Inside the minds of Social Justice Warriors

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To delve into the mind of a social justice warrior, we first have to define what a social justice warrior is. While the term is often used rather loosely, it usually has to do with a very specific sort of person. They are the rather politically minded individuals that believe they can save the world by policing their brand of morals and controlling speech.

Often they are confused with the usual politically driven individuals that seek to help their community. The difference is very much the mind set. One feels that for the most part, we can let people have separate beliefs as long as they aren’t hurting anyone. Where as the social justice warrior feels that the very act of having certain thoughts or criticisms is inherently hurtful.

I have often pondered over how these people come to be. I’ve wondered how it is that these people go from wanting to help the community to being the thought police. I’m not certain whether the social justice crowd attracts perpetual victims or creates them, but at some point they are drawn into a cause. Usually it’s a broad problem that isn’t easily solved.

Now the best thing to do in that situation is to bring your activism down to earth, and to focus on small achievable goals. But that is not what these people do. They instead run on the insane hysterical theory that most people are intolerant bigots that are trying to keep women and minorities down. So if they can’t raise money for their incredibly bad idea, to them it’s the work of some powerful agent that is unseen and everywhere. They run on paranoia.

The only guess that I have as to how this happens, is that somehow they become emotionally drawn into this. Maybe at some point they suffer a terrible slight, real or imagined, and take up the mantle of social justice so that no one ever has to suffer again.

Most of all it is their blindness to larger progress that is most harmful. It is one thing to protest a corrupt person or group of people, it is another to protest them because you believe that they are bad because they are rich white hetero sexual men, and you believe that they have some kind of evil inherent power.

This mindset is the result of an ideology and not logical reasoning. It is based in emotion, and casts any problems they have onto external forces. Because they are running on faith, they miss the obvious progress happening all around them. They won’t read that women are on the rise in academia, or  the growing number of interracial couples signifing the disappearance of widespread racism in the west. Certainly sexism and racism still exist, but not to the extent that it did 100 years ago.

You can not point out the progress in society to these people. They can neither recognize it nor attach any kind of significance to it. Because for them, it can never be enough. They’ll say, “Well we’ve done some things, but we still have a long way to go.” They are blind to progress because they try to attack the problems in ways that don’t work.

They perform the same actions over and over expecting different results. These social justice groups often have no clear goals or cut off point. They can not imagine a world where that group is no longer needed, because when progress does happen, they are blind to it. Things like voting rights, and the ability for anyone in the west to own property are huge accomplishments.

Even if these people could, through some miracle, find a solution to these problems, they would not know that had done so. Because again, they are blind to real social progress. Their faith blinds them to any actual solutions to human problems, because of their paranoid belief that people are actively trying to keep them from succeeding.

That is why they are so inefficient at achieving anything. Because instead of trying to find the common causes of problems like rape or child abuse, they create these insane theories. If you’ve never heard it, it goes something like this. Men treat women poorly because of the media that portrays women as sex objects, which causes men to treat women as not being people, and are therefore more likely to abuse women. All their theories involve this weird sort of butterfly effect, where the act of not following their insane morals hurts all (insert oppressed group here).

Instead of recognizing that there just exist some terrible people in the world that victimize other people, they think that society as a whole is making people rape and murder. If you say the wrong things or are critical of them, the very act of doing so, in their minds hurts everyone.

Needless to say, you can not debate or reason with these people. They don’t recognize evidence. But fortunately for us, they are a minority. The vast majority of people are not diehard social justice warriors. Those people can be reasoned with. Many of them just want to be socially progressive and hop on the bandwagon. They can be reached.

It’s important to remember that these people are not subhuman beasts. They are human like us. Many of us used to be like them. I was once like them. Knowing this, I can tell you, that all you can do is plant the seeds of doubt. If they are reasonable people, then it will burn in their minds as facts that can not be ignored. That is how they’ll wake up to the reality of what is happening.

These people aren’t ready to take their blinders off. They aren’t ready to listen and some of them never will be. One thing is certain, if we want to be different, we need only make our goals and follow through. It is easy to hate, and far more difficult to counter ignorance with rationality. That is how we should approach this, and that is how we will win.

Rachel Edwards
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Rachel Edwards
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