Privilege is an outgrowth of the social justice movement, that branch of political activism that asserts there’s an inherent unfairness, and prejudice, rooted in American life. This unfairness manifests itself in the oppression, grievance, and victimization of women, nonwhites, gays, lesbians, and even transsexuals. It’s an ideology that demands that the country’s very foundations, customs, and norms be reordered to right all of its wrongs. The goal of the movement isn’t always clear because it frequently changes, depending on which set of people is deemed to have suffered adequately and which set is guilty of some form of privilege. Because the movement operates largely by using shame, it can sometimes seem that shame is in itself the objective.

Friedrich Nietzsche directly influenced today’s version of social justice by asserting that there is an inseparable link between morality and power. He wrote in his 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality that those who wished to overthrow the established hierarchy intended to invert it so that the bottom would become the top and vice versa. This wasn’t his prescription for society, but rather a severe criticism of the tendency to view society’s subordinates as inherently moral. “Only those who suffer are good,” he wrote with acrimony. “Only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!”

Nietzsche was identifying and criticizing the notion that those at the bottom of civilized societies should be presumed virtuous and admirable simply by nature of their suffering and disadvantages. But that concept is precisely what forms the basis of the present social justice movement. According to the movement and its ideology, the good, virtuous, and admirable are those who claim to have been aggrieved on account of their race, gender, or sexuality. Under social justice, asserting grievance and claiming oppression earns an individual a higher moral worth than those who are deemed “privileged.”

Who has the power in America’s culture now? The social justice movement does, and that power is reinforced by Hollywood, the news media, academia, and much of the Washington political establishment. Social justice ideology first spread through the universities and from there, to the other hubs of American culture. It went from university academics, who taught it to their students, and then flowed from them to screenwriters and journalists. What’s seen in Hollywood entertainment and in national newspapers, on the TV news, and on the internet becomes a piece of our collective culture. With enough repetition, it’s then absorbed into the mainstream. This is how social justice ended up everywhere.

The ridiculous notion that individuals hold their own truths, as reflected in the asinine “live your truth” mantra, is a key feature of the social justice movement’s ideology. It’s linked to what early 20th-century Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs called “standpoint epistemology.” Epistemology is the philosophy of understanding human knowledge. Standpoint epistemology, or standpoint knowledge, holds that the perspective of a certain person can lend that individual access to a unique truth that others don’t have and can never obtain. Lukacs developed the concept in his 1923 work History and Class Consciousness, in which he refers to a kind of “knowledge” held by people of the working class that “stands on a higher scientific plane objectively.”

In essence, depending on an individual’s identity — race, gender, sexuality, or any combination thereof — he or she will have access to a truth unobtainable to anyone who doesn’t share that identity. Furthermore, social justice dictates that these truths must be acknowledged as unchallengeable and that the “victims” who profess to hold them are to be regarded with reverence.

In America, the earliest signs of social justice in its current state began in the 1960s. Postmodern theories and ideas about class resentments and struggles made their way from Western Europe, spread among academics, and eventually gave birth to the third-wave feminist movement, according to New York University professor Michael Rectenwald. They spun off from there, creating the things that normal people now dread: political correctness, affirmative action, calls for reparations, identity politics, civil rights for infinite special classes of citizens, and on and on.

Because the social justice ideology, the movement, and its enforcers operate outside the purview of normal people, they have their own concepts and terms, some or all of which you might not have heard before.

According to Rectenwald, “social justice” as a well-intentioned remedy to economic, societal problems traces back to the 1840s, when Italian Catholic Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio used the term to describe “the glaring lack of an adequate Catholic response to industrialism and urbanization, with their associated social and economic symptoms.” It was the “supplanting of guild-based cottage industries by urban factories [and] the displacement of workers” during the Industrial Revolution that moved d’Azeglio to state that a certain social justice was required to remedy the impact it had had on the laborers.

During that period, factories and advancements in machinery disrupted the working classes of Western Europe, just as automation has done to the Midwest in America today. The technological shift created economic opportunity for some at devastating expense to others. “The original social justice,” writes Rectenwald, “amounted to the protection and mobilization of small charitable and philanthropic organizations to address (but not eliminate) the recalcitrant social facts of individual, economic, and political inequality, which had been exacerbated under the new industrial economy.”

In short, there were private charities that worked to ameliorate the effects of job displacement and poverty of the industrial age. That was considered social justice. It stands in contrast to today’s social justice movement, which is only tangentially concerned with uplifting the impoverished. It instead trains its energy on bringing down the “privileged” and reordering the social hierarchy around identity and grievance. It wants the moral superiority of the oppressed moved to the top and nothing less.

