Infallibility and Violence

There's a video going around the internet that shows Jordan Hunt, a Toronto hairdresser and pro-choice activist kicking a woman in the face for espousing pro-life views.  During an annual peaceful pro-life demonstration in Toronto where many women were holding up signs expressing their views, one man came along and decided that—unlike the peaceful sign-holding pro-choice demonstrator already present—he was entitled and obligated to express his opinion more directly and silence the women protesters.  He started drawing on their signs, trying to deface and destroy the message they were conveying.  He started drawing and writing on their clothes with a permanent marker, trying to force them to carry around his words instead of their own.  When one of the protesters started filming this behavior and approached him, pointing out that what he was doing was destroying the property of these women, his response was as follows: he asked her for her opinion on a question where pro-life and pro-choice people have differing views—should a 16 year-old rape victim be allowed to have an abortion to recover from the trauma of her rape and not have to have her life further disrupted by it, or does the life of the unborn baby outweigh the horrid circumstances of her birth and the crimes of her rapist father?  When the woman voiced her opinion, which differed from Jordan's, he felt perfectly justified to resort to violence in order to silence her.

It is shocking to see someone allegedly standing up for women's rights so readily resort to using violence to suppress women who don't agree with him.  It is shocking, but sadly not uncommon to see those who ostensibly stand up for oppressed groups like blacks, immigrants, and women viciously lash out at members of these groups who dare voice their dissent.  Witness the racial slurs hurled at black people like Candice Owens or Kayne West by those who supposedly hate racism for these "race traitors" daring to have and give voice to a contrary political opinion.  Even silence is not enough to shield minorities from hate-filled epithets for stepping out of line.  Witness black police officers being treated with threats and hate for simply silently doing their jobs.  Even off the streets and in the supposedly civilized halls of academia it is the same.  Witness conservative women being branded with racial and sexual slurs and accused of internalized misogyny by mainstream media because they dared to vote for the wrong candidate in a free election.

The examples of this behavior could go on for days.  They are limitless, and according to the left only the most extreme examples might be unjustified.  After all, the social justice warriors on the left firmly believe that there's is the side of love and compassion.

And it is true that, from his perspective, it is more compassionate and loving to give a 16 year old rape victim the choice to have an abortion.  It is better to allow her that abortion to relieve her suffering than to spare the mere blob of cells in her uterus.  From his perspective to choice the opposite—to deny the girl the chance to relieve her suffering in favor of the "right to life" of a mere blob of tissue, a part of her body, is at best insane and at worst an act of active hatred and malice toward women.  The problem is that this isn't the only way to view the situation.  Others, like the woman in the video, have a different perspective.  From her perspective, a fetus isn't a mere blob of cells or a part of female anatomy: it is a human being, a baby girl.  From her perspective it is wrong to allow one human to end the life of another because her life or birth is inconvenient.  From her perspective it is madness at best or bloodthirstiness at worst to say that a rape victim should have the right to kill her unborn baby girl for the crime her father committed.

Similar differences exist between the social justice warriors of the left and conservatives on every other issue.  The left sees massive welfare programs as necessary to raise blacks out of poverty, and thus views any attempt to defund or dismantle them as hatred and oppression of blacks.  Conservatives see massive welfare programs as preventing blacks from becoming economically independent and trapping them in poverty, and views attempts to expand and reinforce them as oppression and hatred of blacks.  The left sees police violence against blacks as excessive and motivated by racial animus, and therefore views support of the police as hateful and threatening toward blacks.  Conservatives sees violent clashes between the police and black criminals as the inevitable result of high black crime rates—which primarily victimize law-abiding blacks, and views opposition to the police as encouraging the criminals victimizing law-abiding blacks and destroying black neighborhoods.  The list could go on and on.  On both sides each has a perspective which leads it to see the opposition as hateful and wrong.

But actual violence and hateful rhetoric is primarily the domain of the left, not the right.  The left has Anti-Fa, a large international coalition of activists dedicated to using riots, vandalism, slurs, and violence to silence political opponents (and frequently anyone else who stands in their way).  They're bad enough they've been labeled as a terrorist organization.  Before that they had BLM, which encouraged race riots and the beating of non-blacks, though ultimately denying responsibility for the kidnapping and torture of a white disabled student.  All the time on TV, in the newspapers, and from their pedestals in Hollywood the left has the mainstream media spewing invective (and occasionally threats) at anyone who dares take an opposing political stance.  While there are occasional acts of violence from conservatives (such as the murder of a counter protester by a member of the alt-right at Charlottesville) and small groups that spew violence or hate (such as Westboro Baptist Church), there are no large overarching groups dedicated to spreading violence and hate toward their political opposition.  Furthermore, you can approach a conservative friend on social media or Facebook with a dissenting opinion, and while they may argue with you and some may even insult your intelligence, they won't throw hateful slurs at you to silence you and sever your friendship without even giving you a chance to finish explaining your position.  A left leaning friend on social media, however, usually will.

When the disagreements are equal and proportional, why is the left so much more prone to react to disagreement with violence and hate than the right?  There are many possible answers.  One that many conservatives use among themselves is the idea that shouting names and hitting people is what children do when they've lost an argument.  According to this answer, the left's positions are indefensible, self-evidently untrue, and so when they face opposition their only recourse is to shout obscenities and use violence.  However, this ignores the fact that there is some internal logic to the social justice positions of the left.  However deeply (and reasonably) conservatives may disagree with the premise, it follows that if a fetus is not alive or human and the woman who carries it is, then it is better to kill the fetus than to make the woman suffer.  College university courses and professors offer abundant evidence that when the left wants to they can put together convincing arguments for their positions: else they would not be nearly so successful at converting university graduates into social justice activists.  Furthermore if they all believed, at heart, that they'd lost the argument, it's unlikely many of them would continue to cling to their political views.

