As I’ve been slowly working my way through the social justice chronicles I’ve come to discover that they have some founding principles that may appear somewhat strange to those who attempt to adhere to the tenets of universalism and logical consistency. In the Democratic People’s republic of North Korea for instance, they practice a strange principle when it comes to dealing with dissenters that include punishing three generations of a family for the sins of one member, based on the idea of needing to “purify” the family. In essence this boils down to that if your grandfather was a dissident, then he along with the next 2 generations (your parents and you) will be shipped off to a labour camp as well. This type of thinking is not a strange concept in the Western world as Christianity is based on the concept of inheritable sin, we are all guilty of the sin of Adam and Eve, until we are purified by the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. However, most of western jurisprudence have moved away from the concept, as punishing the son for the sins of the father makes society guilty of punishing people for acts they had no hand in.

Social justice warriors and other totalitarian ideologies on the other hand, are based on the principle of punishing dissenters, and nowhere is this more clear in the calls to “check your privilege“. This simple statement, designed to invalidate criticism and argument, form the backbone of social justice rhetoric and narratives. Social justice prejudice is based in 2 simple principles designed to rob you of individuality so that they can allocate blame an guilt to groups rather than individuals.

You are not an individual to a social justice warrior

In the strange realm of social justice, there is no such thing as individuals. There are only increasingly small groups centered around bitterness over an overly simplified view of history that I mentioned in my post on the privilege hierarchy. However, there are not set limitations on how much nuance you apply to a group. For instance “White” is a group, without regard for the different histories of among others Germanic, Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Slavic, Jewish, and other sub-sections of the “white” category. The category “Female” makes no distinction between the women who worked their fingers to the bone, and the upper class women, who wielded more power than lower class men. It is easy to see why it happens, after all if you had to take into account that a woman from an English Noble family, most likely has been significantly more privileged than lets say the white, straight, male, Catholic, Irish day labourers, then that forces you to take individual histories and persons into account, which undermines the concept of using Marxist theory on biological and social categories.

In order for Marxist theory to work, there has to be clear victim and oppressor categories, otherwise you get the story that I remember hearing from Christopher Hitchens about a man who is stopped at a post in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, and has a man in a balaclava holding an Armalite rifle pose the following question to him:

Man in Balaclava: “Are you protestant or catholic?”

Man in the car: “Actually I’m an Atheist”

Silence….

Man in the Balaclava: “Protestant atheist or catholic atheist?”

The masked man in this case, had only 2 categories, enemy or friend. Marx had the bourgeois and the proletariat, so at least here social justice warriors have innovated in that they develop new and more categories with each passing Tumblr update, that stack in ways that nobody really understands. However, it keeps their ideology a moving target that cannot be demolished with the ease of the categories in the Troubles or in Marx’s writing.

A potential outcome from this that strikes me as morally reprehensible is that if the social justice world-view is evaluated according to the naturalist formulation of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, in brief that any act in a situation will become a law of nature. Then it follows that robbing people of their individuality in interactions with their fellow human beings becomes a universal law, and I think we can all imagine how this world would be if our treatment of people reflected their skin color, sex, gender, and so on, rather than who they are as individuals.

The sins of your ancestors haunt you today

From a social justice perspective those who are not oppressed carry the responsibility for the acts of our ancestors, and need to check our privilege, which is a code word for “accept the blame” for what our ancestors did. The idea being a form of guilt by association or benefiting from a criminal act in the past, of which you are still reaping the rewards. If your ancestors were white, male, CIS, and Christian in 1940, then it follows for a Social Justice Warrior that the more of those boxes that are ticked, the guiltier you are of benefiting from the treatment of minorities in the past. This is the same principle of the “poisoned blood” that underlies the collective punishment of 3 generations of a family for the sins of one member. This is perfectly in line with the source of collectivist ideology, Karl Marx, who divided society into classes without regard for the individuals that make up those classes.

The concept of inheritable sin is highly questionable from an individualist perspective, because each person builds their own merit or lack of merit, irrespective of their bloodline or association. Which is really the key to how they attempt to dismantle merit as a metric, by inherently poisoning it based on “benefiting from a criminal act committed in the past“. If two people are running against each other in a race and one party has a “historical handicap” to a social justice warrior this means that the same handicap has to be applied to the other person. The amusing aspect of this is that the two people engaged in the race, may be perfectly equal based on merit or any other metric, but history dictates that one should be offered benefits and one should receive a handicap. The individual past of the families of each person does not matter, only the collective perception of biological and social characteristics from a historical perspective.

Ironically, for the enemies of ethnocentrism and xenophobia, they are guilty of judging the past by their current modern standards of morality and perspective. Meaning that rather than judging people based on the common behavior in their time, they are judged by a standard that did not exist during their existence. It makes just as little sense to condemn the doctors during the black plague for not giving the people suffering antibiotics as it does to hold people to the social justice warrior moral standards of today.

Summary and conclusions

As I outlined in the beginning these two principles exist for to permit social justice warriors to allocate the guilt and responsibility for acts committed in the past, to persons in the present. This is central to the concept of obtaining justice for groups who did not actually get oppressed personally, by blaming and requiring reparations be made by groups who did not actually oppress anyone personally. In essence, it is a game of benefits by association and guilt by association steeped in the concept of sins of the father.

Ironically enough, in their fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on, they in fact rely on the exact same descriptors that they argue the ancestors of the “privilege enjoyers” were guilty of. Where perhaps one of my ancestors had the same views on woman as most men in his day had, the social justice warriors attempt to flip this to make up for it for today’s women. If your categories were oppressed and marginalized in some manner in the past, you should be given disproportionate freedom and public platforms today in order to correct a past wrong. However, by forgoing nuance for expedience in processing, they may end up further oppressing those who have been historically oppressed for the benefit of those who have already derived great benefits from history. I’m reminded of the statement “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind“, in that once you start judging people by the colour of their skin rather than the strength of their character, by their sex rather than their ability, or other biological characteristics then you are by definition prejudice regardless of your intent.

2 a (1) : preconceived judgment or opinion (2) : an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge [1]

In the case of the beneficial treatment, you are prejudiced according to definition 1, in the case of the statements of “check your privilege” you are guilty according to definition 2. As the injustice done was not extending equal opportunity to every citizen in the past, does it follow that this should be made up for with equal outcomes in the present? Furthermore, as equal opportunity was not just restricted based on convenient and visual ques adored by social justice warriors, does it follow that one should base the repayment purely on those criteria? Are we going to end up with an SJW mob screaming that you need to present your grandfathers tax return, racial makeup documents, and voter registrations dating back to the first time anyone in your family voted so they can determine if you have to check your privilege or if it’s fine in carry-on?

Sources:

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prejudice