Social Justice for Dummies

I finally “get it".  I finally understand the theory of Social Justice.

In Florida a recently passed constitutional amendment would restore voting rights to convicted felons who have completed their sentences.  Now a political groups claims that convicted felons in Florida who would otherwise be eligible to vote under recently passed Amendment 4 are unable to do so because they are unable to afford to pay the fine and costs or restitution which was imposed as part of their felony sentence. They can’t vote because they can’t pay and that’s unfair.  That violates the equal protection clause under the U.S. constitution. Felons should not be responsible for the financial consequences of their crimes to the victims of those crimes.

Meanwhile, those same champions of voting rights for felons also believe that the people of this country should make some compensatory payments – reparations - to the descendants of African slaves.  They hold that we as Americans are corporately responsible for a crime committed over 150 years ago. Therefore I, a non-slave owner and the child of non-slave owners who were themselves children of non-slave owners, should be financially responsible for this historic social wrong.

These two examples cleared the definition of Social Justice up for me.  At its core Social Justice consists of developing a political agenda to reach preordained goals that requires its adherents to hold diametrically opposed opinions concurrently by force of will alone, without the benefit of logic or reason. Its practice requires the claiming or declaiming of responsibility and assigning the same in absolutely paradoxical ways in respect to others. It means living in the land of subtle hues and shadows where the strong sunlight of careful reasoning, interpolation and logical progression never illuminate the darkness.  It means holding core beliefs that are as flexible and elastic as rubber bands.

Ultimately Social Justice is about the subsuming of individual rights and responsibilities under the greater good as decided by the political beliefs of those in charge.  It is about shaming vast segments of society with kind of faux guilt for situations and events far outside their ability to control or affect meanwhile absolving individuals of crimes and the responsibility to pay for them for political purposes.

Writ large this philosophy creates a society where situational ethics guided by political goals become the deciding factor in every situation. It vacuums away individual responsibility for volitional actions. It is the mortal end of RIGHT and WRONG.

We have seen this exact type of social engineering before in the histories of war-time Germany and Japan and the Stalinism of the Soviet Union. Individual justice is swept away by the broom of authoritarianism labeled as what is “best for society as a whole”. Results in those countries were seemingly less than satisfactory.