Reconciling Individualism and Social Justice

tamwin33 (56)in #culture • 8 years ago (edited)

If you’ve paid attention at all to the aptly named “Culture Wars” in Western societies, you’d know the few predominant and opposing views. On the left, we have the “SJW’s”, whose main mantra is “social justice”, and we have the moderate liberals. On the right, we have the “Individualists”, who value rights above all else, and the nationalists, who range from the milder average conservative, to the authoritarian [insert race]-supremacist. All of these categories represent interpretations of what culture is, how it operates, and how it relates to government and society. To fully understand the debate and form an opinion, we must see the philosophies from all points of view, separate the ideological conclusions from the philosophical conclusions, recognize the moral axes by which the philosophies can be interpreted, and try to discover for ourselves a common-sense interpretation of culture that fits both the reality of human nature, and the end-goal of peaceful coexistence.

So, on the left we have the “SJW’s", or the Social Justice Warriors. The adherents to the philosophy of social justice, primarily college students, support the idea that the institutional oppression of minorities and women exists and is enforced through cultural hierarchies. It is based on sociology/philosophy that outlines a structural understanding of culture. It states that people’s appearances, actions, values, and beliefs can all be organized into a hierarchy in relation to themselves. It defines our realities, organizes our interactions, and ultimately allows societies to function. However, this framework called culture is also used to discriminate (much of the time arbitrarily) against one another. What SJW’s want to do is eliminate the subconscious aspect of arbitrary discrimination from Western culture. By doing this, they believe that true cultural and racial equity can be possible. However, they understand that this is an ideal that we can approach, but may never attain (at least in our lifetimes). Therefore, as they apply authoritarian language as a method to combat cultural hegemony, they also advocate for privilege/oppression-correcting institutions to provide equity in what we cannot fix. Before you judge the ideology, know that SJW’s do not use the traditional definitions for these words. Privilege, for example, is essentially the benefits one receives in social and institutional interactions that are not due to character - usually race or ethnicity. On the other hand, oppression is the injuries. The perceived enemy then is those reinforcing the cultural hierarchy of privilege and oppression through language and policy. SJW's desire to unite collective “groups” based on their shared experiences such as race and ethnicity in recognizing their places in the cultural hierarchy. The people of the oppressed groups are tasked with the dismantling of that cultural hierarchy, while the privileged groups are tasked with adapting and conforming to a life of equity. This view of culture stresses the metaphor of "the forest and the trees” - that the forest cannot be seen when looking at an individual tree. Just as macroeconomics differs greatly from microeconomics, they believe that the behavior of cultures differs greatly from the behavior of individuals. They seek to level the playing field by uplifting the oppressed and bringing down the privileged to the same level. They see themselves as cultural Marxist anarchists, in a sense. With this in mind, it is not surprising to hear that they are also predominantly Marxist communists and socialists.

On the right, we don’t see the same philosophical development in respect to culture. Instead, we see a lot of angry white people that understand the implications of the SJW ideology, but not necessarily the framework of the philosophy. They believe it to be wrong but cannot seem to explain it in their own framework or provide a comprehensive counter-theory of culture and cultural hegemony. They argue from the point of view of the individual, rather than from the point of view of “the forest from the trees”, causing confusion in both what SJW’s interpret, and how the tenets of individualism interpret the points of the SJW’s. It is as if the two sides argue in their own entirely different languages. Even the word “individualism” has a different definition on each side, so for all we know they could actually be arguing for the same things (probably not, just wanted to point out the lack of an ability to debate). We need a translator.

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So how can we explain Individualism from the perspective of the Individualist to an SJW? Well, we can start with the main point of contention, namely, the "forest from the trees" argument from above. One could very easily flip this argument and say that the adherents to Social Justice fail to see from the point of view of the single tree in the forest. Individualists claim that by ignoring the individual, generalizations of groups become valid, and anyone who breaks from the pack is labeled either a traitor to the group, or a self-hating outsider. They see the conformity of identity-politics as problematic. So as one can see, the individualists have similar goals of equity and eliminating hierarchy, but take an entirely different approach in their philosophy. They start small, and derive all interactions from the single principle of non-aggression - that no human should initiate force upon another. In other words, do unto others as you would have done unto you. Stemming from this, we get the principles of private property, self-ownership, and rights. If one owns themselves and their body, it is clear that one has the right to do whatever they want with it, just as long as they don’t injure anyone else’s.

