Deal with the world as it is, not how you’d like it to be.
Jack Welch
What is Social Justice?
The social justice movement goals are a fair and equal treatment of all people, regardless of class, race, gender and sexual orientation. Historically this was not the case. And even today, despite better safety nets, a more tolerant society and anti-discrimination laws.
There are two main problems with how the social justice movement’s ideas play out in reality. Problem one is that social justice is not entirely achievable. The world is inherently unfair. Wealth and opportunity are naturally unequal. Problem two is that some of the “equality” Goals of the movement are disconnected from reality. The methods of achieving them are even more disconnected from reality. And the language used and cancel culture are counterproductive.
Here is a classic example: slavery reparations
Enslaved black people were abused, their descendants started with nothing, were segregated to live in poor, less developed and more polluted locations, and thus continued the cycle of suffering until today. So it is fair to pay something to their descendants from our common wealth pool.
However, the people who came with the term “reparations” for this show exactly what is so wrong with the social justice movement. Reparations are synonymous with guilt.
So it’s no surprise that many white people do not want to hear about reparations because they don’t want to associate themselves with guilt. Guilt is not a helpful emotion. If you want something to happen, give it the best possible name. Not one that will divide people, but one that would unite them.
Ideas are only as good for actual Change as our expression of these ideas.
If we go to a wealthy person to ask about money for any good cause, the proper way is to phrase the problem and then ask them “would you consider helping”… Anything more aggressive and guilt-inducing becomes counterproductive. There is a line you better not cross. This line is usually not respected in the language publicly used by the social justice movement.
We have clearly lost common ground and language. And social justice is one of the major driving factors for this.
The uncompromising nature of the social justice movement comes from its obsession with equality. And striving for full equality is in a way striving for purity. And purity in a messy world just doesn’t exist.
Social Justice and Cancel Culture
Cancel culture is ineffective. The canceled person will not change their views. Probably the opposite. They will become less visible and more extreme and dangerous. Canceling is not dialogue. It’s merciless destruction.
There is an even worse subcase – cancelling a scientist. Scientists will not share actual findings because they are not culturally acceptable. Scientists may be flawed and biased but the solution to this is leaning even more onto the Scientific method with high standards such as double blind trials. Just let Science be science and get out of its way. Here is a great talk on this matter with Richard Dawkins.
But canceling companies is great (similar to divesting campaigns):
- Companies change more than people do when faced with an existential risk;
- Companies are not people and can be hurt without it being immoral;
- Companies have to maintain a good reputation to sell and to have investors.
So target companies instead! Unethical companies or ones with very bad products/services should not exist. Destroy them!
The social justice movement and its goals are justified and very important. But the messaging is divisive. This radicalizes people and radicalized people are a disastrous loss for society. The only path forward is searching for and finding common ground.
The Social Justice Movement and Wealth Inequality
This is the most effective part of the movement since being poor makes any other disadvantages like race, gender and sexual orientation much worse while being a problem in its own right, including for our mental health. Fighting the super-rich abusing tax loopholes and offshore heavens is not controversial.
Remember that the thoughts and words we use seep into our culture and have a power of their own.
People don’t develop empathy under hate. But companies develop better rules and practices under scrutiny.
Some industries are evil by nature and structure. So you can also target entire industries.
If you’re wealthy, you have the means (time, resources, money to divest) to fight wealth inequality. If you really mean well, it’s moral to become rich, as long as you’re committed to spending your wealth in ways beneficial to others.
First you need to leave behind the fear of being a bad person if you happen to have it. Then understand how money works and what you need to build a successful business. All while being in Hunter mode as much as possible.
The Social Justice Movement and Feminism
Society pressures women in profoundly unfair ways – stricter social and beauty standards, not enough financial support when bearing and raising children, cultural patriarchy remnants from the past, higher risks of sexual assault, domestic violence… it’s a very long list but everything in it decreases Freedom. Women also earn less money than men for the same work, known as the Gender Pay Gap.
Women have less self-esteem in a trust-based, Bullshit-tolerant world where the ignorant person who boldly claims to be able to handle a project is chosen over the quiet person who actually can handle it.
Women are also disproportionately affected by the fear of being a bad person.
But complaining distracts you from searching for options.
