Psychological Structure Underlying the Critical Social Justice Worldview

Discussion

Key Features of the Critical Social Justice Worldview

Jaco van Zyl:

"In addition to its purely philosophical roots, there is a psychological structure underlying this worldview that requires certain psychological processes and intrapersonal dynamics on the part of its adherents for the ideology to be maintained, updated, and propagated. This article explores these processes.

In their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt categorize social activism into two types of worldviews, namely Common-Humanity Identity Politics and Common-Enemy Identity Politics. The former describes a type of social religion where the well-being of all humans is prioritized based on shared human values and common goals. It is a “social religion,” where all humans are equally included, and members of society are often referred to in familial terms. Historically, common-humanity identity politics has aimed to unite and harmonize racial, gender, and other strata of American life—and not to destroy, “dismantle,” or “cancel” any cultural artifacts of American heritage. The latter worldview, however, endorses a value system where an ever-growing list of aspects in American society are identified as “problematic” and consequently deserving of destruction. People who live by this worldview are vigilant and alert, ready to identify an enemy: a historical figure, an academic subject, language use, religious doctrine, a specific religion, a tradition, or a demographic based on immutable properties (gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.).

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The common-enemy position has a well-established equivalence in psychology. Dividing people and human artifacts into all-bad or all-good categories is a basic feature of the Woke worldview. By virtue of a person’s immutable features, he is assigned a group-identity and is either classified as belonging to the evil oppressor class, the common enemy that needs to be exposed, humiliated, and cancelled or the virtuous, innocent victim class that deserves emancipation and social justice. To the Woke, the individual gets superseded by the group classification from which he cannot escape. Broadly, the categories carrying historical and current culpability include the categories of male, white, heterosexual, and able-bodied. Alternatively, categories carrying historical and current victimhood and moral innocence include the categories female, black/people of color, LGBTQ+ and disabled. This worldview in which every individual is classed as either all-bad or all-good actualizes a defense called splitting. Splitting is a primitive defence of young infants and in character constellations of some adults according to which people are either seen as purely evil and hostile, or purely innocent and loving.

Within this split worldview, certain qualities are attributed to the Other, including feelings, intentions, wishes, and character traits. The attribution of such mental and character traits onto someone else can be described as the defence mechanism known as projection. Prejudice of any kind (be that sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism, etc.) may be seen as the result of people projecting hostile aspects to whole groups of people. Once this split worldview has been established, guilt and innocence of the role players within every incident are determined by gender, race, or sexual orientation.

Critical Social Justice Theory does not ask whether racism or sexism or homophobia took place; it assumes that it inevitably did:

“The question is not ‘did racism take place’? but rather ‘how did racism manifest in that situation?'”

An appropriate question here may be framed as: “Where do the feelings, intentions, wishes, or character traits projected upon the other originate?

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It is the contention of this piece that the feelings, intentions, wishes, or character traits projected to the Other originate with the person himself. These can be devaluing projections or idealizing projections (concordant with the primitive split into all-good and all-bad objects). With devaluing projections, aspects of the person they find internally intolerable, repudiating, or immoral within themselves get projected onto the bad object. Engaging the devalued Other with projected parts of themselves gives such individuals a greater sense of control over the otherwise intolerable aspects present yet denied within themselves. Often, those who employ this defensive splitting and projecting of bad aspects of themselves to the devalued Other, oftentimes manifest the exact type of projected characteristics themselves.

In contrast with devaluation and dehumanization of the Oppressor, the victimized Other is necessarily endowed with the opposite: all-good status of innocence, virtue, moral privilege, heroism, and essential purity. What is noteworthy is that some of the most passionate and devoted adherents of CSJT are also the most privileged elite of society. It seems that a vast number of these adherents belong to the category of white, often male, and heterosexual, frequently occupying prominent corporate, teaching, celebrity, or political positions, and belonging to middle- to upper-class households, having graduated from privileged schools and colleges, with concomitant great social influence, thus corresponding to CSJT’s definition of unearned privilege thanks to a most unjust, racist, and oppressive system. It is, therefore, logical to conclude that guilt about their shared perpetration of oppression may be too intolerable to bear. This anguish is solved in two ways:

By projecting the guilt onto non-adhering members of the same devalued category, pointing out the racism in others, resorting to call-out and cancellation campaigns, and terrorizing individuals suspected of non-adherence (which is tantamount to endorsing racism) online, in the media, and especially before the suspected perpetrator’s employer.

By employing a defense called identification with the victim, they act as allies to victimized minorities, describing themselves in self-deprecating terms, confessing their own racism and oppression, and vowing to commit to the Woke cause of dismantling systemically oppressive racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic systems. This allyship may, in fact, be described as a conscious or subconscious strategy to rid oneself of one’s own sense of complicity in the believed perpetration of oppression, by demonizing the devalued Other and, thus, camouflaging oneself through self-debasement and virtue-signaling behavior.

A further appeal for such passionate endorsement of the CSJT comes from the social incentives. In the media, in centers of higher education, as the ethos of many corporations, at museums, in demonstrations by sports stars, at social events, and in the public statements by celebrities and artists, CSJT is framed as the moral goal of society—a new social religion.

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This state can only be maintained for as long as the all-good versus all-bad split is maintained. Psychologically, this is a much simpler maneuver compared to a more difficult alternative: namely, to tolerate ambivalence. It may be more bearable to condemn whole demographics, whole cultures, and whole histories as all-evil on the grounds of the despised aspects of such persons and their artifacts (also called part-object representation) than to deal with the complexities of appreciating that people of all races, genders, sexual orientations, histories, and cultures consist of both positive and negative aspects to various degrees (i.e., whole object representation).

CSJT ensures the maintenance of the psychic split in various ways. The assigning of privilege and perpetration, on the one hand, and disadvantage and moral purity, on the other, is not based on alterable factors but on static, immutable characteristics framed in totally offensive terms. One does not and might never hear of authoritative-parenthood privilege; addiction-free household privilege; disease-free childhood privilege; or early-trauma-free privilege; nuclear family privilege. These categories (whose correlations with improved development into adulthood have been confirmed) would weaken the split between unchangeable categories and turn it into a more workable framework in which those concerned with social justice could work. Adherents of the Woke worldview disallow this more complex approach to social issues (psychologically, an ambivalent position) and, instead, succumb to the simplistic and often pleasurable permission to demonize entire categories of people according to immutable traits."

(https://merionwest.com/2021/09/02/the-psychology-of-critical-social-justice/)