A Rational Analysis of “Social Justice”

Valuing diversity should imply valuing discrimination, otherwise what value is there to be gained from having diversity? If there is variation, but no selection, there will be no improvements in the ideas or output. Likewise, if there is no diversity, then there would be no value to discriminating. If there is no variation, then there is nothing to select from.

If the left-wing worldview is taken to its logical conclusion, it would actually lead to complete racial segregation. They don’t believe that there are any important differences between people of different races, but if that’s the case, then there can’t be any possible benefit to diversity because we’re all the same. And yet they celebrate diversity, even though they have no reason why it would make anybody’s life better.

At the same time, there are supposed disadvantages that are created by being a minority, so the logical conclusion should be that the best thing to do would be to segregate everybody by race, so that nobody faces the disadvantages of being a minority.

If other cultures and peoples are so insightful, then why don’t the leftists live in those countries? The vast majority of leftists wouldn’t live anywhere else but the West, except maybe Japan and other Westernized countries. If immigration boosts economic growth by increasing the population and thus increasing the size of the economy, then that’s an argument for first-worlders to migrate to third-world countries, not the other way around.

Lookism will probably be the last form of discrimination to ever be eliminated. Not even the most hard-core leftists who claim to be obsessed with eliminating all forms of discrimination have recognized Lookism as a prevalent form of discrimination that exists basically everywhere.

In some cases, heightism can be classified as a subtype of lookism. Heightism is another form of discrimination that leftists don’t address, even though addressing it ought to be part of their worldview.

If it were truly a “good” thing to have equal numbers of men and women in every field, then leftists would put the same amount of effort (scholarships, marketing, preaching, etc.) into getting more men into female-dominated fields, like education, medical field, linguistics, the humanities, etc. When questioned about this, leftists will tend to say that it’s also important that more men enter the humanities too. However, we have to judge people by their actions instead of their words to figure out what they truly want. Leftists don’t even try to recruit more men into female-dominated fields. They only want more women to study STEM because STEM fields have greater social power. They are where humanity’s technology and innovation take place.

People don’t choose what they want to study based on gender or ethnicity. That whole notion is absolutely ridiculous. Everybody studies what they are interested in or what will benefit them. Even though 60% of college students are women and the ratio of women-only to men-only scholarships at US colleges is also 11 to 1, there are still less women in STEM fields than men (biology and medical fields are exceptions). The gender gap in other STEM fields may be decreasing, but it’s unlikely that it’ll ever decrease enough to be completely equal for both sexes. This implies that the gender gap in STEM participation is primarily due to natural, biological differences between men and women. Men and women simply have different interests, and that is okay.

Even if women were subsidized with scholarships and preferential treatment to encourage an equal participation of women in STEM fields, men would still continue to be the leaders in STEM. If there are two groups that work in STEM and one of them chooses it without financial incentives because they would enjoy more than anything else that they could do, and the other group works in it in part because of the financial benefits, then the group that does STEM without those benefits is going to have the better scientists, the better engineers, and the better mathematicians since they’re more motivated to do the field to begin with without the additional financial incentives. The unsubsidized people that are willing to work in STEM work without any additional incentives (men) will still be the better workers in the long run since they are more motivated by the field itself instead of its economic benefits.

Link: Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber by James Damore

There are various theories about the rise of wokism that can be summarized as follows:

• Christopher Rufo: Critical Theory -> “long march through the institutions” -> Wokism
• Richard Hanania: Civil rights law demands nondiscrimination -> judges and bureaucrats declare disparate impact to be evidence of discrimination -> legal bureaucracy to enforce civil rights laws -> Wokism
• Nathan Cofnas: WEIRD morality & belief in psychological equality & intractable group disparities -> elites become woke ->
  • -> woke philosophy -> children indoctrinated with woke ideology
  • -> woke law -> law reinforces institutionalized wokism
• Edward Dutton, et al: The Mutational Load Hypothesis
• Ted Kaczynski: The Power Process, Surrogate Activity, Oversocialization Theory

I disagree with the Mutational Load Hypothesis, because it simply doesn’t fit the evidence. It’s likely that Mutational Load is partially responsible for causing a minority of woke people to be woke. However, since the rise of wokism occurred within just a few decades or so among such a large number of people, our heuristics regarding differences between people inform us that wokism is probably mostly environmental, rather than genetic.