The root problems are:
- historical distribution of power and wealth and patriarchal culture leading to double standards
- the way parents raise boys vs girls.
Leaving women aside regarding big decisions for much of human history was undoubtedly wrong and unfair. But blaming modern men for all past wrongs is not a path forward. Division won’t heal the wounds. Blame is not constructive, even when deserved.
Let’s talk about this privately with our closest people. Men are quite ignorant about many of the challenges women face and need to hear about them from their loved ones in an emotional and personal way. Then they will understand. Extreme public messaging only makes the problem worse.
The upbringing that teaches girls to be more moral than experimental and more cautious rather than brave is a problem of clueless parents passing their fears and Sheep-mode mentality to their kids and more to the girls than the boys. Again private, empathetic conversations with no blame involved can help.
And we need a much better education system that stimulates Freedom, not conformity.
The Social Justice Movement and Race
Racism exists all over the world. But given its history of slavery and then segregation of the black population, we have a typical example of race as a historic root of inequality. We call all of this systemic racism.
On an individual level, racist people exist as well. Humans biologically have higher trust in individuals that look and behave like them.
But instead of building understanding and tolerance as we grow, the problem is often largely amplified by culturally absorbing racism from our environment – older people who lived in a more racist past and gave us biases; right-wing populists; other contemporary racists that the previous two options already created.
This results in almost all white people having at least some implicit bias which we can explain with all of this influence getting into our subconsciousness. So even well-meaning people can make racially motivated decisions.
There are two logical approaches:
We can try to ignore race (Racial color blindness) and focus on helping disadvantaged people based on class instead, like offering poor students a college scholarship. This TED talk is a great introduction to this approach.
Or we can take proactive action to prevent any possible racial injustice. This is known as Affirmative action. Most followers of the social justice movement are supporters of affirmative action, not just in regard to race but also gender.
Moderate affirmative action in personal decisions is great. For example, if you want to mentor someone young, why not choose a person disadvantaged by race?
But the bigger the decision, the more official the process becomes, the more justifications you need to provide, and the more the people not chosen will be very unhappy if they knew race played even a small role.
At the worst extreme, creating any rule based on affirmative action is a powder keg. You may expect people to understand but being on the losing side of even a small injustice (or a perceived one) reveals a very dark, primitive side in almost all human beings. Anger, when treated unfairly, is built into us at such a deep biological level that even monkeys show the same behavior in experiments. You cannot change biology. You can only listen to it.
You cannot solve a millennia-old cultural problem with a simple rule like a quota and not expect any collateral damage. This is not how the world works.
Affirmative action that goes beyond racial discrimination prevention makes white people very angry. So angry that they are willing to share it and make their peers angry too. With all the sharing Truth gets twisted into a more ugly version, leading to the illusion in some people’s minds that there is a political war waged on the white race. And this feeling gives fuel to dangerous white supremacy movements.
Here we come to the problem of entitlement. Angry people benefit no one and certainly not the group their anger is focused on.
Extreme affirmative actions are quite rare, but in half the public’s eye, they are not. The place for brave affirmative action is in our private decisions, not public policy.
We didn’t come to a completely fair solution. But in reality, total fairness does not exist. Color-blindness is a slow approach which means more injustice will be experienced in time. But better to get there in the end and not risk making everything worse. Reality cannot be ignored.
The Social Justice Movement and LGBTQ
Another key area where the movement has done great work is regarding equal rights and better understanding for everyone with a different sexual orientation or gender expression. Important issues that were taboo for centuries are now finally mainstream.
The LGBTQ were historically oppressed, systematically imprisoned or murdered and many more experienced discriminating policies and hate crimes.
Tens of millions of human beings had to live in fear and hide their true feelings and identity just because they were different. A personal regard which shouldn’t really concern others at all.
Developed countries have come a long way since, with most people today being more educated and much more tolerant. This gives many people the Freedom to publicly express themselves for the very first time in history, ever. As they have no experience handling this Freedom and the joy that comes with it, they can be loud and expressive. Many conservative people consider this a deliberate provocation, targeting values like family and traditional society.
Love is a good bridge for empathy between people: LGBTQ people fall in love in ways just as beautiful.