Instead, I believe a more likely answer for Jordan Hunt's motive lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the tantrums of a child who knows they have lost: the hubris of a man who believes his position infallible.

Conservatives owe their tolerance for other viewpoints to a willingness to discuss, debate, and exchange ideas.  It is a willingess born of a desire to understand other view points, and the knowledge that ones own viewpoint may be incomplete and flawed without information or a perspective from the other side.  Conservatives are willing to admit they are wrong.  They believe in an objective truth which, while obtainable, takes effort to know and that no one can fully know without looking beyond their own limited perspective.  They are, on most things, willing to believe that their positions are fallible and may be incorrect.  This gives them the ability to listen to and engage with other viewpoints in a non-confrontational and non-violent way—though a few, of course choose not to do so.

On the other side, as a pundit once observed, "social justice warriors always double-down."  Rather than admitting they were mistaken in their claims or actions, they deflect, obfuscate, and try to push forward the same claims and actions once again, but harder.  This can be seen most recently in the left's dumbfounded reaction to the election of Donald Trump: where, as any moderately neutral observer could tell them, they made the triple mistakes of being caught in political corruption, running on a platform that was more identity politics than substance, and attacking whites and males on the basis of sex and race for opposing them politically.  Yet none of this occurred to the left which instead has spent the past two years chasing ghosts of Russian hacking and collusion (while forgetting that the alleged hacking was only important because it revealed the left's own corruption) only to come to the midterm elections and the Kavanaugh nomination and make exactly the same three mistakes again, but even more obviously and overtly: be caught (by doing it openly) corruptly using alleged sexual assault victims and fake gang rape charges in an effort to derail a nomination, push forward the charges and their entire political platform on a narrative of women's identity politics with no substance whatsoever, and then castigate whites and males for their race and gender when they don't fall into line.  Unsurprisingly, this appears to have cost the Democrats in the polls and made a close race out of what was otherwise to be a blue landslide.  Why does the left keep doing this to itself?  Because fundamentally, they cannot admit that their own perspective is fallible.

At bottom, this is because they don't view truth as an objective thing we are all searching for and that none of us can fully grasp without looking beyond our own perspectives: something which we may find contradicts our own perspectives.  Rather, the social justice left has a Post-Modernist view of truth as completely subjective.  To them truth is one's perspective, one's point of view, one's lived experiences.  There is no possibility in Post-Modernism, of finding a truth which contradicts or invalidates one's perspective or lived experiences.  Those experiences are truth!  And when one's perspective is truth, when there does not exist any objective truth out there that might run contrary to one's lived experiences, then one's opinions and positions become by definition infallible.

This idea of the infallibly true individual perspective was marketed by the professors and teachers of the left as something that would create a more tolerant and amicable society.  Demonstrably, it has done quite the opposite.  When a man's position is infallible, he need not listen to nor understand any opposing view point.  When his very life experience is the infallible truth, then any criticism of what he believes is akin to an attack on his person itself.  When every person's perspective is an infallible subjective truth, argument is violence and there is no point to argument except to dominate another person by a lesser act of violence.  Working from this perspective, the left sees every contrary opinion as a personal attack, a microaggression, a miniaturized act of violence in itself.  They have no need to tolerate it, because their position is infallibly true, and they can respond to it freely with hatred and violence the act of disagreement is in itself a violent provocation.  As the left is fond of saying, "words are violence" so it only makes sense that Jordan Hunt would respond to words with violence.  Whether the violence was directed towards a woman or not was irrelevant.  She violated his infallible truth, and in his view posed a threat to other women.  In that moment, that made it right for him to attack her in order to silence her

The left is not the first or only group to fall prey to violent partisanship based on their own belief in their inherent infallibility.  Some even within Christianity believe themselves to have grasped the absolute truth completely.  They believe that their perspective lines up entirely with the truth and is therefore infallible.  In my experience moderating a discussion forum for Christians, these were the most contentious people, who readily resorted to name-calling, personal attacks, and questioning of other members' eternal salvation over the slightest disagreement.  They believed their own position was infallible, so they had no need to hear out other perspectives, understand or even counter arguments from people with other opinions.  They already knew the infallible truth so they did not need to learn anything!  Further, since they believed they knew this truth from God, anyone who opposed them was engaged in hatred and rebellion against God and treating them with contempt and scorn was entirely justified.  Historically of course, there were other Christians.  The Bishops of Rome and Constantinople famously excommunicated each other because each believed himself and his positions infallible.  From there the branches of Christianity regularly split and diverged, many times violently, because each was convinced that theirs was the infallible truth and they need only punish those who criticized them as heretics.  While proclaiming love for God, they killed His children.  They forgot the humility so often extolled in the Bible, and forgot that even the Apostle Peter once needed to be reproved.

Today, in the face of rising secularism, many Christians are thankfully turning toward one another with humility again, though of course, not all choose to do so.  The left, meanwhile, holds ever closer to the belief in it's own birthright of infallible truth, and thus grows more and more hateful and violent toward outsiders, even those they proclaim they love and fight for.  They also become more and more riven with internal schisms and crusades against heresy that would not have been out of place in 15th Century Catholic Spain, were it not for the technology in use and the fact that the left (currently) lacks the political power to torture and execute those they despise as heretics.

But then of course, I am not a leftist or a social justice warrior.  I am a Christian and a conservative, and I don't believe my perspective is infallible truth.  I don't kick women for disagreeing with me or call people racial slurs for having a different opinion.  I listen, I reason, and I try to understand.  And if you think I'm wrong here, tell me why.  I am fallible, and I am willing to learn.

