The Social Justice Warlords

Making social justice based again

Excellence is social justice. Ludwig van Beethoven conducting with baton - by Katzaroff.

Social justice is real. It’s essential. And chances are, dear reader, you, like me, may just turn out to be a closet social justice warrior warlord.

No, I haven’t traded in my pen and pipe for a hammer and sickle. And I won’t be dying my hair a shade of faded electric blue.

Social justice is real. It just isn’t what the ideological leftists¹ say it is. As with most valuable concepts, the hyperactivists have just turned something real into its opposite. This is what ponerogenic groups do.

I don’t have the source on hand, but several years ago I recall listening to a talk by Jordan Peterson where he claimed social justice didn’t exist. It was a misnomer. There is no such thing as social justice. I disagree.

The ancients defined justice as something like “to each his due.” It has to do with how individuals are treated, giving each person what he deserves. As a reflection of our innate “moral tastebud” for fairness, it is a reflection of our human nature. Unfairness activates our moralizing instincts even from a very young age. We don’t like cheaters, and we enjoy punishing them or watching them get punished.

We all value justice to some degree or another. And since we are also social creatures, justice is necessarily social in nature and in practice. But if that is the case, then maybe Peterson is correct, and adding “social” in front of “justice” is simply redundant. Not so.

The social element of justice that necessitates its own name has to do with giving each person his due within and with regard to the structure of society. Lobaczewski called this socio-occupational adjustment. He put it like this:

… 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. (Political Ponerology, p. 43)

But to avoid confusion and negative connotations, let’s just call it societal justice.

Societal justice is the realization of the value of competence in practice, and the emergence of the social structure implicit within the mosaic of existing human talents and abilities, under the leadership of those numerically few of the most talented. As Lobaczewski writes in Logocracy:

People of the highest level of aptitude constitute only a few per thousand of the population of nations. Nevertheless, these people, endowed with incisive intelligence, constitute such an important factor in the life of any nation that their relegation to a position of social maladjustment and the suppression of their voice and cultural-creative role, inspiring progress in various fields or serving as accurate critics, make the normal functioning of society—its cultural, economic, and political development—impossible. Thus, a nation’s future depends on whether it is able to recognize these people, acknowledge their role, and respect them.

Deviations from this “sorting by competence” are examples of societal injustice and hamper the emergence of that implicit structure.

Let’s take some entirely fictional examples:

• An individual of average (or slightly above average) intelligence, due in part to that lack of innate talent, plagiarizes others in her academic writings to keep up appearances and advance her career. She ascends to the position of president of a prestigious university, due in large part to the color of her skin and her political ideology.

• An extremely intelligent and creative individual is denied a position at multiple universities at least in part on account of his skin color, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and/or political ideology. Because this person is more intelligent than all of those in a position to hire him, and his ideas are more innovative than any of these people are capable of, his so-called peers ignore him and his work—out of jealousy, spite, sensed job insecurity, and their own deep-seated feelings of personal inferiority.

Both of these are examples of societal injustice. Lobaczewski calls the former “upwardly adjusted socio-occupational adaptation” and the latter “downwardly adjusted socio-occupational adaptation.” In the first, a person achieves a position above their abilities. Such people have a tendency to ignore important issues that arise due to their inability to comprehend such complexities and discover creative solutions, instead focusing on trivial matters in an often overly theatrical manner. (“Look at me, I’m doing stuff!”) In the second, a person is unable to achieve a position suited to their talents. They become bored and resentful, deprived of the ability to achieve any kind of meaningful self-actualization and depriving society as a whole of the potential fruit of their talents. Forced to work on trivial matters (which they sometimes fail at due to said boredom), they cannot devote their energy to the complex problems ignored by the upwardly adjusted.

It’s not just universities. The dynamics work in any group setting, whether a factory, mechanic’s shop, corporation, church, orchestra, military, or government. In everyday terms, some people are just not cut out to be leaders, or musicians, or soldiers, or priests. And if they are, some musicians are not cut out to be soloist violinists or lead guitarists, or conductors, or band managers. Some soldiers are not officer material. When people occupy a position outside of their level of talent and education (within certain bounds), the synergistic creative effects of human diversity are stunted.

