self diagnose that that balance has been broken.
And when that balance is broken, your sense of your values, your perspective upon the world is much stronger and you start dividing the world into right and wrong.
You being on the right

then if you're divided into right and wrong, then the people in the wrong are viewed as enemies and you tend to demonize it, demonize them.
And if you follow that logic, then a demon is somebody who can be damaged, hurt or killed

and that leads to a violence or a conflict.

So the foundational recognition you have to have about others in the world is that we're all different we all have different value systems, different perspectives

in today's world we look at the past cast system or monarchy or dictatorship and we feel anger at those and we feel pity at those.
But having said that, if you look at, in human history, we have lived far longer under those systems that we have lived under liberal democracies

in a way these systems are not unforgivable systems.
They were just another system that human beings organized themselves in.

So even in those systems, you know, you have to understand that they had their own internal logic and you have to recognize that, you know, acknowledge that those internal logic existed.

And if you have that understanding or acknowledgement, it would not elicit anger in your heart.

So love is not that high emotion or joyous emotion.
Love can be actually better defined as the absence of hate.

But having said that, based on that acknowledgement or understanding of the differences of others.
Then the choice becomes what am I going to do in this world?

Because understanding how others can be doesn't mean you agree with them or that they're right.

That means you are free to choose another value, another belief system and then based on that you walk your own path

so that may lead to a dialogue or they may lead to a competition.
But as long as you don't consider each other hostiles or enemies,

that means that it's always better, more efficient, effective to use kind of peace as a driver for change.

So not only does your heart have to be peaceful to drive change, but the process of transformation of change also has to be peaceful.

But when we say peaceful, we don't mean to just let the current situation be if you don't agree with it or be passive or accepting about it.
What we're saying is use non violent ways to persuade to change to transform whether that's voting, that's public dialogue, any other strategies that you can employ.

Let's look at Korea for example today,

you know, the president out of his frustration at the effectiveness of his rule, wanted to solve this problem violently.

So the person, the very person who actually, you know, sworn oh, to uphold the Constitution of South Korea was the one who actually violated its spirit and tried to suppress the National Assembly through violent means in effect enacting a palace coup.

But the Korean citizens are not reacting to this in a violent way they are peacefully reacting to

of course, there are those of us who are raging inside our hearts

but they're singing loud songs that actually almost feels like a festive occasion as they voice their opposition.

And there's more and more protesters and it's sustained and therefore the pressure is increasing

and they're trying to transform or effect a transformation in a peaceful way.

So a spiritual practitioner doesn't mean you just accept things the way it is passively.

So going back to your question about the middle way, if there's anger driving your actions for change, then it's something for you to look into yourself, to be introspective about it.
But however, if you see unfairness that you want to change in this world, you need to actively engage.
Just do not engage out of anger.

Thank you very much. That was very helpful.