Everyone wants justice, or at least seems to want justice. Even those lynching vigilantes wanted justice, which is, of course, the claimed point of being a vigilante. Vigilantes simply want their own quick view of justice, but without a process.
Lately, there’s a lot of talk about “social justice,” particularly in social media. In fact, there’s so much talk about being vigilant of social justice, that it is probably great time to reflect on our view of justice in society, at least to make sure there’s no beam in our eye that might cloud our vigilance. That wise “beam in your own eye” [1] comment from Jesus warns us of our human natural inclination to hypocrisy. So, let us get re-focused for a brief moment.
Justice, if it is to occur—and such as our American culture understands the term—is the function of a process. Justice, we understand it, is not so much the result, but the process by which the result occurs. With so many differing views of righteousness in a free-thinking society, there is simply no way to achieve theoretical resultant justice that satisfies everyone. People cannot even agree with themselves, let alone agree with everyone else. Therefore, as a matter of practicality over theory, we have developed a system of justice, including systemic checks and balances.
At least for now, and for so long as we can rationally predict, human beings will be involved in the systemic decision-making to try to achieve social justice. Of course, to achieve justice, we need to judge. To judge, we need to make decisions. To make decisions, we need good thinking and wisdom. We certainly all agree that anyone who prefers the decisions of a fool over a sage is not only a fool, but a reckless fool.
So let us examine our internal process of thinking wisely and clearly about social justice. To do so, we might coin four justice-killers as the Four Horsemen of the Social Justice Apocalypse. These Horsemen are all around us—all day and all night—whether or not we perceive them.
1. The First Horseman is Hearsay.
Hearsay will cause a decision-maker to forget the source of the information. First-hand knowledge is certainly the best information, which is not always possible for judgment. But Hearsay makes us forget to “consider the source.” Social media is filled with “band-wagon” decisions of people persuaded by other people who are not a proper source of influence. We should always “consider the source” and whether the person or thing that might influence us is of sufficient independence, objectivity, credibility, and integrity to merit wise reliance. It is not about being better than someone else, but knowing better than to rely upon someone else. [2, 3]
2. The Second Horseman is Induction.
Induction is the process of inducing a general conclusion from a particular. The problem is that Induction is a gambler, because Induction might be right or wrong. Induction’s brother, Deduction, has perfect logic to a conclusion, being from a generality to a particular. But, Induction—going from a particular to a generality—is a form of prejudice, perhaps natural, but prejudice nonetheless. Induction is what causes us to think that one swallow makes a summer. [4, 5]
Induction, with the help of Emotion, is the perennial stumping politician pointing to a particular to induce a general conclusion, “See little Johnny over there, he is fatherless because his soldering father was killed by our own Union forces with friendly fire. All war is bad and this Civil War must end now.” Induction is what makes someone tend to think that one bad person of a certain type is representative of all persons of that type. Induction might express a warning, but we forget that Induction is logically incompetent to provide us with a definitive conclusion. Sometimes Induction gets lucky, and sometimes Induction gets unlucky. Some might say that, as a horseman, Induction is always “jumping to a conclusion.“
3. The Third Horseman is Emotion.
[6] Emotion is the most efficient judgment-killer that ever existed. Emotion tends to ride along with hope, often simply with the hope to be validated, and there’s nothing better than a like-minded crowd to cross-validate one to the other, rightly or wrongly. [7, 8]
Emotion causes “rationalization” rather than being rational, with the “I knew I was right all along” foregone conclusion. Emotion cooks the judgment books with bias, often from selfish interest. Emotion and Induction share the weapon of conclusive self-righteousness: Emotion carries the ammunition and Induction carries the weaponry. [9] Social media tends to induce and to magnify emotions by pure mechanics of opinion proximity. Adducing emotion is a type of rhetorical manipulation, and there are a lot of emotions upon which to hang a cause.
4. The Fourth Horseman is Time.
[10] Time is perhaps the most forgotten horsemen, and yet he forever lurks. The Internet now “remembers everything,” making it tough to forget or to forgive anything. Facts now live and cast stones forever. Every newly discovered closeted fact is treated the same as the occurrence of a new fact, which it is not: it is an old fact newly discovered. What a person did 10 years ago might not be representative of who a person is today. “Label the act not the person,” until some juicy piece of second-hand information provided by Hearsay, with the help of hot mean Emotion and Induction, cause us to forget about Time and to conclude not only that an old act is a new act, but also incorrectly to induce that the old act is conclusively representative of the person today. Maybe or maybe not, but the systemic process is four-time flawed. People evolve. Standards evolve. Contexts change.
Social media is making a fortune with “morality time travel” that places acts that occurred in a former cultural framework into an evolved current social context. New wine must be matched to new wineskins. In most cases, the law of trial evidence excludes old facts of a person’s conduct for this very reason. A person might be the same, or might have changed, but woe unto us as Hearsay, Induction and Emotion cause us to forget about Time, wreaking havoc upon our judgment as we draw and express our so-called justice.
Judgment is an opinion, and it is a free country, so to each his or her own. But, if we are so bold (or arrogant) to judge others or contexts, we are taught to at least be vigilant unto ourselves first; that is, to perceive our own system of judging within the purported system of justice we so ardently profess to value, and to ensure that we and our society have not gotten carried away by any or all of the Four Horsemen of the Social Justice Apocalypse.
The Four Horsemen are justice-killing vigilantes always riding around us looking for someone to lynch under the name of social justice. And, if we do not see one of the horses, it might be because we are riding it.
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[1] ONE®: The Unified Gospel of Jesus, Divine Version [Second Edition] Published: ONE: 612 [T7:3, L6:41] (“Beam Eye“)
[3] Considering the Source – The Business of Aesop™ No. 68 – The Lion and the Statue
[4] Surviving Prejudice, Not All Bad
[7] Leadership and the Audacity of Hope
[8] Hiring on Hope – The Business of Aesop™ No. 90 – The Cat-Maiden
[9] The Insecure Human Being – The Business of Aesop™ No. 51 – A Fox Without a Tail
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© 2021 Gregg Zegarelli, Esq. Gregg can be contacted through LinkedIn.
http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-am-i-judge-social-media-death-four-horsemen-gregg-zegarelli-esq-/
See also: Surviving Prejudice, Not All Bad; No Tolerance for Hate, or All Tolerance for Hate?; Pro-Life or Pro-Choice? Chapter 1, Bias