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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 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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