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The Forum > Article Comments > It's 'social justice' time > Comments

It's 'social justice' time : Comments

By Don Aitkin, published 2/7/2013

How do we turn social justice from something done to people into something they do for themselves?

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I do have a solution to poverty in Australia, Don Aitken.

To begin with, let's stop importing poverty. Aghans alone have employment rates of only 6% after five years of residence. Iranians are the next group most at risk from long unemployment and poverty, with 88% still unemployed after five years. In Europe, 50% of the Muslim population is on welfare benefits. Angela Merkel summed it up nicely. The reason for European stagnation, she said, was because "Europe had 12% of the world's population, 26% of the world's manufacturing capability, and 56% of the world's welfare recipients."

In 1965, 3 % of the working age population in Australia was on welfare benefits. Now 16 % of adults rely on welfare. This is bad for them, bad for their children, and is financially unsustainable – ie bad for taxpayers. Another take on this – in 1965 there were 22 taxpayers for every one person on welfare; now the number is 5.

Extrapolate forward and you see a vision of Greece, Spain, Cypress, and Ireland, with their own national insolvency problems. The populations of these countries and their elected representatives were acutely aware of their financial insolvency, decades ago. But like irresponsible creditors with a new credit card, they borrowed until they could borrow no more, and they wished away their problems until the bailiffs arrived.

Poverty is primarily a factor of intelligence and culture. Some cultures which advocate opposition to birth control are not surprisingly poverty stricken cultures. Cultures which express opposition to wearing condoms are not surprisingly those most prone to community destroying human pathogens like AIDS. Importing people from these failed cultures is a recipe for social catastrophe.

As for intelligence, smart people do not eat unhealthy food, they don't gamble away their wages, become obese, educate themselves to get good jobs, save their money and invest it, do not engage in risk taking behaviour, and possess self control. Dumb people are the opposite and they are a burden on smart people. Doing anything to raise intelligence levels is one very good way to alleviate poverty.
Posted by LEGO, Tuesday, 2 July 2013 10:43:24 AM
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Society becomes the bad guy when it fails to both uphold good actions and protect others against our bad choices.

A good society is one that protects not just its own members but people everywhere, including tomorrow’s children, against our bad choices.

Sometimes a society embeds the injustice of bad choices for the economic benefit of an elite or a majority.

For example, we say people have a right to live, but when land where they could build shelter, grow some veggies has been completely commodified, they are REQUIRED to serve that system, good or bad. How do people actually have a choice “about how they live”?

By firstly ensuring the state is behaving justly in relation to access to land, we can then ask “What are the responsibilities of families, or at least the heads of them?”. The socially just answer will not be that the head of the family should get a job, any job, even in the real estate, tobacco, arms or some polluting industry to pay the rent.

The job (the responsibility) of someone who has access to land by birthright rather than by “ownership” is to use only the access they need for its purpose of sustaining life - to build and maintain shelter and grow as much for their own sustenance as an equitable entitlement would allow … and to do so in the most socially and environmentally responsible way known, so as to pass on that birthright intact or improved to future generations. That is a real job – a big job! Only then should one look for additional ways (just and environmentally sustainable ways) to contribute in return for the benefits of being part of a good society.

A solution becomes apparent and sustainable only if we can see things from a perspective where there is a proper relationship to the land. There is no solution available in the injustice of denying people their fundamental free right of access to nature’s gifts of air water sunlight and LAND.

Chris Baulman
@landrights4all
Posted by landrights4all, Tuesday, 2 July 2013 2:13:53 PM
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A nice thoughtful piece, Don.

In my grumpier moments I tend to think of social justice as the vague euphemism the left has invented because it is not respectable to talk about socialism any more. But there is something behind it, however elusive. It seem to have elements of liberal virtues (equality, dignity of the individual, mutuality) and collective ones (responsibility to others, recognising that poverty and injustice can be products of systems and institutions as well as the malign acts and selfishness of individuals). Rather than addressing the tensions between collectivism and individualism, it seeks a balance.
Posted by Rhian, Tuesday, 2 July 2013 3:58:20 PM
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I like the idea of social justice but my own experience has been that those who flaunt the term most readily use it as an excuse to justify using the power of the state to back up their own set of prejudices.

There is little of no concern for the collateral damage of social justice policies, there is little or no concern for injustice against those outside of preferred groups.

From those I've know well enough to have a sense of how it works in their own lives those who call the most loudly for expenditure of taxpayer money for social justice causes do whatever then can to minimise their own contributions to the tax system.

R0bert
Posted by R0bert, Tuesday, 2 July 2013 7:04:31 PM
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My view of social justice is that a society functions for ALL its members, not just the stronger, wiser, healthier, richer and more mature ones.

This means: those who live sensibly and those who don’t, those who have a knack for generating wealth and those who are financially hopeless, those with a strong sense of responsibility and those who are supremely selfish, those who live healthy lives and those with a talent for substance abuse, those with a strong work ethic and those who don’t believe that life is about working our butts off … and so on.

As soon as we start injecting moral judgments into what constitutes social justice, we miss the whole POINT of social justice.
Posted by Killarney, Tuesday, 2 July 2013 10:39:45 PM
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Killarney very much agree with what I think I read in your post. I'm wondering if you mean something different to the way I've intepreted the post given some of the points we disagree on else where but the plain meaning is what you intended well said.