Societal justice is the attainment of that synergy and creativity.

Lobaczewski appreciated the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, of which societal justice is a part—they even call it social justice. This is not the contemporary infusion of ideological leftist social justice into Catholic teaching, but a tradition going back over a hundred years. The moral advantages that come with being properly positioned are just one part; the other is material. According to the Church, “A workman’s wages should be sufficient to enable him to support himself, his wife and his children.” If this is not the case, something is wrong with the social structure in its economic (and moral) dimension. If a worker cannot fulfill his personal and social functions and support a family in the process, the society in question cannot be just.

“Social justice” flips all of this on its head. This is what the 20th-century communists did with their “social advancement” policies. As I pointed out in my introduction to the book, real societal justice was achieved at least in part: some talented workers and peasants who would have been otherwise barred from an education and a position in line with their talents were able to achieve this. (This was also the motivation for the institution of standardized testing in the United States—to allow talented youths who weren’t in the proper elite demographic group to gain entry into the exclusivist university system. The results were good, for a time.) What went wrong, and what made it an example of social injustice, was that it primarily artificially advanced the incompetent, who became strong supporters of the pathocratic system, because doing so secured their positions, which they otherwise would not have. And it artificially retarded the advancement of truly talented people who were not of the correct class or ideological beliefs.

For the ideologically woke, justice has nothing to do with fairness or just deserts, but with equality. The San Diego Foundation tells us that social justice is defined as “the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities.” In theory, this gets close. A talented Catholic should have had the right and the opportunity to receive a top-notch education before the advent of standardized testing, but that wasn’t often the case. In practice, however, this has come to mean that an untalented person should have the opportunity to achieve a position to which they are unsuited, and the right to that position. If a person from a “historically marginalized” group is not the CEO of a major corporation, they should have the equal right and opportunity to that position. Not only that, they should be given preferential treatment, without regard to whether they deserve it.

For the modern-day advocate of “social justice,” the two examples I mentioned above are not seen as injustices. Social justice has come to mean the artificial advancement of the incompetent based on arbitrary features (when seen in relation to competence), and the deliberate blocking of the actually competent based on similar categories. This is bad news:

In order to maintain their position, [the upwardly adjusted] begin to direct attacks against anyone with greater talent or skill or who criticizes them for their incompetence, removing them from appropriate posts and playing an active role in degrading their social and occupational adjustment. This, of course, engenders a feeling of injustice and can lead to the problems of the downwardly adjusted individual …

What are those problems?

As a result, [the downwardly adjusted] is more likely to have accidents. Such a person always knows if his social and occupational adjustment has taken a downward direction; at the same time, however, if he fails to develop a healthy critical faculty concerning the upper limits of his own talents, his daydreams may “fix on” an unfair world where “all you need is power.” He would like to repair this world, and in his dreams he aims too high, reaching for positions that in reality require more than he is capable of. Revolutionary and radical ideas find fertile soil among such people in downward socio-occupational adjustments. It is in society’s best interests to correct such conditions not only for better productivity, but to avoid tragedies.

This simultaneously leads to increasing dissatisfaction and tensions among individuals and social groups; any attempt to approach human talent and its productivity problematics as a purely private matter must therefore be considered dangerously naive. Development or involution in all areas of cultural, economic, and political life depend on the extent to which this talent pool is properly utilized. In the final analysis, it also determines whether there will be evolution or revolution.

This is the present state of affairs.

As often happens when I’m writing a piece, the gods of time smile upon me and send material my way that says all the things I wanted to say, and all the things I didn’t even know I wanted to say, better than I could say them.

Two recent articles on Substack capture these dynamics perfectly. The first, written by

Gaius Baltar

, was published last year but just recently came to my attention (thanks to the Deimos Station bros).

WHY IS THE WEST SO WEAK (AND RUSSIA SO STRONG)?