Traditional Justice vs Social Justice

General principles, such as "justice" or "equality," are often passionately invoked in the course of arguing about the issues of the day, but such terms usually go undefined or unexamined.  Often much more could be gained by scrutinizing what we ourselves mean by such notions than by trying to convince or overwhelm others.  If we understood what we were really saying, in many cases, we might not say it or, if we did, we might have a better chance to make ourselves understood by those who disagree with us.

—Thomas Sowell, "The Quest for Cosmic Justice"

It's not secret that championing for social justice is a huge part of our culture in America today.  It is also a hotly debated and deeply divisive issue.  On one side, you have those who see themselves as the champions of justice—social justice warriors, if you will—for the marginalized and oppressed groups of our country and the world at large, opposed to—as they see it—hateful bigots and promoters of injustice and inequality between groups.  But if you go to the other side, you'll find the opposition is also enamored with the idea of justice and equality for all people, talking about equal processes, egalitarianism, and the justice of meritocratic systems—all opposed, as they see it, to the gross injustices and inequalities of the bigoted social justice warriors themselves.  Both sides are concerned with equality, fairness, and justice, but both have different definitions of what justice is.  One group's views of justice are thoroughly modern and revolve around social causes, activism, progressivism, and righting the wrongs not only of society but of history and the cosmos itself.  The other group's views of justice are more traditional and revolve around individual liberties, rights, and merits, and about impartial systems modeled after the blindfolded goddess of justice from Greek mythology.  These concepts of justice are not merely opposite, but in many cases mutually exclusive, giving rise to plenty of conflict between these groups.

Individual vs Collective

While both traditional justice and social justice concern themselves with addressing the wrongs in the world, the type of wrongs and the object of justice differs.  For traditional justice the emphasis is on individual wrongs, crimes which can be assigned to individual culprits who can then be brought to justice.  Traditional justice looks at crimes like the embezzlement of funds by a banker, the rape of a woman, or the murder of a man, and it seeks to punish these crimes.

For social justice the emphasis is on social or cosmic wrongs for which no individual actor can be blamed.  It looks at wrongs like the greed and callousness of the wealthy toward the lower class, society's sexualization of women, the plight of those born with disabilities, and high arrest rates among racial minorities.  In addition, while traditional justice looks at individual victims and individual perpetrators, social justice looks at both victims and perpetrators as a group.  While individual examples of social justice wrongs are often widely publicized, the point with social justice warriors is never merely to punish an individual crime but rather to use that crime to raise awareness of the communal problem facing the whole group and to seek retribution from the group held responsible.  For example, while in traditional justice a male sexual predator found to have raped a young woman would be cause for punishment of that individual criminal and nothing more, in social justice the punishment of the individual rapist is almost immaterial: the real cause is using him as an example of how all men objectify all women and punishing men as a class for this wrong.  An example of this very thing can be seen in the #MeToo movement, where women are hailed as heroes for bringing forward their personal stories of abuse but withholding the identities of their abusers from the public and from authorities.  In traditional justice this would be a mockery of justice because it allows the individual perpetrator to escape and continue committing crimes, but in social justice it is a victory because it furthers the case for condemning all powerful men as sexual predators preying on all women.  As one social justice writer argues, "We Don’t Help Most Victims When #MeToo Becomes About Punishing Abusers...punishing individuals does not address the systemic forces that enable men to harass and assault people, mostly women, with impunity."  In much the same fashion false allegations of hate crimes and abuse (such as a black alumni activist and leader sending "white supremacist" death threats to her own school and fellow black students) are often justified and minimized by social justice advocates because even though the individual alleged crime is a fake (which is an affront to traditional justice), the larger social issue it was supposed to represent is real and gained attention from the hoax (which was all social justice advocates wanted).

The biggest problem with this idea of collective guilt is that it is really only humanly possible to determine guilt for anything on a case-by-case, individual-by-individual basis.  You cannot say for sure that every person even in a very small group like a family is guilty of a particular sin if you have not examined them each as individuals.  Since the groups social justice warriors seek to assign collective guilt to are generally vast demographics, they invariably wind up making sweeping accusations (as Marilyn French did when she said "all men are rapists"), only to have to back down from them when it's demonstrated that not all individuals in the group match the mold they've cast for them (with things like "not all men" disclaimers now commonly posted before social justice warrior's collective accusations of male guilt for their participation in a culture of patriarchal sin).  Social justice thus is inherently unjust in this respect because it assigns guilt to innocent individuals based solely on their group membership.  Likewise it assigns innocence or even victimhood to individuals who may have perpetrated crimes (such as female rapists and black racists) based solely on their membership in designated-victim demographic groups.

Actions vs Identity

As an extension of the above, traditional justice concerns itself with individual actions, whereas social justice concerns itself with group identities.  The distinction seems little more than a reiteration of the above emphasis on individual vs collective guilt, but the contrast is very stark when we compare the ideals of traditional justice to those of social justice.  The ideals of traditional justice are embodied by the blindfolded goddess Themis, with her scales in her hand.  Traditional justice weighs the actions of individuals to determine what their actions are and what reward or punishment they deserve.  Traditional justice is blind to the concerns of identity.  Ideally, rich and poor, young and old, men and women, black and white, are all one and the same before traditional justice, which cares only whether the actions of each of them as individuals are right or wrong and whether or not they've reaped the appropriate rewards or punishments for their deeds.