Rufo’s, Hanania’s, and Cofnas’s theories of wokism each note a few important points, but they each ultimately fail to fully recognize the historical context and background regarding why critical theory, WEIRD morality, and wokism evolved in the first place (the causes of 1960s counterculture, anti-Nazism, etc). None of the theories describe the memetic processes that propagate wokism either.

The theory that Ted Kaczynski proposed in Industrial Society And Its Future is the oldest of these explanations, but I’d say that it’s the best one. He missed some important details (anti-Nazism backlash, higher birth control access, etc), and his description could be improved, but he did a great job at describing wokism and why it occurs, especially when terms like “woke” and “virtue-signaling” didn’t exist yet when he wrote his manifesto. He doesn’t describe his theory on the origins of wokism concisely in the manifesto since he wanted to spend a lot of words describing and criticizing leftism/wokism and since that wasn’t the main goal of the manifesto. Nevertheless, sections 2-6 explain most of his theory, with section 5 “The Power Process” and section 6 “Surrogate Activities” being the most important.

The following is an outline of events throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that lead to the rise of Wokism:

1. Christianity was initially the dominant moral belief system of the West for a couple millennia.
2. The Allies defeated the Nazis in WWII, which lead to the downfall of Social Darwinist beliefs and ideas, due to their association with Nazism. A sharp cultural backlash of anti-Nazi values and ideology gradually flourished throughout the West since nobody wants to be accused of being a Nazi. The Holocaust becomes a sacred moral narrative.
3. The aftermath of WWII and the baby boom generation caused the greatest cultural turning point of the 20th century, the 1960s Counterculture Movement, which ignited the rise of Wokism and Humanism.
4. The increasing availability of the birth control pill and other types of contraception in the 1960s and beyond lead to the Sexual Revolution, which lead the rise of Feminism.
5. The fall of Christianity caused more people to lose their sense of purpose in life. Since fewer people were propagating Christian memes, this created a vacuum that caused people to spread other memes instead, to fill the loss of purpose in their lives. Additionally, homosexuality became less taboo, the Western left became more accepting of Muslims, etc.
6. Humanism arose in the late 20th century, as a secular replacement to Christianity.
7. Humanism was influenced by the need for equal representation, which became apparent for the first time in Western culture after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
8. The prosperity of the West, technological advancements, and the success of the Civil Rights Movement and other counter-culture movements created the illusion of “moral progress”. This created the folk theory for woke morality.
9. The fall of the USSR ended the Cold War and shifted the public’s attention towards other political issues. It becomes more socially acceptable to promote socialist and communist ideas in the West.
10. People became more and more alienated from the modern world, due to the rise of fake information and alienation created by mass media and technology. Much of this fake information and the morals instilled through the mass media caused/cause people to adopt and favor more humanist values.
11. Technological advancements caused people to be unable to experience the power process, so people started engaging in woke activism, as a surrogate activity for creating meaning in their lives.
12. The existence of racial, sexual, etc disparities justifies and strengthens woke activism and affirmative action, with the goal of eliminating said disparities.
13. Wokism gradually penetrates Hollywood, entertainment media, news media, and academic institutions. Political and financial institutions later become compromised as well, since it became socially advantageous to virtue-signal for higher social status, better approval, etc, even if it leads to pathological altruism for the rest of society.
14. The establishment media became more partisan in the 2000s, and started using fake news tactics to propagate of wokism, and reinforce the beliefs of its believers.
15. The Internet created lots of social groups to which people could conform to, which exacerbated the rise of wokism and increased radicalization. It also caused many different flavors of wokism to develop.
16. Various memetic phenomena contribute to the further spread and development of wokism.

In summary, the rise of Wokism was caused by multiple factors, namely technological advancements and lifestyle changes, increased contraception availability, the fall of Christianity, the rise of Humanist values, anti-Nazi backlash, a struggle by wokists to find meaning in their lives, various memetic phenomena, and the capture of major establishment institutions.

Cofnas proposes that educating people about biological realism and hereditarianism will be sufficient to defeat wokism, but it won’t be enough. For one, he overestimates the ability of people to change their minds. For another, Wokism and virtue-signaling will continue to exist no matter how many milestones the wokists manage to achieve. Nature is inherently inequitable, so wokists will never run out of new equalist milestones to propose. And every time they do manage to achieve some equalist milestone, other ones will just matter more. Additionally, the wokists don’t have any effective long-term solutions for bestowing meaning to their lives. Until that is resolved, the wokists will continue promoting woke causes to fill the void of meaning in their lives.

