Justice and Victimhood

Traditionally justice meant responsibility for your own actions. A person justly received the benefit of his legitimate works, and conversely, a person justly received punishment for his misdeeds. Laws were intended to define and protect justice, and a justice system grew out of that.

Of course there are always ways to tread along the edges of the law, to abuse the intent of justice while remaining barely legal. But the original spirit of justice remains in the hearts of most citizens. The spirit intended to reward integrity, self-discipline, and personal responsibility, while punishing only the proven transgressors.

There is now a new “justice”, a political justice that is contrary to the spirit of the original meaning of justice. When we hear of justice these days, as often as not we hear that we are responsible for denying justice to the oppressed. We receive a sense that the great masses of impoverished and politically endangered peoples that exist in the world today are situated that way because of our actions or our inactions, our intentions or our inattentions, as a favored and dominant group.

The new call for justice is not for a personal justice, it is not the traditional justice, it is a political justice for an identity group, one that has been identified as being oppressed. The history of the world is awash with such groups, and oppressed groups like this have created other oppressed groups in great domino effects.

One example is the USA itself. Oppressed by the church in Britain, colonists came to America. Oppressed further by King George, America created a nation in a land inhabited previously by native Americans. The native Americans were oppressed by the Americans. And going the other direction in time, native American groups oppressed each other.

In our own culture, workers were oppressed so they formed unions. Now unions are powerful oppressors in their own right. It is difficult to be born into an identity group that has not, somehow and in someway, oppressed another identity group at some point in their history.

Class is the oppressed identity focus of communism. Race and wealth are the focus of our modern western rulers. In much of the world it is religion which is the focus, only much of the time without the justice part.

This new call for justice - political justice - morally convicts entire groups without trials. It is now easy to condemn an entire race, based on perceptions alone, especially when facts are difficult to come by and even more difficult to verify. An entire generation can be condemned for actions (not proven) attributed to their demographic group that existed generations ago; the sins of the forefathers visited upon the descendents.

But more egregious than having a political justice that condemns entire groups without trials as designated oppressors, is the effect that this new justice has on the victims.

Because the new justice demands material reparations on the one hand and an overweening pity on the other hand, the usual balance expected of traditional justice is overturned. The group designated as “victims” is given the expectation that because of this designation of victimhood status it will receive, without the duress of earning it, material goods and an increased wealth. It is owed to them they are told.

In addition, the pity they receive along with the expectation of increased wealth leads them to believe that this status, victimhood, is valuable and even profitable. The incentive toward personal responsibility is broken.

There is another, more sinister aspect to the new justice. There are those who invest themselves into this process for their own benefit. These are the crusaders for political justice, those who derive a sense of self-righteousness, an inflation of self-importance and ego, by identifying groups that qualify for victimhood (there are plenty from which to choose), and then campaigning loudly and brashly on their behalf.

Now, who can criticize someone who selflessly fights for justice? But that is not what is going on here. The ultimate product of political justice is not integrity, self-discipline and personal responsibility, nor is it independent, self-sustaining, mature members of society.

What actually happens with the crusade for political justice is the dark inverse of traditional justice. The crusader needs victims in order to sate his ego, his need for self-righteousness, even the public intellectual’s need for recognition as an anti-cultural rebel.

The designated victims need the crusader to keep the largesse flowing their direction. It becomes self-sustaining, a system of co-dependent oscillation.

The situation with American black ghettos is an example of this sort of self-sustaining, mutual benefit. Those residents that escape the parasitic political justice system into the traditional, integrity / self-discipline / personal responsibility system, do well there at the expense of being called uncle toms, oreos, and other derogations by those who prefer to remain in the victimhood system. The “victims” come to resent those who they see as traitors to the system of victimhood. There is social pressure to remain, not to upset the system.

The parasitic systems engendered by political justice are not isolated to the USA. But they are encouraged by western crusaders for political justice, those intellectuals and activists wearing mantles of moral superiority on their heads like halos.

Is it transparent to these crusaders that the people they champion with their inverted justice are in fact entrapped by it? Or are perpetual victims an actual known objective of these folks and their negative justice? It’s hard to discern the difference, since the crusaders never, ever admit to failure in their wars, instead finding scapegoats for the failure of political justice ever to produce anything other than the stasis of victimhood. Well, it does produce one other thing; it produces the loud and self-righteous condemnation of western society by western activists living in western comfort.

The new victimhood justice is finding its way into the legal system, usurping the domain of traditional justice. When “society” is declared at fault, or a “group” is declared oppressed, there is a good chance that self-righteous crusaders for political justice are embedded within those declarations. Political justice is a hazard to civilization.