The System is Not Broken—It’s Working Exactly as Designed
Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
By: Lisa M. Hayes
There is a dangerous kind of optimism that takes root in the belief that the system is broken. It offers a kind of comfort—a way of explaining away the horrors we witness by assuming that things are malfunctioning.
But the system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed. And to believe otherwise is, frankly, a measure of privilege.
For many, the system has never worked. It has been, from the beginning, a rigged game. The justice system, the economy, healthcare, education—all of it was never built to serve everyone equally. It was built to maintain power for the few and offer just enough to the rest to keep outright rebellion at bay.
When we say the system is broken, what we often mean is that it has become impossible to ignore its brutality. That the illusion of fairness has cracked in a way that makes even those previously insulated by privilege feel its bite.
But for Black and brown communities, for Indigenous people, for immigrants, for the disabled, for the poor—this is not new. The structures of oppression that uphold systemic injustice are as old as the system itself. To say it is broken suggests that there was a time when it worked in a just and equitable way. There was not.
It has always been designed to protect capital over people, corporations over communities, order over justice. And it is doing that right now, in real time, with ruthless efficiency.
And let’s be clear—the very idea that the system is “broken” is a perspective available only to those who have, until now, been shielded from its full impact. It’s a statement that assumes that fairness and justice were once the norm, and that we have somehow strayed from that path. The reality is that fairness and justice have never been the foundation upon which this system was built. Inequality is not a glitch; it’s a feature. The suffering of the many has always been the price of the comfort of the few.
This is why marginalized voices have been sounding the alarm for generations. Those who have always lived under the crushing weight of systemic oppression have never been under the illusion that things would simply “work themselves out.” They have never had the luxury of trusting that justice would prevail on its own, or that the system would self-correct. They have always known that any semblance of progress has had to be fought for, often at great cost.
So, where does that leave us? If the system is not broken, then we must stop waiting for it to be fixed. We must abandon the naive hope that it will course-correct on its own. And most importantly, we must stop mistaking our newfound awareness of the system’s cruelty for its malfunction.
If we want justice, equity, and liberation, we do not need a repair. We need a reckoning. We need an unmaking. And then, we need to build something that serves everyone, not just those the current system was built to protect. The foundations of injustice cannot be remodeled; they must be demolished.
It is not enough to simply acknowledge that injustice exists. It is not enough to demand reforms that only serve to make oppression more palatable. We must commit ourselves to dismantling these structures entirely. We must be willing to let go of the systems we have been conditioned to believe in, even when doing so feels uncomfortable or destabilizing. Because the truth is, for many, the system has never been stable to begin with.
The work ahead is daunting, and there are no easy solutions. But if we truly care about justice, we must be willing to take on the burden of building something new, rather than clinging to the lie that what we have now can be salvaged. The future is ours to create, but only if we first recognize the truth:
We cannot dismantle what we do not first name. And we cannot afford the luxury of pretending that what we are witnessing is an accident. It is not.
It is working exactly as designed.
Lisa Hayes is a life coach, coach trainer, author, and editor of Confluence Daily. She specializes in social, social justice, political issues, and mental health. Her work has appeared in publications like Huffington Post and Real Simple. She is also the Communications Director for a local fire department in Mexico. You can find Lisa at www.lisamhayes.com or www.thecoachingguild.com.
