Do Not Dig Two Graves

Confucius was a pretty smart guy. His comment on revenge is spot on. We see it playing out now with the social justice movement. For many in Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other social justice organizations, the social justice movement is perhaps more about revenge than it is about justice.

In their quixotic quest for positions and money for which they might not otherwise qualify, they destroy the concept of excellence. But they also destroy two other key concepts.

First, the promotion based on race/gender undermines self-worth. When you take something you did not earn, it affects the psyche and self-esteem. Now some may not have the robust inner life to consciously understand it, but they almost certainly understand at the sub-conscious level. And their peers understand it and wonder whether the social justice advantaged person got the position on merit.

Second, with their efforts to re-write history, they undermine the two key documents that are society’s foundation: The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The goal of re-writing history is two-fold. First, it is to blacken the names of the Republic’s founders so that anything they did is questionable. Second, it is to consign the Constitution to the dustbin of history in order to create a new government without the checks and balances and philosophical foundations of the Republic.

What many in the social justice movement do not seem to understand is the philosophical underpinnings of the Republic, the checks and balances, and the market-based economy generate and perpetuate prosperity. Dig a grave for the Republic and you must also dig a grave for the people the social justice movement purports to help. Lowered prosperity will severely harm the poor as well as the middle class. Violence and the death toll, especially in urban areas, will rocket up.

Conservatives that seek to counteract the social justice movement and protect the Constitution need to be mindful of Confucius as well. If they approach the problem from a revenge perspective, they will need the same two graves. They could take down the social justice movements but destroy the Constitution in the process if they seek to destroy the social justice movement rather than educate and reform it.

The social justice movement is not really about justice. Justice is giving people what they have earned—either rewards or punishment based on their actions. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines justice as “the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments”. An impartial allocation is not what the social justice movement wants. Even if we extend the concept of justice to John Rawls’ concept, the social justice still does not fit into even this liberal concept of justice. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, “In Rawls’s egalitarian liberalism, citizens relate to each other as equals within a social order defined by reciprocity, instead of within the unjust status hierarchies familiar from today.” Now he wrote primarily in the 1960s and 1970s. He published his theory of justice in 1971, when society was still torn by racism and injustice. But note, he emphasizes fairness and equals with reciprocity. This is most decidedly not what the social justice movement aspires to today. They seek to forcibly redistribute wealth and build a culture based on race and victimhood.

The approach to resolve the social justice, “woke”, diversity, inclusion, and equity issue must be solution oriented and rooted in the concept of justice and liberty.

To be solution oriented, we must first define the problem rather than list the symptoms. The social justice movement is a symptom, not the root problem. The root problem is compound:

• There is a history of racism in the US. While the US has spent trillions of dollars on the issue and fixed most, if not all, of the structure problems, a lingering resentment remains. This resentment is the core of the problem.
• There is a resentment of wealth and education. This resentment triggered the Marxist utopian philosophy. It is why social justice is closely tied to Marxism and socialism.

In a nutshell, the problem is about power and wealth and how it is distributed in society. Conservatives can crush Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements and not solve the problem. That approach is like using antihistamines on a cold. They help with the symptoms, but do nothing about the underlying cold. In society, attacking BLM and other movements is like fighting a hydra. Cut one head off and another pops up. He and his nephew worked as a team to cut-off a head and cauterize it to keep it from growing back.

Figure 1 Hercules and his nephew fighting the Hydra From istockphoto

The next installment will look at a solution-based approach to avoid digging two graves and address the problem of “The Ultimate Revolution”.

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