Social Justice Advocates Don’t Understand Justice

Justice is the state of being just, righteous, or fair. But most importantly it’s based upon the concept of objective morality. Simply put, it’s the idea that there is such a thing as universally bad, unjust, or immoral treatment of human beings. The government can not dream of dispensing justice if there is no such thing as objective truth, and objective morality.

The whole idea that human beings are deserving of a certain level of treatment can simply not exist without that idea of an objective morality that exists beyond subjective morality. Governments have to possess a set of ethical standards for the criminal justice system to even exist. This objective morality must exist for the system to work.

Now I’ve laid that all out so that I can explain why I believe the modern proponents of social justice not only don’t understand justice, but are making it impossible for justice to be had. Social Justice is often described as the idea that every human being is deserving of basic human rights. The problem is that governments like the United States already hold this as their standard, and have for a very long time.

Social Justice assumes that the system does not already have this moral standard in place. Furthermore it’s modern proponents do not fight for justice in the true sense of the word, which would be a fairness based on objective morality. They do not believe in a fairness that most could recognize. Instead they rely on post-modernist thought, and subjective fairness.

I will submit that subjective fairness can become the standard when a consensus among the people is reached, but it is also possible that the people reaching this consensus are ill-educated on that topic. We have to be careful when changing the objective standard, because it can degrade the structure that preserves human rights.

To explain what I mean in terms of objective versus subjective fairness, I’ll present a scenario. Imagine that Jane is riding the subway. Joseph is standing in the train station waiting for his train to arrive.

Jane and Joseph bump into each other by mistake as Jane exits the train and fails to see where she was going. Jane’s bag full of books and files go everywhere. Joseph stops to help Jane pick up everything she dropped, causing him to miss his train home. He gladly does so, because he feels that he was somewhat at fault, even though the whole event was caused by Jane who was tweeting as she exited the subway car.

Joseph leaves the situation feeling like he helped someone out. No harm, no foul. Jane feels as though she had just been a victim of man-slaming and as she exits the scenario she takes his picture and tweets it out.

She suggests that this man violated her personal space, and that the whole situation triggered her social anxiety. Three days later her story has changed from an accidental bump, to a man groping her in the subway car, and Joseph finds police at his door. He has to come down to the station, and is only saved by surveillance tapes and eyewitness testimony of him helping her pick up her books and files.

Individually Jane believes she was violated. Joseph believed that he helped a klutzy girl. The law recognizes their individual right to thrive. The law determines whether or not someone’s rights have been violated.

However the criminal justice system is not without flaw, and though Joseph was acquitted of all charges, Jane’s twitter followers who weren’t there believe that he groped her and got away with murder. So they get hysterical and decide that the objective standard of what it means to be violated on a subway car must be changed to include any unwanted violation of personal space.

So the internet becomes up in arms about this accident and they successfully change the law to privilege women in these kinds of disputes. They classify any violation of personal space even when accidental, as a form of assault, and decide that harassment must be determined more by individual feelings of violation than whether or not their rights were actually violated. In the mind of the social justice warrior this can never be a bad thing, because to them it would just be helping women, and we can’t have too many privileges for women.

In reality this sort of thing degrades the rights of certain people to privilege others, which is precisely what the modern proponents of social justice accuse the system of doing. From their perspective, it’s perfectly reasonable to do this because in their minds it’s fine to harm people they believe to be in a class above them.

However, the objective standard held up by the criminal justice system classifies this kind of treatment as a human rights violation. You simply can not prioritize the rights of one set of people over another. But this is precisely what they are doing.

They presume that the pre-existing government standards are to blame. Furthermore they assume that elected officials by default are bigoted and that the only way they can be less bigoted is by making sure that the authority figures are less white and male, as if the state of being female or non-white by default makes you more capable of representing other people who are female or non-white.

If you are this kind of social justice minded individual, what I’ve written thus far must be quite alien to you. Because you’ve been told that the world is defined by your subjective perception of privilege, and so therefore your individual perception of reality must be recognized. What you fail to realize is that governments lack the time, money, and resources needed to cater to all of the individual feelings of their citizens.

It simply cannot be done. Ultimately what you will do is privilege women and minorities until white males become a visible slave class, and you won’t stop there. Because in your individual reality, you won’t be free until white men suffer for everything you believe them to be guilty of for merely existing. Then when that slave class dies out, you’ll fight amongst yourselves until you find another scapegoat.