Social justice is just the opposite.  In social justice, guilt or victimhood is determined collectively and is based on group identity, most often broken down along broad demographic lines such as race, sexuality, gender, or gender identity.  Because this necessarily condemns innocent group members alongside guilty ones (and, by the same token, lumps guilty individuals into groups designated as "innocent" or "victims"), it is necessary for social justice warriors to, on some level, determine that individual actions are irrelevant.  Stories of individual crimes committed or suffered are still circulated, but only to serve as anecdotes to prove the reality that certain identities are always victims in need of protection and retribution and others always privileged perpetrators in need of punishment and repentance.  Disclaimers may acknowledge that "not all" members of this or that group have such experiences or are guilty of such wrongs, but these disclaimers are always followed by blanket accusations nonetheless, often including some point of argument that seeks to bring even the exceptions into the rule.  Thus in social justice the goddess discards her scales to remove her blindfold, because the only really relevant factor in social justice is identity, not actions.

The irony of this is that it tends to make social justice warriors, on some level, hypocrites to their own cause.  Ostensibly, they claim to oppose bigotry and prejudice of every kind.  They proclaim themselves the true opponents of racism and sexism, the true enemies of anyone or thing that judges others on their membership in demographic identities rather than by the actions that make them an individual human being.  And yet the ideology of social justice compels them to do the same, constantly judging everyone they come in contact with not on the basis of their actions as an individual human being but by their membership in a demographic group.  And since social justice encompasses and judges all group identities, social justice warriors often turn out to be, by their actions and words, more bigoted than the racists or sexists they oppose—as their opponents will often only hold prejudices and stereotypes about one group and may even discard those prejudices with group members they've come to know as individuals (that is, of course, assuming they ever held any prejudices at all), but social justice requires prejudice and stereotyping toward all groups, even one's own allies and friends.  And it requires it unceasingly: no amount of action can make social justice view a white straight woman as a black lesbian.  Even the most ardent champion of social justice remains tainted by their membership in a designated perpetrator group.

Opportunity vs Outcome

Another big focus with both traditional justice and social justice is the emphasis on fairness and equality.  But again, this is a place where differing ideas of what fairness and equality are lead to totally different philosophies.  In traditional justice, the emphasis is on equal opportunity and fair process.  This is embodied in the concept of a fair trial, where even if the outcome is a foregone conclusion the accused gets the same opportunity to defend him or herself by the same processes and rules as any other individual would have.  Equal process does not mean, however, equal chance of success.  A trial may still be just as fair if the evidence against the accused was slight and they were easily able to prove their innocence, or if it was overwhelming and their best efforts failed to plant any reasonable doubt of their guilt in the minds of the jury.  This is similar to the concept of fairness in sports, games, or war where to play or fight fair means to adhere to a common set of rules that applies to everyone, whatever the outcome may be.

With social justice the emphasis is not on the process, but on the outcome.  Fairness in this context is similar to how one might say a cripple racing an athlete is not a fair race unless the athlete is given some sort of handicap (that is, unless they race by a different set of rules).  In social justice equality means that the outcomes of wealth, success, happiness, safety, and other benefits of society are distributed equally across all demographic groups.  Whether or not the process of getting to that outcome is equal or fair for all people (or any people) is irrelevant in social justice.  In fact, many social justice warriors treat equal processes and equal opportunities with suspicion saying they are not really equal because the underlying advantages and disadvantages of the differing groups give some a better chance of achieving a desirable outcome through the same process than others.  They propose explicitly unequal systems in the form of numerous affirmative action programs in an effort to "level the playing field" and make up for the disadvantages of one demographic compared to another, which are always attributed to the past or present prejudice of social justice's opponents.  But there are numerous problems with this approach to equality, starting with whether or not it is really achievable.

Achievable vs Unobtainable

Where traditional justice demands equal opportunity, that result is generally easily achieved.  In some cases, achieving this is as simple as removing a checkbox from an application, and gender and race blind application processes have been used successfully many times.  In other cases, laws forbidding discrimination and requiring a low burden of proof for accusations of it have been extremely successful in convincing organizations that they must eschew even the appearance of discriminatory practices.  In other cases, simple economic competition has been able to overcome prejudice, as employers in Apartheid South Africa sometimes found it was cheaper to provide illegal equal opportunity employment to blacks than to maintain the mandated segregation between the races.   Equal opportunity can also be tested for by creating test cases such as fake resumes or actors of differing genders or races portraying the same actions and measuring the result.  By such means, we can determine that not only has the past 50 years of social activism been successful in achieving equal opportunity for women and minorities, but in many ways it has even overshot the mark, as women, for instance, perform better on applications where their sex is known than if it is unknown, and if male and female actors perform equally violent physical assaults on one another in public the reaction invariably and overwhelmingly favors the female (who is often aided and applauded by bystanders) over the male (who is almost instantly in danger of physical attack or arrest from passers by) even when the attacks the woman actor is portraying would be just as damaging if performed in earnest.  Whites and particularly Southeast Asians have also found that they have a more favorable acceptance rate in colleges if they self-identify as African-American than as their actual race.

But of course none of this achieves equality of outcome.  Thus while advocates of traditional justice warn that society has gone too far in overcorrecting past injustices, advocates of social justice maintain that it has not gone nearly far enough.  After all, women still take up fewer than 50% of the coveted management and STEM field jobs, and there are still more Asians in most universities than their are African-Americans.  These things are easily measurable, but they remain utterly unachievable—and they will continue to be!  Even in the absence of discrimination, the ideal of any occupation or powerful position being made up of exactly the same demographics in exactly the same proportions as the nation's population at large cannot be realized for two reasons.

The first reason is that such a distribution of outcomes arising on its own (without being artificially forced by quotas) is statistically impossible.  This can be easily demonstrated with a coin flip.  The coin has a 50% chance of landing on either side, heads or tails.  Neither side is any different in this respect, neither has any special advantage or disadvantage.  They are both perfectly equal in the process by which they arrive on top and in their ability to get there.  And yet this does not mean that flipping the coin twice will give you one heads and one tails, or that flipping it four times will give you two heads and two tails.  Just because the odds are equal and the sides are the same, nothing prevents the coin flip from producing heads four times in a row, and though hundreds or thousands of flips will approach a 50-50 distribution, they will never quite arrive.  So likewise even if there were no difference or discrimination between men and women in the workplace, we would never quite see an even 50-50 split between them in any given career.  We would get close with a large enough sample size, but the only way to truly get the outcomes to align with the odds based on demographics would be to force the result artificially.

