Social Merit, Not Social Justice

The more we pursue social justice, the worse we get

Social justice is destroying society because a value that in its Aristotelian sense was the practice of the virtues that were owed to others instead became a license for individual vices.

Its radical adherents today pretend that social justice is deconstructing oppressive political and societal systems when it is actually constructing oppressive systems in the name of justice. Social justice arguments begin with calls for freedom and end with calls for government and corporations to implement social justice through centralized oversight and punitive measures.

The defining premise of equity is that fairness is a misleading abstraction and that real equity can only be achieved through a multi-generational process of centralized intervention in every arena of human affairs from education to economics to entertainment in order to advantage some groups and disadvantage other groups in the hopes of achieving equality of outcome.

Since an equality of outcome is inherently impossible without total societal control, equity is simply a justification for permanent state repression. Total state control of the economy, education and every arena of life did not achieve equality in the USSR, China or any of the Communist countries that conducted long and bloody experiments in enforced equality.

The equality pursued by social justice is in stark contrast to the equality written into the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson conceived of men as being equal with respect to the government while equity seeks to make men equal with respect to each other. One is the foundation of democracy, the other of tyranny. One provides for equal rights while the other deprives everyone of rights in order to use government authority to make them equal.

Beyond the certain economic failures of centralized state control were two societal failures: giving any entity a monopoly on control leads to inescapable inequality, no matter what that entity’s stated ideological mission may be, and diminishes the ability of the individual to project his or her own virtues into the public square. Imposing social justice destroys social merit.

The purpose of law in a functional system is to reinforce the common sense morality of society which rewards virtue and punishes vice. A corrupt or dysfunctional system however does the opposite and sabotages common sense natural moral impulses. And that is our society.

Social justice without social virtue is impossible and that is why every social justice reform decreases individual virtue and leads to worse public behavior. A virtuous society rewards individual merit and punishes individual misbehavior while the modern inversion of social justice treats individual merit as a vice and individual vice as a virtue. Not only poverty, but crime and terrorism, are seen as conditions of oppression rather than individual choices.

The trouble is with the model of social justice itself which rigidly insists on diagnosing individual choices as the result of social conditions. If people steal, it’s because they are oppressed. Everyone is the product of a set of general variables, a class, race, a gender, and other categories that can be combined into an equation that will ineffably predict their behavior.

There is no sense in rewarding virtue and punishing vice because virtue is a product of privilege and vice is a product of an unjust system. What social justice seeks to do is to overturn the system so that those with the worst behaviors float to the top and no longer need to behave badly. And when they behave badly anyway, the proponents of social justice have no answer for it except to argue that it is impossible to ever right the system and end its systemic oppression.

By doing so, they admit that their program is a permanent tyranny that is doomed to fail anyway.

Rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior has shown us that most Americans are basically good. If they were not, crime would be much more pervasive than it actually is.

When California effectively legalized shoplifting, most people did not steal. But at the same time it also showed us that a society where good behavior is punished and bad behavior is rewarded is unlivable. While most people did not steal even when it was allowed, we should not expect that situation to continue indefinitely if we actively cultivate an immoral society.

Creating permissive climates for drug use and sexual misbehavior quickly normalized both. Similar societal signals that stealing is normal behavior applied across a generation might very well produce a society where everyone steals and no one thinks that there is anything wrong with it. If this sounds far-fetched, such a situation effectively existed before the fall of the USSR in which property was seen as ‘societal’ rather than individual and anything could be taken.

Centralization doesn’t make people more moral, it shifts responsibility and makes them amoral.

Morality asks that we believe that there is a right and a wrong, that our actions make a difference and that doing the right thing will make society and our own lives better.

Social justice makes the government and its satellite institutions into the exchange mechanism for rights and virtues, shattering the bonds of virtue that connect us to each other and to society. Instead of society being represented by other people, it’s represented by unaccountable institutions that are unjust and promise to remedy injustice by classifying us into general categories. There are few reasons for individuals to see the sacrifice of their rights to it as a virtue or to refrain from trespassing on its privileges when it is in their own interest to do so.

Socialism collectivizes virtue the way that it does property and renders both ‘ownerless’.

Social justice has made America weaker, poorer, less moral and far less virtuous. And it certainly hasn’t brought about equality. What it has instead done is create a painful consciousness of individual positions which are conceived of as unfair and unchangeable.

This is in stark contrast to social merit, the traditional approach in this country, which reinforced societal common sense rules rather than seeking to replace them, which rewarded virtue in order to ensure more of it, and punished vice in order to reduce its proliferation.

Social merit brought about a far greater equality, not by actively pursuing an artificial equalization, but by creating a system where individual articulations of virtue were rewarded.

America has had its fill of social justice and it has brought our society to the brink of destruction. What we desperately need is a society of social merit in which people will once again exchange positive behavior for positive consequences leading to a virtuous cycle of good outcomes.

The more we pursue social justice, the worse we behave and the worse our society becomes. It’s time to reclaim a society built not on collective authoritarian visions of managing humanity from the top down, but on the moral power of the individual and his treatment of others. Our morality should be measured by how we treat our neighbor, not how we theoretize about the benefits of government regulations or adorn our cars with world saving bumper stickers.

Social justice has made our society oppressive and unjust. Its only future is tyranny or civil war. But the redemptive powers of social merit can unleash individual goodness to restore America.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.