Daily Inspiration Quote by Eric Butterworth

Butterworth’s line is a small revolt against the managerial impulse in American self-help culture: the idea that life is a broken machine and your worth depends on fixing it. As an educator and Unity minister steeped in practical spirituality, he flips the script. The job isn’t repair; it’s perception. That sounds passive until you hear the subtext: most of the “problems” we rush to correct are misreadings powered by fear, ego, or inherited narratives about how things are supposed to go.

The phrasing matters. “Set things right” carries a moral swagger, a whiff of crusade. It assumes there’s a single, obvious “right” and that you are authorized to impose it. “See them right” is humbler but more radical. It suggests that clarity precedes action, and that action without clear sight becomes control dressed up as virtue. In an educational context, it’s also a critique of teaching-as-correction: the teacher as mechanic tightening screws. Butterworth’s alternative is education as training attention, helping people notice what’s actually happening inside and around them before they reach for the red pen.

The intent isn’t to excuse injustice or tell people to sit serenely amid harm. It’s to warn that frantic fixing can become a coping strategy that avoids the harder work of honest seeing: your biases, your motives, your participation in the mess. In that sense, the line is less about resignation than responsibility. If you “see right,” you stop mistaking anxiety for urgency and certainty for truth - and whatever you do next has a chance of being effective rather than merely corrective.