The second reason equal outcomes cannot be realized, and the larger problem with the concept, is that it stands opposed to the very concept of diversity.  Social justice warriors are quick to point out that diversity is a wonderful thing, our strength, because it brings us all together in one whole, and we all bring something different to the table.  We all have different backgrounds, different experiences, different thoughts, feelings, cultures, attitudes, outlooks, wants, desires, plans, and approaches.  Social justice warriors constantly point this out, and even go so far as to say that the concerns of a minority demographic cannot be truly understood or appreciated by outsiders of the majority group, because our inherent diversity makes us so different.  But the moment it comes to considering equal outcomes in terms of who does what job, how much money is made, who holds the positions of power, and who buys what product, all that diversity is instantly forgotten: members of the various groups are treated as so many interchangeable parts with their only difference being which box they check on a demographic survey.  But if diversity is important, if we are really different, then what reason would we have to expect all our outcomes to be the same.  If we really are different, would we even want equal outcomes?  Nowhere is this question more apparent then when gender disparities are discussed.  Would women really want to make up 50% of sewage and sanitation workers, 50% of construction workers, and 50% of wartime and workplace fatalities and injuries in exchange for being limited to making up only 50% of teachers, nurses, and stay-at-home parents?  If we don't expect women to make up 50% of the fanbase for war movies and violent video games, why would we expect them to be just as interested in risky and potentially dangerous jobs as men?  If we think it's okay for women to make up more than 50% of the market for dramas and Harlequin romances, then why shouldn't we expect more of them to be interested in a good work-family balance (or being a stay-at-home spouse) than men are?  If we can admit that many women have different likes and dislikes than many men, then we must face the fact that creating equal outcomes in the workplace will mean forcing a lot of women into jobs and situations they'd rather not be in, for the sake of "equality."  If we try to deny that women are any different than men, then we undercut the entire narrative of diversity, to say nothing of contradicting the evidence.

While the difference between men and women is perhaps the best example of how diversity makes equal outcomes impossible, the same problem exists to a greater or lesser degree with every demographic social justice warriors champion.  We are constantly reminded by social justice advocates that these groups have different cultures, experiences, and perspectives—different enough that outsiders cannot truly understand them.  Should we expect such different subcultures to all have exactly the same values and thus all pursue exactly the same goals in life in exactly the same way with exactly the same skill and energy?  Should we expect that all differing perspectives will lead to the same approach to life and get exactly the same results?  If we really are different, if we truly are diverse, than we cannot expect that we'll all take advantage of the same opportunities with equal vigor and take the same approach to each and every challenge—and if we cannot expect every group to act the same, we cannot expect that they'll all have exactly the same results.  The only way to get equal outcomes for everyone would be to erase our diversity with enforced conformity.

But social justice proposes that at least the majority of the differences in outcomes are really the result of either present discrimination or groups being hampered by generations of past mistreatment.  Even if the processes and opportunities are equal, social justice warriors insist that the unequal results necessitate discrimination as the cause and that it must be countered by a the well-intentioned discrimination of affirmative action.  Even if we accepted the morality of righting one wrong by committing another, there's still a practical consideration that poses an enormous challenge to this approach.  Since discrimination is not the only possible reason why equal outcomes might not exist, how do we determine how much of the unequal outcome is down to discrimination rather than random chance and the different choices that diverse groups make?  Having determined that, how do we decide how much present discrimination is necessary to undo the effects of past discrimination?  It really isn't humanly possible to make this determination with any degree of accuracy—there are simply too many factors, especially when you consider that not all members of a group have faced the same amount of disadvantages or been equally hampered by them.  What ends up happening instead is that an arbitrary standard is set across the entire group, usually with the end goal of forcing exactly equal outcomes without any attempt to account for other possible causes of differing outcomes, like random chance and differing choices.  Because these necessary variables are not factored in the desired split is almost never achieved and the resulting system is really only equal in that it isn't really fair to anyone.

Incentivizing vs Disincentivizing

One major difference that arises between the results of these approaches to justice is how they incentivize or disincentivize human behavior.  In traditional justice, equal opportunity incentivizes doing one's best.  While a certain racial group arriving in a country may start off with a severe disadvantage, everyone in that group has the same opportunity for success or failure based on their personal actions as previous generations of immigrants.  While they may not at first be able to take advantage of the opportunities that lead to the top outcomes of wealth and status, they are no different in that than the groups that came before them.  With this promise of succeeding by the same opportunities as other groups, they have the motivation to pull themselves up to equal footing generation by generation.  This is the American success story that has been replayed by nearly every immigrant group to come to these shores in the past two hundred years.  The Irish, German, Italian, Eastern European, Jewish, and Asian immigrant groups all faced animosity and poverty on first arriving on America's shores, but each group was spurred on by the availability of success promised by equality of opportunity (even though for many it was—and in some cases, still is—limited by institutional racism) and incentivized to try hard and reap the rewards of their efforts.  Consequently, each of these groups has enjoyed great success in American society and some have even risen to the top in terms of wealth, education, and prosperity.  The reason is simple: telling someone that if they do well, they can succeed incentivizes them to try their best; it motivates them.

