World Day of Social Justice!

According to the UN, today, February 20, is the World Day of Social Justice! WooHoo!

Before we celebrate, however, what are we celebrating? The anodyne explanation on the UN webpage with its appeals to fairness, peace, and security? Or the way the nice sounding words, “Social Justice,” make you feel?

If you’re celebrating the former or get a warm feeling from the latter, you’re in for a surprise!

What’s the surprise? Let’s look at what, exactly, is meant by the phrase that goes by many names, wokeness, Critical Social Justice, Social Justice (note the uppercase “S” and “J”). Author and scholar Helen Pluckrose provides the best explanation of Social Justice I’ve ever come across, and it’s worth citing in its entirety:

1) Knowledge is a social construct created by groups in society. These groups are determined by their identity in terms of race, gender, sexuality and more and deemed to have dominant or marginalised positions in society.

2) The dominant groups – white, wealthy, straight, Western men – get to decide which knowledges are legitimate and which are not. They choose the ones that serve their own interests.

3) These legitimised knowledges then become dominant discourses in society and simply the way to speak about things. Everybody is unavoidably socialized into them and cannot escape being so.

4) People at all levels of society then speak in these ways – this creates and perpetuates systems of oppressive power like white supremacy, patriarchy and transphobia.

5) Most people cannot see the systems of oppressive power that they are complicit in because they have been socialised into having those very specific biases unconsciously.

6) Therefore, the systems of oppressive power are largely invisible and their existence and means of operation need to be theorised by Critical Social Justice activists.

7) Those who have studied Critical Social Justice theories – particularly the marginalised groups who subscribe to them – are then more able to see the invisible power systems and convey them to everybody else. (This is why they are often referred to as ‘the woke.’)

8) Social justice can only be achieved by making everybody believe in these theories. This entails seeing and affirming these invisible power systems and their own complicity in them, as well as committing to dismantling them.

9) Any disagreement with or resistance to affirming the above beliefs is evidence of either ignorance or selfish unwillingness to accept one’s complicity in the oppressive power systems and is automatically invalid.

10) Therefore, the liberal belief in the individual’s agency to evaluate a range of ideas and accept or reject them is a self-serving myth and liberalism, above nearly all other ideologies, is a major impediment to achieving social justice.

When Social Justice is explained according to what it actually means, that is, how proponents and Social Justice scholars use the term, it is so conspicuously ideological it is hard to believe any sane person—not to mention venerable institutional body like the UN—would subscribe to its tenets and then honor it with a day of celebration. 

Yet here we are! Social Justice is a universal solvent that has completely corroded virtually every major US institution and has now escaped the anglosphere. And to be clear, there is not an iota of evidence for any of it! Zero. In fact, it doesn’t even fall into the realm of testability and science because it is not falsifiable. There is no way to test its assumptions or see if they can survive scrutiny. (This is just one reason that proponents won’t debate.)

While there’s no need to buzzkill sober readers with multiple tales of horror from diversity, inclusion, and equity news stories, on this World Day of Social Justice! (exclamation mine) one item does stand out: The Biden administration issued an Executive Order on “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” Hooray! There will be equity apparatchiks in federal governmental agencies!  

Make no mistake, despite the saccharine language on the UN’s webpage, and the noble appeals to civil and human rights and legalese on The Whitehouse’s webpage, what’s really happening is institutionalized epistemic vandalism and systemically robbing individuals of their cognitive liberty. Yay! To grok this, you need to slow down and re-read Helen’s explanation of Social Justice. What Biden is doing, and what most universities have already done, is further compromise the legitimacy of our institutions by implementing divisive, untested, morally fashionable ideas. And these ideas have consequences: they transform public institutions into bodies that cannot be trusted because of the corruption of institutional missions. Simultaneously, mechanisms are embedded to prevent course correction.  

And if this isn’t enough to make you celebrate the World Day of Social Justice! and my overuse of exclamation points as unguents didn’t help, then just stay tuned! The fun really begins when you start to vocally question Social Justice laws, procedures, and policies! Whoopee!