Kafka's wisdom cuts deeper than a simple call to ethics—he's identifying a peculiar human weakness: our talent for confusing the two. Most of us don't struggle between right and wrong so much as between right and *comfortable*, and we've become expert at dressing up the latter in respectable language. Notice he says "start," not "end"—the implication is that rightness becomes harder to maintain once you've built your foundation on what merely passes inspection. Consider the manager who knows a policy harms good employees but implements it anyway because "that's what corporate expects": she's already lost the thread by the time she notices her authority has hollowed into mere compliance.