I propose the following solutions ideas ending wokism:

• Educating people about Epistemology and Biological Realism: If people learn to understand why the woke causes that they’re fighting for are futile, then they may re-evaluate their beliefs and actions.
• Tactics for fighting the Culture War and moving the Overton Window: We need to have good arguments and present ourselves as reasonable, intelligent people acting in good faith. These will create cognitive dissonance.
• Rational Humanism: Most humans need to have a belief system or religion to follow and give purpose in their lives. To replace, we need such a religion that has more natural, sustainable, long-term causes. Rational Humanism proposes that people should focus on reproduction and civilization as the main chosen purposes of their lives.
• As time passes and as modern civilization declines, it will become more and more clear that Humanists and Humanist beliefs have failed to achieve the world that they’d like to achieve. If enough frustration, disappointment, and apathy develop, they may be more willing to change their minds and reconsider their worldviews.
• Evolution will gradually cause leftists and leftist genes to become less common.

The best way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating by race. Unfortunately, when people get used to preferential discriminatory treatment, equal treatment will seem like discrimination, even though it’s the other way around.

Affirmative action rewards less qualified people at the expense of people with better merits. The end result is that prestigious white-collar jobs are occupied by less qualified people. Eliminating affirmative action would thus ensure that applicants to universities, scholarship recipients, and other opportunities are all based purely on merit. This is the better approach because it would lead to our society to have better engineers, better programmers, better lawyers, better doctors, etc, which would lead to better machinery, better software, a better legal system, and better healthcare. The merit-based approach thus benefits everyone across the board, whereas the same cannot be said for the affirmative action approach. Additionally, if a person of color does become a doctor, engineer, lawyer, etc in the future, they won’t have to wonder if they were the best the school had to offer, or the “best adjusted for race”. The rest of society won’t have to wonder or suspect that either when they are the patient, the consumer, or the defendant.

The person in this tweet is basically saying black people have no merits and they need a rigged system to get jobs. Affirmative action sounds so stupid and absurdly racist when the quiet part is spoken out loud. Affirmative action proponents believe that the only way blacks and Hispanics can achieve a Harvard education is if they are given preferential treatment and access.

Another problem with affirmative action is that you can define an almost unlimited number of intersectional categories. Even if affirmative action does succeed in selecting applicants with equal quotas for race and sex, leftists may eventually ask “Why stop there?” Applicants should also be selected equally based on childhood upbringing, disabilities, hardships, life circumstances, etc. Going further, leftists may eventually demand that everyone should also receive equal income, equal benefits, equal dating opportunities, etc, in addition to existing race/sex/disability/hardship quotas. If you make one type of inequality go away, then other types of inequality will simply matter more. The same argument can also be made as to why pursuing maximal wealth equality is equally pointless.

To summarize, pursuing affirmative action and other types of absolute equality has at least two problems: 1. it erodes meritocracy, and 2. it only makes other types of inequality matter more.

The only way people could overlook the current anti-white propaganda and policies in the West is if they had an ideology that blinded them to it. When “It’s okay to be white” is labeled a hate slogan, we have a problem.

Links Regarding Anti-White Ideology And Propaganda In The West:

• Systemic Anti-White Bias in Western Media: A Ton of Evidence (Available as PDF)
• The Rise of Anti-White Bias in Media (with Statistical evidence)
• “Indigenous” Peoples of the World: Everyone Except Europeans
• The Intentional Destruction of White Birth Rates: Leaked reports from Planned Parenthood, the Rockefeller Foundation, World Bank, US NSC (including CIA, military etc.)
• Imperialism and Colonialism: White Guilt and Historic Non-White Conquests of European Territories
• Stochastic Terrorism: Non-White academics promote violence against Whites with real-world consequences