By contrast, the equality of outcome social justice promotes is a powerful demotivator.  The reason is equally simple: tell people that they will get the same result whether they do well or poorly, and they will not put in the effort to do anything but poorly.  Tell African-Americans that they don't need high SAT scores to get into college and they won't try to get them.  Tell them that the entire education system is a rigged game and they deserve to have life simply handed to them on account of past injustices, and it should come as no surprise that their performance in school tanks and they begin demanding the world on a gilded platter.  Even with the best of intentions, this effect applies, with welfare programs that give money to those who are unemployed and even more money to those who are single mothers invariably creating large populations of unemployed single mothers who are dependent on the checks.  The key is that whatever behavior a program or initiative most rewards is the behavior people will have an incentive to do.  Thus unemployment programs that give more income than entry-level jobs incentivize people to remain unemployed (or underemployed) rather than starting careers that could raise them out of poverty (because in the short term, they'd lose their government checks and their income would actually fall).  Affirmative action programs which reward being a victim of discrimination and member of a certain race incentivize strong racial identity (bordering on ethnocentrism), a constant sense of victimization and entitlement, and fake hate crimes when real ones cannot be readily found.  To see these incentives, however, is to acknowledge the importance of opportunity over outcome (since these incentives always operate at the level of determining which opportunities people pursue and how hard), and since social justice cannot do that, it remains clueless a to why so many of its programs intended to uplift minority groups (especially blacks, their favorite target to "help") wind up trapping them in a permanent underclass instead.

Liberal vs Authoritarian

Traditional justice and equality of opportunity do not require a great deal of authority to enforce. Even unsupervised children can agree among themselves to race each other by a common set of rules. No dominant authority is required to tell them to pick the same goal, route, starting point and time.  Likewise, no great amount of authority is required for traditional justice to be established.

On the contrary most great advances in traditional justice and equality of opportunity have often been the result of lack of authority.  The Magna Carta was signed not because a powerful king demanded it, but because his authority was too weak to prevent it. Voting rights expanded to all classes of men not by feat of aristocratic power, but because aristocratic power was too eroded to prevent it.  The American experiment of a kingless society founded on the ideals of equal opportunity and traditional justice for all arose as a result of democratic processes and a citizen's militia overcoming the authority of a monarchy across the sea.  Slavery and Jim Crow may have been abolished by acts of government authority, but these acts were made possible by the erosion of the authority of the white Southern elites over the centuries.  Northerner abolitionists had wanted to abolish slavery and establish equality from the very outset of America, but the economic stranglehold and resultant wealth and power of Southern plantation owners prevented them from doing so until the industrialization of the North and the decline of the economic power of cotton growing gave them enough power to challenge that authority, first in the Civil War, then again with the coup-de-grace of the Civil Rights Movement.  Even in our own time the view that heterosexual and homosexual unions should be equal under the law occurred largely because of the collapse of the political authority of the "Moral Majority" that was the Evangelical Christian Right.

But traditional justice and equality of opportunity don't just come into being because of liberal situations or policies.  They also promote liberal societies and hedge against the emergence of any kind of authoritarianism.  After all, while an authoritarian might easily use the equal opportunities of a liberal society to rise to power, he would be unable to abuse that power much, since traditional justice systems would give his opponents opportunities to thwart his power.  Nor would he be able to remain in power long, as the same opportunities he used to gain authority could be easily used by anyone else to replace him.  No authoritarian could remain in power long or exercise his power much in a traditionally just society of equal opportunities without first changing the society to move away from these ideals.

Social justice and especially equality of outcome on the other hand, as we have seen above, require authoritarianism to work.  Someone has to decide which groups are the designated victims and which are the designated perpetrators.  Just looking at society as a whole, it is hardly obvious which group is which.  Does the fact that the women on average are paid up to 22% less than men on average make women the victims, or does the fact that men suffer workplace fatalities at over 13 times the rate of women make men the victims?  Similarly, does the fact that blacks are killed in police-related shootings at a disproportionately high rate (25%, when they're only 13% of the population) make them the victims, or does the fact that blacks commit crimes at a hugely disproportionate rate (53% of all murderers, when they're only 13% of the population) make them the perpetrators?  In both situations both facts have the same root cause and can't really be addressed or understood in isolation.  In both, one statistic is far more out of balance and more alarming to a neutral observer than the other, and yet in each case the former statistic is all that's ever talked about because it reinforces the designated victim status of women and blacks, while the latter statistic is ignored or suppressed (talking about either will get you labeled a racist or sexist).  All of this takes an authoritarian attitude from academics, activists, and the media to choose the designated victim and present only those facts which support that view, while simultaneously repressing contrary information as hate speech.

Once groups have been broken down into a racial/sexual hierarchy of designated victims and designated perpetrators.  Authoritarianism is required to enforce arbitrary amounts of discrimination against demographics designated as privileged and in favor of groups designated as oppressed.  There is no real incentive to enact this kind of discrimination without a society of authoritarian social justice, since it's bad for business—driving away good applicants of the designated privileged class because they realize they won't get a fair chance and driving away good applicants of the designated oppressed class because they realize they'll only be valued for their demographic identity rather than their work, while simultaneously attracting bad applicants who couldn't otherwise get employment and will expect to be able to coast by on minimal effort and the trump card of their designated minority status.  But if the alternative to enacting discriminatory affirmative action policies is being ostracized and ruined by accusations of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, businesses have little choice but to comply.

Beyond this discrimination, since unequal outcomes are often the result, as was discussed above, of different choices made by diverse groups, authoritarianism is required to enforce conformity between differing groups.  This can be seen at work in social justice today in many ways.  Most obviously it can be seen in Anita Sarkeesian's famous declaration that intersectional feminism (a branch of social justice) is rightly opposed to "choice feminism"—or the freedom of individual women to make their own choices about how to live their own lives—and more recently in the authoritarian feminist stripping of grid girls from their chosen profession, against the wishes of those women and the majority of the community in which they were a part.  It can also be seen in the black community in the tendency by social justice warrior blacks to denigrate any black who performs well in school and seeks to succeed in society on the basis of their own merit rather than through affirmative action and entitlement—or worse yet doesn't vote a straight Democratic ticket—as a "coon," "Uncle Tom", or an "oreo:" a traitor to their own race.  An ideology that depends on suppressing individual free will for the accomplishment of its end goals cannot be anything other than authoritarian.

