Social Justice

A based definition

Justitia (2014), by Howard David Johnson

Justice: Giving each person his due.

Society: An ordered community.

Social justice: Giving each person his due position in an ordered community.

Everything in its right place.

As Lobaczewski put it in Political Ponerology:

… the development of an adult human’s gifts, skills, realistic thought, and natural psychological worldview will be optimal where the level and quality of his education and the demands of his professional practice correspond to his individual talents. Achieving such a position provides personal and material advantages to him, as well as moral satisfaction; society as a whole also reaps benefits at the same time. Such a person would then perceive it as social justice in relation to himself. (p. 43)

Ideological purity tests and political croneyism, affirmative action and race-norming, nepotism and buying one’s position: by definition, these are all forms of social injustice. And as Lobaczewski put it in Logocracy:

Individuals who, through wealth, political, doctrinal, or racial privilege (such as some blacks in the U.S.), have reached positions where their talents prove inadequate in the face of tasks and responsibilities, begin to be demonstratively preoccupied with matters of lesser importance while overlooking those that are significantly more important but more difficult.

This theatrical preoccupation with “matters of lesser importance” is no longer merely a dodge on the part of the incompetent individual; it is institutionalized, as Heather Mac Donald shows in her new book When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. The orientation of medical school, for instance, is being shifted “away from basic science and toward race theory” (p. 46). I don’t think many sane people would argue that the medical knowledge necessary to perform complex surgery is “significantly more important but more difficult” than learning and practicing anti-racism advocacy.

Just a few facts culled from one chapter in Mac Donald’s book:

Step One [a mandatory second-year med-school exam] has already been modified to try to shrink that [racial academic skills] gap; it now includes nonscience components such as “communication and interpersonal skills.” (p. 33)

Making Step One pass/fail will help students more “effectively tell their stories to residency programs,” since it is apparently a student’s “story” that hospitals should use in selecting interns. (p. 34)

The University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, among others, happily converted to a “holistic” selection system in 2021, adding community activities (think: anti-racism advocacy) to class standing. (p. 35)

The MCATs [Medical College Admission Test] have already been redesigned to try to reduce this gap [between black and white students]; a quarter of the questions now focus on social issues and psychology. (p. 36)

… some medical schools offer early admissions to college sophomores and juniors with no MCAT requirement, hoping to enroll students with, as the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sina puts it, a “strong appreciation of human rights and social justice.” (pp. 37-38)

Grand rounds, previously devoted to teaching about tricky medical cases, have been dumbed down as well:

On May 12, 2022, the vice chair for diversity and inclusion at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Medicine gave a grand rounds at the Cleveland Clinic on the topic: “In the Absence of Equity: A Look into the Future.” Afterward, attendees would be expected to describe “exclusion from a historical context” and the effects of “hierarchy on health outcomes” … (p. 41)

According to the AAMC [American Association of Medical Colleges], newly minted doctors must display “knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may present varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice.” (p. 41)

[UCLA medical school] has replaced the third-year curriculum—traditionally devoted to rotations through various clinical practices—with eight elective concentrations … [including] Health Justice and Advocacy, which will instruct students on how to be “advocates for justice” by learning about “human rights” and the “social determinants of health.” (p. 42)

This institutionalization of incompetence forces everyone else to engage in it, too.

Grant applicants seek the services of the burgeoning diversity-consulting profession to make sure that their proposals sound the right diversity notes. … Discussions about how to beef up the diversity section of a grant proposal have become more important than discussions about tumor biology … Mental energy spent solving that conundrum [how cell signaling in nematodes applies to minorities, for example] is mental energy not spent on science … (p. 50)

They are taking doctors out of the classroom, clinic, and lab and parking them in front of anti-racism lectures. (p. 52)

All this has the effect not only of “upwardly adjusting” people with lower levels of talent into positions for which they are not suited, but also of downwardly adjusting those who are. For example:

Asian-American Student Has Near-Perfect SAT Score and a 4.65 GPA, Gets Ugly Shock After Applications to Elite Universities

According to Fox News, Wang scored a sterling 1590 out of 1600 on his SAT exam (many Asian parents would probably be mad about him being 10 points short of a perfect score) and earned an eye-popping 4.65 high school GPA, thanks to advanced classes that enable students to achieve GPAs higher than the 4.0 associated with straight A’s.

Given those marks, and the fact that Wang doesn’t appear to have any character or criminal issues, you would think one of the admissions departments at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Princeton, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon University or the University of California, Berkeley, would give Wang the time of day.

You would think wrong.

Wang told Fox that he was rejected by all of them.

“I gave them my test scores, and then they must’ve ran the model on that… [they] told me I had a 20 percent chance of getting accepted to Harvard as an Asian-American and a 95 percent chance as an African-American,” Wang told Fox.

This is not an anomaly.

Mac Donald gives more examples: top students are not even trying to get accepted, because they know they won’t be. As one UCLA prof told Mac Donald, undergrads at the school’s science labs are saying, “Now that I see what is happening in medicine, I will do something else.”

Or, as Harold Robertson put it in a recent (must-read!) piece for Palladium:

Promoting diversity over competency does not simply affect new hires and promotion decisions. It also affects the people already working inside of America's systems. Morale and competency inside U.S. organizations are declining. Those who understand that the new system makes it hard or impossible for them to advance are demoralized, affecting their performance. Even individuals poised to benefit from diversity preferences notice that better people are being passed over and the average quality of their team is declining. High performers want to be on a high-performing team. When the priorities of their organizations shift away from performance, high performers respond negatively.

… high performers who see an organization shifting away from valuing honest performance respond by disengaging.

Lower-performing young men … are turning their backs on college and white-collar work altogether.

The combination of new employees hired for diversity, not competence, and the declining engagement of the highly competent sets the stage for failures of increasing frequency and magnitude.

… what happens when the men who built the complex systems our society relies on cease contributing and are replaced by people who were chosen for reasons other than competency?

The answer is clear: catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity.

Lobaczewski again:

Defective [social] adjustments, on the other hand, are sometimes the cause of bitterness and difficulties on every social scale. … A person with a qualitatively inaccurate and inferior adjustment in relation to his own talents is always aware of it, though it is rarely affirmed by those around him. … Such a person is easily frustrated, so he changes his profession or job, learning the new one easily. The learning period gives him an opportunity to engage his talents. But since his work does not engage his abilities, he takes his mind off it and goes into the world of his interests and dreams. As a result of this distraction, he is more likely to make mistakes and to cause accidents. Although such people sometimes make some innovations, they generally do not do the job better than a worker of merely sufficient ability. An employee who is more intelligent than his supervisor is easily drawn into ambitious conflicts with him.

The social justice movement is a misnomer. It is a social injustice movement, and it is an ongoing disaster. It robs the people who are upwardly adjusted from having a profession actually suited to their ability and in which they can find meaning, and it robs society of competence and, by extension, excellence—replacing it with the progressive collapse our complex systems.