Feminists of the 1980s did most of the work in bringing social justice from academia to the rest of America. In her 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism, influential feminist Sandra Harding writes that “by starting from the lived realities of women’s lives, we can identify the grounding for a theory of knowledge that should be the successor to both Enlightenment and Marxist epistemologies.” In other words, Harding is asserting that women, simply by nature of their gender, possess a particular knowledge that should function as the viewpoint by which the world operates.

If standpoint knowledge functions as the brain of social justice ideology, its heart is intersectionality, an ever-shifting ranking system that determines who is more aggrieved than the next, who deserves more deference than the other. It’s a hazy, nonconcrete way of measuring overlapping identities and their corresponding hardships and victimhood. The more cross sections of oppressed identities an individual can claim, the higher his or her status on the intersectionality scale.

It gets messy even within the movement. Who can say whether one person is more aggrieved than another? Is a black woman more or less oppressed than a white gay man? Is a Latino man more or less privileged than a Palestinian transgender woman? Is a Native American man more or less aggrieved than a lesbian Asian woman? It’s all worked out through a type of never-ending oppression Olympics, a competition for the title of Most Aggrieved. The judges are the social justice enforcers, the culture fascists in academia, in Hollywood, in the news media, and in political Washington.

Black feminist author Gloria Watkins, better known by her pen name "bell hooks," helped usher in the intersectionality ranking system in her 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, a critique of the feminist movement of the 1960s. In that book, she argues that the movement overlooked struggles against forms of oppression that fall outside of gender, and outside of white women in particular. She writes, “Within society, all forms of oppression are supported by traditional Western thinking. ... Sexist oppression is of primary importance … [because] it is the practice of domination most people are socialized to accept before they even know that other forms of group oppression exist.” She continues, “Since all forms of oppression are linked in our society because they are supported by similar institutional and social structures, one system cannot be eradicated while the others remain intact.”

Hooks maintains that the most discussed grievance of the time, the lack of women’s sexual and economic independence, was only the first step in addressing other forms of oppression not yet acknowledged by society. That observation was a prescient prediction of the situation in present-day America, with its bottomless well of grievance and oppression.

The most up-to-date idea of privilege, social justice theory’s ultimate adversary, was pushed into the mainstream by Peggy McIntosh, who is famous for her 1988 essay, White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies. The essay builds on 1960s feminism but ventures into race by critiquing the privilege of white people in everyday life. Without ever using the phrase, McIntosh talks about the hierarchy of intersectionality. She refers to it instead as “interlocking oppressions.” And without ever using the phrase, she introduces social justice ideology’s most potent weapon — the modern-day struggle session: the command to “check your privilege” in front of the masses.

“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” she writes. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.”

She goes on to give 46 examples of white privilege she personally enjoys, an exercise that college students are now instructed to replicate at universities all over the country. (I personally went through it during a mandatory freshman-level course.)

Among McIntosh’s examples of her white privilege are: “I can be reasonably sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me”; “I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives”; and, “Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance that I am financially reliable.”

McIntosh’s “knapsack of special provisions” might have simply served as an innocuous set of observations about unrecognized prejudices if it weren’t for the second half of her essay. That part takes a maniacal nosedive and suggests that those who possess privilege feel a sense of shame and a sense of responsibility to atone for something they had no say in.

“A man’s sex provides advantage for him whether or not he approves of the way in which dominance has been conferred on his group,” McIntosh writes. “A ‘white’ skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us.” She says that “individual acts can palliate, but cannot end” the cycle. “To redesign social systems,” she puts forth, “we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions.”

To redesign social systems. That’s the entire purpose of the social justice movement. It’s to remake society from top to bottom.

McIntosh concludes her essay by denouncing the “myth of meritocracy,” which she says is kept alive by “obliviousness about white advantage [and] obliviousness about male advantage” and is “kept strongly inculturated in the United States.”

This is social justice. It’s an ideology that says the America you understand today is fundamentally broken and that full equality is unobtainable without a complete overhaul of its current order and a total abandonment of what McIntosh called the “myth of meritocracy.” Social justice maintains that there is no meritocracy, only identity, oppression, and privilege. Those assumed to hold an advantage due to their race, gender, or sexuality must submit to the aggrieved in accordance with the new intersectionality hierarchy.

“Politics,” says Rectenwald, “is reduced by social justice warriors to a series of … Facebook statuses, tweets, kneel-downs during the singing of the U.S. national anthem, and so forth.” This is called “virtue signaling” — overt gestures that communicate adherence to the movement and its ideology.

Social justice is centered on who can claim the highest form of oppression, grievance, and victimhood at any given moment. It’s an endless competition in claiming to have been the most exploited, most subordinated, and most abused.

Social justice and its enforcers have created an ever-evolving, never-satisfied new class of people: the victims of privilege, who in turn become the privileged by victimization. They are our privileged victims.

Eddie Scarry is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner and the author of Privileged Victims: How America's Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People , from which this essay is adapted.