Leading into culture, individualists tend to agree that it is a framework that defines how social interactions work, but they don’t really go much further. They believe that it arises from the individual tacitly consenting to that cultural framework. As one has the right to associate freely with whoever they want, one can essentially secede from popular culture to form their own. They say to hell with cultural norms - be who you want to be, and you will find others who agree with you and accept you. And if you don’t like someone, you don’t have to deal with them. But the individualist also understands the penalties for arbitrary discrimination, racism, and sexism - both in the market and in one’s personal life. They believe it is both advantageous and righteous to judge solely on merit. Therefore, cultural hierarchies become standardized personal beliefs that can be deviated from, and the less tolerant will eventually phase out due to market and social forces. With this knowledge, we can now see why individualists tend to hate SJW’s, and why the most vocal tend to be caucasian. However, there are other philosophies that are oftentimes confused with Individualism since anything that is perceived as right-wing is grouped together. The conservatives, as well as the more authoritarian alt-right, for example, believe in something very different, which is a conversation that I’ll get into later. Trying to force and mold culture in the way that SJW’s do, to the individualists, is against the spirit of culture being this free-flowing, diverse ocean of ideas and ways of thinking that flourishes when people are unafraid to speak. The groups at the top of the cultural hierarchy are often blamed by SJW's for the injustices done to those lower in the hierarchy, and as there is obviously no grand conspiracy among white people to keep the rest of the world down, many white people have become angry that they are being blamed. Individualists, as well as the conservatives, see this as a generalization of white people and is, therefore, racism all the same (Historic definition, not the SJW's definition of racism).

One might read this and see that there is a great deal of miscommunication, confusion, and fundamental disagreement on both sides, however, I believe that much of it is ideologically motivated. If we strip away the misleading and blinding ideologies, leaving nothing but the philosophical frameworks, the realities of human interaction, and our end-goal of peaceful coexistence as equals, these two disparate philosophies actually seem to work very well together.

Taking a step back, it seems that while the Individualists ignore the power of culture, the SJW’s ignore the power of the individual. We’ll start small, with the individual, whose effect on culture cannot be ignored. Individuals do have agency, and at the most basic levels, they operate as the individualists say. We all tacitly consent to our cultures, and have the ability to change them and form new cultures. Individualism represents the choices that each of us have to change our own lives and others'. However, human psychology is not so simple, and people don’t always act entirely rationally. As we are very much shaped by those around us, our realities are often defined by the time we decide to examine our own culture. These biases are so ingrained that they’ve become invisible to us, and on top of this, there are other aspects of human psychology that just cause people to trend towards irrationality - the main reason the field of behavioral economics is booming right now. So when we look at larger trends, the forest of the trees, we can understand that there is a cultural hierarchy. The individual affects culture as the culture affects the individual - it is a micro-macro relationship. The two philosophies need not contradict each other.

The Individualist SJW then, when looking at privilege and oppression, realizes that in voluntary interactions, intolerant cultures lose. The tolerant people will always have an advantage over the intolerant, and we therefore have an incentive for peaceful cooperation, an incentive to learn about other cultures, and an incentive to eliminate ignorance (by social pressure, economic pressure, or otherwise). That is not to say that there isn’t privilege and oppression, but voluntary interactions are not the source. Rather, the source comes from systems and laws that are foisted upon cultures by a government or other monopoly. In economics, we see a rise in the discrimination coefficient when monopolies are in play, and a rise when the government centralizes control in industries. For example, when rent controls are introduced, the shortage created by the price ceiling increases the discretion that landlords have in choosing who they will take as customers. Further, the properties become more expensive, unkept, and some are simply flat out abandoned by the smaller landlords. The centralization of power always results in more cost, more discrimination, and transfers of wealth and power to the already wealthy elite. The government, being a monopoly of law, and therefore subject to this rule of centralization increasing discrimination, is the one aspect of society that dictates all people and industries. Even in the face of blatantly discriminatory and violent policies, there really is no choice but to comply. This centralized entity, the state, that dictates the law for vast numbers of communities and cultures, is the point at which people on top of the cultural totem pole are going to dominate. When a culture forces its beliefs onto other cultures through law, the cultural hierarchy is cemented and reinforced by those laws and the biases of the employees of the state. So, it seems that although cultures do exist in the way that SJW’s describe, their conclusions as to how we should proceed are entirely detached from reality and science. Rather, it seems that their conclusions are entirely based in ideology - just as the individualists reject the science of macro cultural trends, simply due to ideology's blinding power.

