In the here and now it seems more important than ever to categorize yourself for the benefit of others. The two most prominent varieties of this seem to be classifying yourself by your mental handicaps or the near viral resurgence of telling everyone your A/S/L, where age is now your pronouns, sex is what gender you identify as, and location is your political stance. Ultimately though you can depict yourself as whatever you see as the most flattering or progressive, as long as you keep it within 280 characters.
I don’t like this check box mentality and I don’t like how we render our opponents and allies down to these minor facets of what should be an entire personality. I especially don’t like how these facets have seemingly become people’s entire personality, so I’m going to break down one of these newly constructed identities for funsies.
Social but not Just
The term Social Justice Warrior has always bothered me so we’ll be taking that apart today. For now, let’s just start with the idea of Social Justice: Meting out justice for those society has left behind or abused as decided by the affected community. At face value that seems like a good idea, noble even, but it starts to run aground as soon as you try to define “justice” and “affected community”
In the modern day of instant communication and internet archives, the “affected community” for any given problem is no longer a local issue that is dealt with by those involved, it has spread globally. Any single person can take offence to any single thing regardless of whether it actively affects them or not. This can lead to widespread outrage over an issue that the group of people it actually affects don’t find troubling nor do they see themselves harmed by it. The reactionary nature of this global community ends up trampling over the wishes of the local community they claim to be defending.
Justice has two very divergent ideas at its core: one being the objective application of laws to bring balance to scales upset by villainous behaviour and the other personal satisfaction against one who has wronged you or the group you represent. The first represents true justice the latter represents just us at our most base and regressive, an animal lashing out at what harmed it. When someone is targetted for social justice, regardless of the validity of the accusations, the desired outcome is always the same: their life should be ruined. You can decide what category of justice that falls under.
What War?
The term Social Justice Warrior was original a mockery of the people it was applied to. People who seemed overly zealous in identifying social malignancy were labelled with it but over time they came to truly embrace the title. This terrifies me.
A Warrior is something savage from before our modern age. Warriors are not soldiers, they are not there to defend a nation or it’s people. Warriors are those that exist to fight and when there is no enemy left they find or create new enemies to make war against. Simply using the term warrior to describe yourself implies that you are intending to make war on something. War does not bring justice, war does not solve social issues, all war gives us is a body count and broken survivors.
We don’t need warriors and we should not be trying to make war within our own societies, doing so will only further entrench extremists on either end of the spectrum. What we need are social activists whose goals are trying to open more dialogue so we can better understand and accept each other.
Mob Rule or the Ruling Mob
Social Justice and its warriors have grown steadily in media coverage and as a group identity. Our politicians try to levy it for youth engagement and educational institutions welcome it with open arms and very few questions asked. To be considered forward thinking and progressive nowadays you must at the very least pay lip service to the ideals and decisions of the social justice movement. If you are not deemed progressive enough you are demonized and will be ignored or attacked depending on how vocally you express divergent views.
I think the founding ideas of the social justice warrior are good: Equality of opportunity should be strived for, those that cannot defend themselves need someone to fight for them, you shouldn’t be discriminated against for sexual orientation; race; gender; or disability. What I don’t like is the almost militant pursuit for vengeance and reparations in place of actual Justice, or how social justice warrior has transformed from a social stance to an identity, how the end goal seems to have become about the battle and its perpetuation and not the resolution of social issues.
You can fight for others without starting a war, you can seek justice without vengeance, you don’t need a title to conform to or an ideology to back you when doing what you think is right. You don’t need to be a social justice warrior, you only need to be you.