Some excerpts so you realize why you have to read it:

Any rational person upon hearing a western leader, diplomat or “expert” speak, asks himself this question: “Are they just lying or are they really this incompetent and delusional?” The answer is “both” but the incompetence factor is far greater than most people can imagine.

The current ideologically-based power structure of the West outright requires that certain types of people be in positions of influence and certain types of people be sidelined. This applies to all steps of the social ladder; from kindergarten teachers to university teachers and corporate executives, and all the way up to the leaders of society itself. This has been progressing steadily for the last five decades or so, and has resulted in a major structural problem for the West. That problem is the obvious and massive degradation and misallocation of human capital in the West.

Lobaczewski saw this back in the 1980s, to the extent that he said the U.S. didn’t even have a society. It has only gotten worse. As he wrote back then:

All these difficulties become extremely destructive if a social … group, in keeping with its doctrine, demands that its members be accorded positions which are in fact upwardly adjusted in relation to these people’s true talents. This erodes the social structure …

Martian wordlord

John Carter

also just wrote about it:

Outside the Walls of the Crumbling Tower

Plagiarism used to be an example of poor scholarship, laziness, and poor ethics (i.e., cheating). Not so any longer. Plagiarism is the new excellence. And pointing it out is just right-wing cancel culture. Cheating isn’t bad; those pointing it out are. John writes:

Over the past month, many suggested that part of the motivation for the professoriate’s spirited defense of Gay’s right not to perform the emotional labour of citation was their anxiety over the skeletons they all know full well are hiding in their own closets. Plagiarism-checking software didn’t really exist until a couple of decades ago, and so far as I’ve seen it hasn’t been systematically applied anywhere outside of the occasional undergraduate course. By unspoken gentlepronoun’s agreement, our eminent learned societies have quietly avoided subjecting their work to such scrutiny.

That raises the fascinating question of just how much plagiarism there really is. The guilty man fleeth. The ladyboy doth protest too much.

Just read these tweets collected by John:

The academic community is taking it all about as well as you’d expect:

That Community Note has to hurt.

He’s right, you know.

You can’t destroy what already lies in ruins.

The whole thread is pretty funny, actually. Dude is so salty. And yes. Yes, you are Rufo’s bitches.

As the AP put it: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.”

John essentially provides a way to restore societal justice to a system out of which the very principle has been beaten, broken down to its constituent parts, and transmogrified into an antimatter monster negation of itself. In other words, a way for talented individuals of an academic bent to do what they like and get paid doing it, all without forcing themselves to submit to the socio-occupational meat-grinder of the university system.

Pretty much everyone recognizes competence when they see it, just as they recognize unfairness. John’s proposal—a patron model of intellectual creation and development—utilizes that basic fact. The institutions are hell-bent on running the incompetocracy into the ground, but regular people can find those neglected corners of competence on their own and support them directly. Maybe a grassroots decentralization of the academy can come to supplant the current clown show. In the meantime, there’s Substack. Speaking of which:

I’ll close with the following words from Baltar’s article. His description of the type of socio-occupational (and eventually psychopathological) inversion Lobaczewski warned about is perfect:

In order to achieve these ideological goals for the West, two things must happen: a) The right people must be put into power at all levels of society and b) any disruptive elements must be eliminated or suppressed. Since all ideological goals tend to be more or less in conflict with reality, there is no group more disruptive to them than the one who operates objectively and independently. People like that simply cannot be allowed into positions of power, and if they must be, they must be kept quiet and/or forced to toe the line.

The objective/rational/general competence group, whether it is 1.5% or 8% of the population, therefore becomes a problem rather than a resource. This is exactly the situation in the West today.

Many people have noticed that meritocracy has been systematically abandoned in the West and the relationship between competence and reward severed in giant swaths of the economy - and almost completely in government. What few people seem to realize is that this is a necessity for the West’s ideological goals to be reached. High-level competence cannot be promoted because it is a threat. It cannot therefore be rewarded.

1. SJWs? Woke? Marxcissists? I don’t know what the currently hip lingo is anymore. Educate me in the comments, please.