• The only coherent definition of “woman” is “adult human female”. Trans-inclusive definitions of “woman” require presupposing the male-female sex dichotomy while simultaneously denying it. Nearly all English dictionaries define <woman> as “adult human female”. If a dictionary does include a trans-inclusive definition for <woman>, it’s never the first or primary definition.
• Trans women are not women, and trans men are not men (assuming the most logical definitions of “man” and “woman”). No matter how many surgeries, hormones, or therapy a person receives, no one will ever be able to become the opposite sex of what they were born without showing obvious imperfections. Biology is reality. It will always be impossible to change and/or erase the serious neurological and biological differences between men and women.
• The best and most non-controversial way to define “woman” is via genetics. In mammals, the Y chromosome contains the gene SRY, which triggers male development.
  • A woman is an adult human female, who does not have a Y chromosome that contains the gene SRY. It’s that simple.
  • For people who have (Complete) Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, they are still male by definition. They have a disorder, but it’s a rare boundary case where a person may present as the opposite sex and be accepted as such without any surgeries, hormone replacement therapy, etc. There are thus rare cases when people might refer to a biological male as a woman in a social context, use she/her, etc, but that person is still not a woman, biologically speaking.
• Sex is the most important and primal social distinction in human society. Sex is 2 billion years old. Nations are thousands of years, and race is hundreds of thousands.
• Gender dysphoria is maladaptive, and it is classified as a mental disorder according to the DSM-5. Its occurrence in the modern era is likely yet another negative consequence of modern civilization, technology, and evolutionary mismatch.
  • Some research has shown that transgender brains are structured more closely to brains of the opposite sex compared to cisgender brains, although they’re still structured more closely to their respective biological sexes.
• Early-onset gender dysphoria should be distinguished from late-onset gender dysphoria.
• LGB (drop the T) should be popularized as an acronym, because being gay or bisexual is not the same as being transgender.
• Intersex people are to transgender people as albino people are to white people. They are completely different things. Bringing up intersex people as an excuse for the existence of more than two sexes is a Red Herring Fallacy.
• The argument that “a woman is what we say a woman is” is a circular definition, and thus fallacious.
• Trans ideology is founded upon the idea of gender and sex being different. But the ideology and arguments are really just a game of defining terms. Things like a legal systems, nations, love, etc have cultural constructions around them, but that doesn’t make the underlying things fake.
• Trans ideology isn’t falsifiable, and no evidence is supplied for why it really exists. If you ask any trans rights activist (TRA) why they believe in the sex-gender dichotomy, they would say that they believe it because the definitions of “sex” and “gender” are true. However, this ignores that they were the ones who invented the definitions. This means that their beliefs are a matter of faith, not rationality.
• Since leftists are changing language to advance their agenda, the rationalists could modify their culture war strategy by using different language. The trans activists acknowledge that “female” only refers to sex and is thus exclusive of transwomen. So instead of excluding transwomen from the definition of <woman>, the rationalists could start using “female” everywhere. Examples:
  • Males should never compete in female sports.
  • Males are forbidden from entering female restrooms and female-only spaces.
  • X does not have to date males, and Y does not have to date females, if X and Y are not attracted to those sexes.
  • “she” is for females and “he” is for males.
  • Et cetera.
  • Note: Since leftists will argue that ’man’ and ’woman’ are social terms and that ’male’ and ’female’ are biological terms, this approach might not work for some social things. In which case, both sides will have to continue arguing over what a ’woman’ is. If the trans activists try to move the goal post again by changing the definition of “female” too, the rationalists can call them out on it.

• The medical field should be focusing on how to treat gender dysphoria (i.e. to cure it; to make it go away), not on how to affirm the illness.
• Trans people may feel that gender reassignment surgeries, hormonal therapies, etc may help them feel better, but there are not enough long-term studies conducted on this, as of the early 2020s. There aren’t many out there since trans-people are a recent phenomenon with not a lot of people to study.
• The long-term effects of puberty-blockers, hormonal therapies, sex reassignment surgeries, etc are still unknown and possibly dangerous (especially for children), and yet they’re becoming more common anyway due to leftist ideology and big pharma.
• The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems and requirements that candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass.
• It could be that some transgender people choose to transition because they want attention and/or because they’re bored because they’re not able to go through the power process in today’s world.
  • Some people who transition due to late-onset gender dysphoria are motivated to transition in part because it’s a fetish for them.
• How does the argument “born in a different body” make any sense? Hypothetically, I could say “I feel like I’m born in the body of a 17th century nobleman”. But I’m not. I can’t change that anymore than I could change what sex or gender I am.