As we discussed in the Love post, it’s hard to choose who we fall in love with. LGBTQ people have a much higher chance for one-sided love, especially when being young in school, surrounded by almost entirely straight peers. Combine this with the shock to realize that you’re different, then the anxiety of coming out to your parents and friends… It’s no surprise that mental health problems are much more common among LGBTQ youth.
So proper education on these topics is important. Don’t worry, learning that gay people exist won’t make a single straight kid gay. Science is highly in favor of the theory that once a baby is born, sexuality is pretty much set in stone.
Of course, for bisexual people, it may seem changing but this is exactly what bisexual means. Many guys and especially girls learn they are bi later in life.
Trans people are harder to understand. I found someone who explained it well enough. Abigail is amazing, and you should definitely check out her Youtube channel as a great example of non-divisive, highly educational social justice communication.
If you think LGBTQ people are a threat to society, bring all the empathy you have to the table and get to know individual people. You’ll find out they are just people like you and me. And they have been through a lot.
After the movement achieved important milestones like marriage equality, it starts focusing on less important issues.
In developed countries the movement publicly obsesses about gender pronouns, but this is not an issue big enough for the discussion space it now occupies. The pronoun saga overcomplicates everyday matters and is not a constructive way to go. It would be much better if everyone just scaled down the pressure on using a non-offensive word that, even if accidentally gotten wrong, was not meant to mean harm.
Having to walk on eggshells in everyday conversations contributes to everyone’s anxiety in an already anxious world.
And if you force 99% of the population to make any effort so 1% of the population don’t accidentally get their feelings hurt by a word that is not offensive or intentional, you’re playing with social fire.
At the same time LGBTQ have it very hard in many parts of the world – even if most of them manage to hide under the radar and survive, having to live your life in Fear, hiding your true identity, is completely incompatible with Happiness. This is a life and death issue. The pronouns matter, but not for life and death.
And if we really cared for the people with life and death issues, we wouldn’t be triggered by pronouns.
Let’s have perspective and use our Energy and Resources where they are most desperately needed.
The Social Justice Movement and Representation
What about the representation of women, black or LGBTQ people in art, movies, books, etc? Can we just agree the answer is “whatever” and let creators create art? From a practical standpoint it’s good for disadvantaged people to see that others like them can be protagonists and matter in popular culture. But art cannot be planned and any type of pressure on it is extremely damaging.
Why the social justice movement may cause a bigger problem than you think
Massive social unrest is one of the most serious threats to humanity. Many countries, where young men were angry, descended into anarchy or civil wars with terrible consequences.
Social division is the first step to this. The social justice movement needs to acknowledge that it’s causing a lot of anger with some of its messaging. And that undeserved anger is still anger. Justice will fail everyone if angry people with guns take to the streets. And while this may seem unthinkable in the modern age, no one expected the French Revolution either. A growing number of people are so angry in their filter bubble that they want to see the world burn.
In terms of ideas, rights and the fight for spreading information and getting attention, social justice is making a lot of progress. But this comes at the price of radicalization of the ones we blame or leave behind.
Many white men have the dangerous feeling of being cornered and attacked from all directions. It doesn’t matter if it’s Truth or fiction; if it’s true in their heads, it’s their reality and they need dialogue and help. Blame will not help!
Many of these men are privileged and have extreme views resulting from division and propaganda, but others are poor and it would be wrong to call them privileged. They are fighting decreasing jobs, evil corporate employers and rising costs of living and feel not just threatened but also abandoned. Affirmative action quotas and other real or perceived injustices make these people feel extremely angry. This is not the way to go. Reality has to be more important than equality in its impossibly pure form.
Let reality guide us.
This means that the people in the movement bear extra personal responsibility. Everything you say, write, post or share becomes a part of one of the most influential movements in world history. So every time before you post, pause and ask yourself three questions:
Is my post an objectively true?
If so:
Does this post add valuable ideas or insight not already popular on the Internet?
(If it truly does, post it no matter the answer to the third question)
If it doesn’t add a unique perspective, ask a third question:
Will this post have a uniting or dividing effect on society?
If it’s uniting, post it. Otherwise, don’t.
Society cannot handle more division. If you want to be a trailblazer, be a uniting one. We need you!