As for conservatives, they believe that the state actually should dictate culture, and is the legitimate authority on deciding culture. It seems that they accept cultural hegemony as a given, and believe that since the state is a legitimate cultural authority, people should conform to the culture of whatever state they live under. However, this becomes problematic when one realizes that: 1. culture is ever-changing while conservative government tends to be static, 2. Culture, due to thousands of years of people solely interacting with others proximate to their regions, combined with upbringing biases, is still connected to (but not limited to or by) race, and 3. Conformity breeds obedience to a higher authority. For these precise reasons, we tend to see authoritarian nationalists trending towards right-wing/left-wing [insert race here]-supremacism.

While conservatism in this sense is undoubtedly undesirable and dangerous, state liberalism is not much different, and tends to take similar culturally-dominating stances on economic and social issues, encouraging discrimination and cultural hegemony. An example of economic culture-domination is the rent-control issue I described above. On the other hand, a social issue example of a liberal culture-dominating policy is gun control. Gun control has been used for thousands of years to keep the “lesser” cultures, races, and ethnicities in check. I wrote a piece on the racism of gun control about a week ago, which you can find here(https://steemit.com/blacklivesmatter/@tamwin33/the-racism-of-gun-control-and-how-laws-target-culture-a-response-to-the-altonsterling-shooting). It applies more to the Philando Castille shooting, but I didn’t hear about that one until after I had posted it. Further, my facts come from watching the video myself and reading the eyewitness accounts, which are never entirely reliable. I hope, however, that the facts are proven reliable, and that I explained it well enough. The point I was trying to make in that article was that it is an inherent aspect of the state paradigm to increase the power of the ruling culture (with attached race) at the expense of the minority cultures (with attached races and ethnicities). By taking away firearms from minorities, and leaving them without much police presence, we leave them with a detached police force (who de facto enforce the cultural hegemony in their implementation), and who enforce laws that again reinforce the cultural hegemony (drug laws, stop and frisk, etc.). All they have left are black markets for their cultural behaviors and illegal weapons for their defense, which can be used to further arrest and oppress them while maintaining the perception of having the moral high-ground. One might say that the state does some good for minorities, which may be true, but I would be careful in supporting them, as these policies just seem to be trying to make up for problems caused by the state's imposition of culture in the first place.

I should also make sure to say that this tendency to dominate other cultures is not necessarily intentional (some of it is, such as with Nixon’s drug war), but it is primarily expressed through the biases that we all have grown up with. It is my own belief that the state and the dominant culture are inseparable, and that while we can imagine a state that is blind to culture, it is inevitable that the biases of the dominant groups (and the sociopathy of oh-so-fallible people in power) will quickly shape the laws of that state as well as the enforcement, and destroy that assumption immediately and completely. So, if we accept that respect for the individual is pertinent to the fluidity and diversity of culture, that it cannot be divorced from the concept of social justice, and the fact that voluntary interactions tend to eliminate arbitrary hierarchies, we must therefore recognize that anything that attempts to control the individual, centralize power, or otherwise impose cultural values upon others, is the machinery that perpetuates privilege and oppression. So as we move forward, we must question not only the values of our own cultures, but we must question culture’s relation to the state. Seeing as the dominant culture is inherently intertwined with all existing forms of the state - including democracy - we must look to new fashions of structuring society that respect both individual rights and the multitude of interacting cultures. I will leave my analysis at that, as I don’t want to associate this with any specific theory. I have my own opinions and solutions, but I think in not proposing mine, we can have an open debate that would allow us to hear new perspectives, freeing us from the dogma of our ideologies, and leaving room for consideration of new ways of thinking.