Thinking Critically About Social Justice
3rd March 2018
Silicon Valley has historically had a reputation for being quite libertarian, but it appears to be becoming increasingly intolerant towards conservatives and even libertarians. Companies seem to be rapidly adopting a culture of social justice that is far more consciously activist than the libertarianism and/or moderate liberalism that preceded it. As a consequence, conservatives and libertarians are now viewed less as people with different views, and more as obstacles to moral progress, thus justifying their harassment.
Most corporations these days are developing the atmosphere of a Communist re-education camp, in which ‘diversity’ is the unquestionable Party Line and those who don’t Love Big Brother are in danger of finding themselves on the street. In part this is just a response to modern culture: Those companies who don’t toe the Party Line open themselves to expensive lawsuits and boycotts; the NRA and its (former) partners are just the most recent poster children to be marched through the streets with their hands bound behind them and insulting placards around their necks.
There’s something missing from the social justice narrative though, demonstrated by the situation in Silicon Valley and those other fields I mentioned: it doesn’t take into account the power and oppression it exerts itself. In a society where social justice advocates are outside the dominant power structure—as was the case when these ideas were originally articulated—this doesn’t matter much, since their power is negligible. That’s increasingly no longer the case, as social justice advocates have come to exert major influence over central areas of society, and consequently have also gained substantial power over society as a whole. Clearly, an accurate model of societal power must include social justice ideology and its advocates.
I object to the term ‘social justice’ in its entirety. There is no qualified justice: Justice is Justice, and sticking an adjective on the front of it is an attempt to hijack a term in pursuit of a political agenda. (This is of a piece with other statist propaganda tools: ‘price gouging’, ‘war profiteering’, ‘black market’, etc.) Justice is inherently social — there is no ‘justice’ outside of society, so saying ‘social justice’ is like saying ‘damp water’. The use of the term ‘social justice’ is like the use of ‘gay marriage’, an attempt to steal the positive connotation of a social institution in promotion of a program that, objectively viewed, would be entirely outside, if not contrary to, the historic meanings of the term.