• Pronouns are supposed to make speaking more convenient. Forcing people to remember everybody’s pronouns makes them inconvenient, which defeats the purpose of using pronouns.
• If you have 30 people in a room and only one or two (or zero) have ’preferred pronouns,’ making it mandatory for everyone to announce their pronouns is a tokenistic time-waster. Among strangers, the main purpose of group introductions is to serve as an icebreaker, not so much for everybody to introduce themselves with the assumption that everybody will remember everything. Most people aren’t trying to pay attention, so most people won’t remember anything, much less preferred pronouns.
• How often do people hear their own pronouns anyway? When talking with people, it’s usually just “you” or their name. Requiring people to use preferred pronouns requires third parties to police what people say on the trans-person’s behalf. Why should people care how others describe them when they aren’t around to hear it, especially if they aren’t trying to be rude?
• Even if we do use someone’s preferred pronouns, they might still get upset anyway.
• Forcing people to use preferred pronouns is compelled speech. It violates freedom of expression.
• The only reason all this pronoun nonsense has any traction is because it’s imposed from the top down. Trans activists tend to argue that language changes and evolves, so adding made-up pronouns shouldn’t be an issue. But this argument ignores that the language change is not organic or natural in this case, hence why it is an issue. The language change is being forced on people against their common sense (and self-preservation), and people face consequences if they fail to submit to the leftists’ rules.
• If an employer is hiring people and they see a list of pronouns on an applicant’s resume, they are wise to toss the resume and move on. It’s a red flag that such people can and will play the identity card at the slightest inconvenience, and that their company is guaranteed to lose when the lawsuit comes, even if no laws were broken and no harm was caused.

In real life though, if someone politely asks me to use their pronouns, then I will generally refer to them as they wish and not make a big deal out of it, even if I think that it’s silly and ridiculous.

• Trans people will never go away, unless governments make it illegal for people to get trans surgeries, hormonal “treatments”, etc.
• People should be required to use the restroom designed for their urinary tracts. Different bathrooms have different toilets that are designed for different urinary tracts. This will also decrease the probability that females get sexually assaulted in female restrooms.
• To throw open the doors of women’s bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman is to throw open the doors to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth. And it’s of growing concern since gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones.
• It should be illegal for puberty-blockers, hormonal therapies, sex reassignment surgeries, etc to be given to children who are not legal adults. Society should reconsider the age of adulthood, although it wouldn’t be too different.
• Trans women should be forbidden from being able to play in women’s sports. Even if they take hormone therapies and surgeries to make them more similar to women, they will still have an unfair biological advantage against them that enables them to win competitions in women’s sports. If trans women want to play in athletic sports competitions, then they must compete in men’s sports instead.
  • I’m not saying that trans women should be forbidden from playing in any sports at all. I’m just saying that they should compete in the same competitions meant for their biological sex.
• Trans people who won’t date other trans people make up a minority of trans people. Having gender dysphoria may be beyond their control, but if they say that they only date “men” or that they only date “women” and they refuse to date trans people, then they are being hypocritical, especially if they would rather affirm their own mental illness rather than try to fix it.
• Every trans person should disclose that they are trans before going on a date with someone. Not just because it’s lying/unethical for them to not do so, but also because it’s in the interest of their own personal safety (they wouldn’t want to piss off a violent, unstable person by lying to them).
• The threshold would have to be incredibly high to argue for anything regarding “trans rights” on utilitarian grounds since they are such a small proportion of the population.
  • Any impositions to comfort trans people that even mildly inconvenience the majority would fail to maximize utility.
  • On the other hand, if comforting trans people was worth inconveniencing the majority, then trans people would be utility monsters, by definition.
• Society’s (and especially leftists’) obsession with gender identity is yet another instance of the modern world’s denial of biological realism.
• The obsession with gender identity takes away from focusing on more important problems, like suicidal problems, economic problems, overpopulation, etc.
• Trans people deserve the same rights and respect that everybody else has.
  • In practice, this often doesn’t happen because they often look ugly, they can’t fully pass as the sex and gender that they’re trying to present as, and many people dislike them for redirecting so much of the public’s attention, culture, and politics.
    • Even if this is the case, that is still not a good reason to deny transgender people respect and decency when they’re minding their own business.