R0bert
Posted by R0bert, Wednesday, 3 July 2013 6:25:07 AM
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I said to a commenter on my website that 'social justice' is difficult stuff, and the six comments here demonstrate that difficulty. I think I could agree in part with all six, yet they all present different views about what the concept means. The only thing I can be sure of is that we're going to hear quite a bit about it over the next several weeks!
Posted by Don Aitkin, Wednesday, 3 July 2013 8:05:12 PM
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Well, yes. For myself, even though I would discount or modify much of his initial concerns I rather like the final remark made by LEGO, to the effect that one crucial move to alleviate poverty, at any rate, would be to figure out how to raise general intelligence levels across the population. To do that, we need to figure that the key is not in improving education departments so much as in honouring mothers, and ensuring that all babies,before and after birth, get warm loving care in the context of a good physical and nutritional and intellectual/moral environment - from their mothers!(with fatherly support as well) This may be a tall order, but probably the sine qua non. Meantime we could exert a bit of energy in getting rid of INJUSTICE, the multiple examples of which are easier to tackle, because less global.One instance I would prioritise myself is the need to scrutinise the HUGE difference between the RSPCA's PR media releases and the actuality of RSPCA behaviour. There is now plenty of stuff on the web to make such an investigation relatively easy for anyone with an interest in doing so.Yes,disclosure, I am personally interested in this issue. For some extra details check out www.communityrun.org/petitions/stop-rspca-prosecution-scandals-1
A primary concern here is regularised elder abuse, couched in moral fervour, and relying on the basic substratum of ageism that permeates Australian society. It is a game that has enabled the RSPCA to become a financial empire on the basis of asset-stripping older people who have one way or the other become socially stranded.
Posted by veritas, Monday, 22 July 2013 11:26:30 AM
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Rent-seekers everywhere you look.
Posted by Antiseptic, Tuesday, 23 July 2013 8:28:10 AM
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It seems to me that the nub of the problem is that our social justice advocates are all focussed intently on their own concerns and they become so overwhelmingly knowledgeable about and protective of that particular aspect of social justice and advocating for it that they drown out any attempt to point out flaws in their approach or to broaden discussion. Dissenters are demonised and victims paraded like trophies. As a result, they are very effective at achieving funding and policies that are based entirely on a one-sided view of the problems they are addressing. Weak populist politicians compete to be seen as the most compassionate to the cause of the day and eventually it just makes sense for people to self-select into some form of protected group because of the preferment on offer.

Education is the key. It would be both cruel and politically untenable to simply stop any of the programs willy-nilly, but they are socially dysfunctional so they have to be pulled apart somehow.

In my view the way to do that is through teaching people some of the things that are fundamental to being human - sociality, resilience, obligation to others.

Most people are good. They don't want to do bad things. However, they are wrapped up with their own concerns and they lack a framework of broad knowledge with which to assess competing claims of goodness or to debunk false ones. That means they are vulnerable to manipulation by people who seem to have a greater understanding of what needs to be done, whether those people are preachers or politicians or pompous, primping prats.

We need to strive to arrive at a simple and readily implemented way for people to assess the genuine goodness in an idea rather than the superficial gloss on the surface.

A moral philosophy that is simple and works and cuts through the noise, in other words
Posted by Antiseptic, Thursday, 25 July 2013 5:01:59 AM
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In communications research there has been a huge amount of work done on encryption and coding in order to make it possible to reduce the power required to transmit and receive a useful signal in a noisy environment. I suspect that is a key to improving social justice discussions in the public sphere. .

One of the aspects of that research is the idea of "Private key/public key" encryption and I think this is applicable at present in that the private key determines what messages can be received, regardless of what the public sees. PGP is the best-known example. Socially, this plays out in the different ways that a message is interpreted by people according to their particular identification as a member of a group, such as "progressive" or "conservative" or "radical": "religious", atheist", "agnostic"; "scientific", "arty", "philosophical"; perhaps most powerfully of all "Christian", "Muslim", "Jewish".

The important thing about private key/public key is that one must never reveal the private key or the message is open to all.

We need to try to arrive at a "public key/public key" understanding of the semantics in messages. Semantics is the way we encode information in our messages and that may have nothing to do with the way the information is transmitted.

It is only by teaching people to think that we can achieve social justice.
Posted by Antiseptic, Thursday, 25 July 2013 5:15:34 AM
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Antiseptic - what refreshing ideas. I'd love to chat, best over over a cup of tea/coffee, glass of beer, with email as back-up option. You won't need to be Sherlock Holmes to track me down...But I've spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to escape the bureaucracy increasing and problem multiplying effects of the dynamic inherent in the one-problem-at-a-time approach. Every time, the solution produces problems greater than the initiating difficulty.
Posted by veritas, Thursday, 25 July 2013 11:26:53 AM
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sounds great, Watson. Please ask your second to contact mine and name your preferred stringed instrument...
Posted by Antiseptic, Friday, 26 July 2013 6:17:05 PM
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On reflection, it looks as though teaching people to read might be more important than teaching them to think!
Posted by veritas, Friday, 26 July 2013 8:05:49 PM
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The two are entwined, surely?
Posted by Antiseptic, Saturday, 27 July 2013 8:50:59 AM
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