But social justice not only is authoritarian in the present, it also has an authoritarian past.  Social justice traces its roots to Marxism, which first posited the basic ideas of social justice with the designated victim demographic of the working class and the designated perpetrator of the privileged bourgeoisie.  When first advanced by Karl Marx, this philosophy had little or no impact and gained very little following.  It wasn't until Marxism was taken up by Lenin that it really became a powerful force, and Lenin himself wasn't able to enforce any of the social justice ideals of Marxism until he forcibly dissolved the democracy of Russia in the Russian Civil War.  Lenin to Stalin, to Mao, to Pol Pot, to Castro, to Maduro, the history of the communist branch of social justice is a history of the bloodiest authoritarian regimes known to mankind, responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 million—far exceeding the death toll of the Holocaust.  The fact that many major social justice authority figures got their start as communists and that many social justice warriors espouse communism today and speak favorably of communist regimes illustrates that they too share the communist dream of an authoritarian utopia of forced equality of outcome (though as history as indicated time and time again, the real result of this will be a dystopia of enforced squalor, misery, and death for all).

Facts vs Feelings

Underlying all of this is a fundamental difference on what constitutes evidence.  In traditional justice, evidence is based on objective truths. Facts about which both sides can agree are used for the basis of arguments to persuade the other side to adopt one's point of view.  This results in traditional justice philosophies being highly grounded in reality, but simultaneously gives them the risk of appearing unsympathetic toward the feelings of others, since only facts are taken into account when making a decision, regardless of how well or poorly that decision may make others feel.

This emphasis on the importance of facts, objective truth, and scientific method over feelings, beliefs, and perceptions traces its roots back to the Enlightement, which heavily influenced and was heavily influenced by traditional justice.  During the Renaissance, Enlightenment thinkers sought to overthrow of old systems of thought steeped in ungrounded belief, religious mystery, and the desire not to offend against cherished individuals or ideals, and to replace them with a science, religion, and society built solidly on facts, reason, and evidence.

Social justice takes the opposite approach, as indeed it must.  As discussed above, social justice must ignore a great many facts when it comes to inditing whole demographics as guilty and privileged (or innocent and oppressed) when many of the individuals within them are not and when many facts paint a picture which contradicts the chosen demographic hierarchy.  Social justice must also ignore the facts about different demographics arriving at different outcomes because of random chance and different choices, and it must ignore the fact of its own discriminatory policies and their failure to bring about the desired equality of outcome.  It must also ignore the fact of its own authoritarian use of power (or even the fact that it has power) in favor of projecting authoritarianism and power on designated perpetrator demographics (even when those demographics demonstrably have no power—such as the Boers in South Africa).

But none of this really poses a challenge to social justice, because social justice has different philosophical roots than traditional justice.  Where traditional justice springs from the Enlightenment—a movement that elevated the importance of facts over all—social justice springs from Post-Modernism—a movement that declared facts do not exist.  In a nutshell, Post-Modernism proposes that there is no real objective truth, or that no real objective truth can be known: that all we can really know is our own perceptions of (or feelings about) truth.  At the same time, Post-Modernism does not reject perceptions as not-truth, but instead promotes them as replacements for truth.  A commonly used example is the story of the blind men who don't know what an elephant is feeling different parts of it and creating descriptions of the entire creature from their feeling of a single part: variously describing it as long like a snake, thin and flat like a leaf, or thick and round like a tree trunk.  The moral in Post-Modernism is that no perspective is really invalid, since parts of the elephant really are like that, but that everyone's perspective and feelings about truth are equally true and valuable while simultaneously having no basis in objective fact.  In fact, since objective truth cannot be known in Post-Modernism, feelings and perspectives effectively become far more important than rational analysis and evidence (since these seek to reveal an objective truth that Post-Modernism believes non-existent or unknowable, and thus irrelevant).  Another effect of this elevation of feelings and perspectives as equally valid (and more important) alternatives to objective truth, is that under-represented feelings and perspectives gain greater authority in Post-Modernism, and especially social justice.  After all, if all you have are the accounts of the blind men with which to imagine an elephant, and all of their perspectives are equally true and valid, then you must hear and give equal weight to all of them in order to truly understand the elephant yourself (or at least come as close to true understanding as Post-Modern theory allows, given that there is no truth, just subjective perceptions of it).  Thus feelings and perspectives which are said to be less prominently expressed or less common are heralded as gems containing insights overlooked by the predominant perspectives.  In fact, in intersectional feminism, oppressed groups and perspectives are held to contain not equal but greater wisdom and validity than those of the majority.

Social justice has embraced this philosophy wholesale as its foundation, and in social justice facts are irrelevant—what truly matters are the feelings and perspectives—the lived experiences—of those who are oppressed.  Of course, saying facts and evidence are irrelevant makes it impossible to prove who is oppressed and who isn't.  Fortunately, social justice has an authoritarian bent where designated victims will tell you that their demographics are the most oppressed and therefore have the best and most valid perspectives.  As proof of this (or of anything really) they will appeal not to any objectively verifiable facts, rather they present as proof their own subjective experiences and feelings of fear, outrage, and sadness—feelings meant to prove that they are oppressed, because to be oppressed is to be right.  In social justice, outrage trumps objective evidence.