This is precisely what happens when you allow for moral relativism in government standards. When you start suggesting that some humans should get special treatment, because you individually believe that it’s owed to them, often the rights of others must be violated to privilege those individuals.

Certainly you don’t believe that you are privileging women and minorities with affirmative action and the like. You don’t think that laws like the violence against women act hurt both genders. You certainly don’t believe that no-fault divorces hurt everyone either. Because from your perspective, punching up can never be bad.

The problem is that all of you social justice types believe that it’s government that gives people rights. When in reality the government assumes you to have inalienable rights as a human being which must be preserved. That is all that government is really capable of doing sustain-ably. Anything more than that requires an increasingly authoritarian presence of the federal government, which requires citizens to give up freedoms to maintain it all.

Social Justice Warriors believe they are fighting the system, but they aren’t. Instead they just provide opportunities for politicians to achieve more power, by being the ones to give in to mobs of disgruntled idiots so that those idiots vote for them come election time. You are the system. You believe you are punching up, but you’re actually punching yourselves and the people you intend to help.

To continue the story, you believe you are helping preserve the rights of women and minorities. But in reality you are often privileging the easily offended people like Jane, and enabling them to prosecute good samaritans like Joseph; privileging her reality over objective reality. You’re hurting the Josephs of the world to help the Janes, because you believe the Janes are innocent victims of a system of intersecting layers of oppression.

The problem is that there is no proof that there exists this intersecting web of privilege and oppression in these first world governments. It’s all bullshit being spouted by lifelong academics who majored in philosophy and social sciences, but never took classes in ethics or critical thinking.

To put it bluntly, it’s like letting a person with a degree in liberal arts tell a rocket scientist how to do their job. It’s philosophy majors who know nothing of real life, citing other philosophy majors, citing other philosophy majors. All with no empirical evidence to support any of their bullshit outside of the work of other philosophy majors.

Now I understand that even the idea that people inherently have rights is a philosophical position, and that the concept of human dignity only exists within the realm of human thought. But I also believe that not all ideas or individual philosophies are equally important or even valid.

I also believe that there are universal truths about the nature of humanity which we’ve discovered over time, and that you’d have to be a complete moron to ignore them. One of these universal truths is that the proponents of social justice can never truly be sated. They will shift the goal posts forever if you let them.

You could establish the most egalitarian society that the planet has ever known, and they would be entirely oblivious to it. Because in their minds, someone, somehow, had an advantage which they projected malice onto. Maybe in their mind, that advantage slights them in some way. Whatever the reason, there will always be disgruntled mobs of people. It doesn’t matter how good things get, they will always make signs and complain.

This is not the behavior of people fighting for objective fairness. These are the actions of those who want retribution and not justice. It gives rise to vigilante justice and a thirst for blood. It does not bring long term peace or prosperity; only turmoil. Social Justice as a standard is not the problem. The problem is that it’s proponents don’t know the meaning of justice and often there are preteens with a better understanding of government and economics than the ignorant parasitic buffoons who endlessly ask for more.

They do not demand the preservation of their pre-existing rights. Instead they ask for an increasing amount of entitlements. They endlessly speak about privilege when they fail to have even a basic understanding of the difference between a right and a privilege. They cannot differentiate between an advantage and a privilege. Instead these concepts blur together until they all mean the same thing.

If you aren’t the least bit concerned about the state of politics in the first world after this article, then you honestly haven’t been paying attention. Maybe you think this doesn’t affect you. Maybe you think that it would be fine if the first world fell, because then you’d have successfully toppled the authority figures that you believed were the problem.

Congratulations, because now all the weaker nations that the first world protected are up for grabs and can easily be overtaken by nearby countries with plenty of guns and people who give no fucks at all about the first world concept of human rights. Those concepts may as well not exist in those countries at all.

Unless we somehow bomb ourselves into oblivion, there will always be a first world. If we have a choice over who wields that power, then it would be most advantageous for all of us, that it be countries who believe that people have inalienable rights.

But if there is at all a sense of irony in all of this it’s that such a system seems to eventually produce the ideas that threaten to unravel the thousands of years of human progress that brought civilization to this point. Which is, the idea that all ideas are equally valid, and that subjective reality is more important than the preservation of individual rights and freedoms. So in closing I must ask, have people completely lost their damn minds?