Manufacturing Peace vs Manufacturing Hate

In traditional justice, the emphasis is on bringing different parties with different perspectives together to discuss and settle their grievances on the basis of their common ground and the unified nature we all share as human beings.  While it seeks to punish injustices and reward righteous acts, it also seeks to bring peace between individuals by resolving misunderstandings and clashing perspectives by arriving at conclusions based on a set of objective facts and evidence upon which both sides can agree.  It has countless times been successful in staying the hands of angry mobs by patiently explaining how the evidence—which the mob itself can see and verify as objectively true—points to the innocence of the accused.  Even in cases where it finds a perpetrator guilty, its measured handling of evidence, conviction, and punishment has in many cases meant that those once rightly spurned by society as awful criminals are welcomed peacefully back by their neighbors because "he served his time" and the matter has been objectively settled.  In some cases, it has even motivated reconciliation between the relatives of murder victims and repentant convicted killers.  Traditional justice does not merely punish wrongdoing, it promotes and creates peace, stability, and harmony between groups whose clashing feelings, perspectives, and lived experiences would otherwise motivate them to hatred and violence against each other.  In doing so it does not negate its own power and usefulness, but rather objectively proves it.

Social justice, while it promotes itself as the bringer of a utopian future, brings no such peace or unity.  In fact, because of the central importance of feelings of oppression in social justice and the irrelevance of objective truths, social justice actually promotes greater mutual hatred and division.  By denying the existence and relevance of objective truths that both sides can agree upon, social justice demolishes and denies the possibility of common ground.  Each side becomes locked in a struggle in which it is impossible to give quarter to the enemy without denying one's very self—invalidating not only one's own perspective, but since perspective is reality, denying their very existence—because there is no middle ground, no common humanity based on objectivity: just the tyrannical perspectives of Us vs Them.  This can be observed in society at large,  where the animosity between the sexes has become a palpable and (increasingly) political tension—more so than during the Suffrage Movement—, where racial tensions are higher now in many ways than they were during the Civil Rights Era, and where (tellingly) social justice advocates are openly calling for (and implementing wherever possible) a return to segregation and apartheid.  Far from bringing unity to diversity and thus making it a strength (which America's previous melting pot of traditional justice did silently for generations), social justice has in one generation weaponized diversity and used our differences in perspective, feelings, and life experiences to tear our common heritage, institutions, values, and reality apart into armed camps.

Internally, social justice groups are just as—if not more—divided, riven by constant rivalry and animosity between each of the component demographics.  Witness, for example, the fighting between and eventual conquest of the LGBT activist faction by the Black Lives Matter faction (as symbolized by the forced inclusion of black and brown stripes on top of and dominant over the LGBT rainbow flag).  Even within the LGBT movement itself there is infighting and resentment between homosexuals and bisexuals, and homosexuals are further polarized between the "more privileged" gay men and the "more oppressed" and therefore more important lesbians, who further break down between cis and transgendered women, and so on.  The in-fighting is infinite.  As feminist Christina Hoff Summers observed of a 1992 annual meeting of the social-justice-inspired Women's Studies Association:

"The participants were told to assemble in small groups based on their healing needs.  So there were groups for Asian women, African-American women, elderly women, Jewish women, disabled women, fat women...  None of these groups proved stable.  The fat group polarized into gay and straight factions.  Members of the black lesbian group could not get along, those who had white partners were called out for their privilege and had to form a separate group.  And new identities emerged!  A group of women with allergies formed a caucus and issued a set of demands...  It was a conference of scholars, but we didn't resolve our differences through rational discussion.  Instead intersectionality created new reasons for anger and devoured itself."

By focusing only on the differences of perspective and feelings which divide its adherents, social justice leaves no unifying factor even for its own movement other than the presence of a mutual enemy.  It is therefore imperative to the social justice movement that hatred and oppression from designated perpetrator groups (whites, males, heterosexuals, etc), continue indefinitely, or even increase to keep pace with the increasing internal tensions within their movement.  Should these groups fail to oblige (as an increasingly racially-diverse and color-blind majority frequently does), social justice advocates are forced to latch onto objectively inoffensive occurrences (like a child wearing a shirt that uses an affectionate comparison that's been in vogue for use on children of all races for decades, or two men who refused multiple times to leave a store being arrested for loitering, or a young thug being shot dead while charging at a police officer he'd previously assaulted) and distort them into evidence of racism and oppression, and sources of outrage.  Sometimes, when even that is not enough, some social justice warriors will create instances of bigotry and hate whole cloth, sending death threats to their own accounts, painting their own houses with swastikas, or leveling accusations of criminal assault or sexual violence that never really happened at unsuspecting innocents...and other social justice warriors will defend their actions, because their lies helped hold the movement together and keep it focused on an external enemy, lest it turn inward and tear itself apart completely.

More than that these instances of hatred and bigotry, whether real or manufactured, become a currency of power within the social justice movement.  After all, to be outraged it to be right, to be most oppressed is to have the most important voice.  No surprise then that the social justice communities that dominate the media and academia have devolved into a "race to the bottom" where new identities and oppressed demographics are invented daily for adherents to claim membership in and thus boost the validity and power of their own viewpoint.  Small wonder that the self-reported rates of mental illness and PTSD in these groups approach 100%—even though for most of these self-diagnosed their most traumatic memory is the announcement that their candidate lost a presidential election.  No wonder that reported hate crimes seem to be most common in cosmopolitan, multi-cultural cities dominated by left-leaning politicians and social-justice-obsessed universities, rather than in isolated and ethnically homogeneous rural poor farming towns.  All of these things not only give cohesion and legitimacy to the social justice movement as a whole, they also grant power, status, and relevance to the supposed targets of these alleged hate crimes.  Social justice is not only the cause of hatred and division, not only does it depend on continued animosity, it and its adherents thrive on it and have no incentive to stop or slow down.