The Catastrophic Death of Fairness By J.B. Shurk
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_catastrophic_death_of_fairness.html
Some social psychologists believe that humans are biologically wired to seek “fair” relationships with others. Some theologians believe that the soul’s capacity for distinguishing right from wrong leads a moral person toward the same result. Whether genetically or spiritually inclined to prefer fair outcomes, we humans are not comfortable around those who cheat and prosper from duplicity. Cheating is ugly and therefore despised.
Systemic cheating, however, now dominates Western life. Elevating “diversity for diversity’s sake” over all other metrics for gauging achievement has reduced merit and hard work to second-class virtues. Rewarding illegal aliens with amnesty has cheapened the sacrifices of those lawful immigrants who have struggled to integrate into their new home countries. Allowing delusional men to dominate women’s sports has cheated female athletes of a fair playing field for pursuing excellence. In ways big and small, “woke” governments, corporations, and academic institutions cheat Western citizens of the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their own labors.
Of course, systemic cheating is disguised in language that sounds noble. “Woke” Marxists use “fairness” jiujitsu to force disingenuous and unprincipled change.
Unfairly promoting a less talented person over a more talented person because of his respective skin colors is celebrated as a victory for “diversity” — a reminder that in the twenty-first century, racists are still obsessed with how a person looks at the expense of what thoughts occupy his mind. Without any public debates or votes, governments have replaced “equal treatment under the law” with “equitable” redistribution — or, in layman’s terms, “special treatment under the law” — so that certain classes of people can benefit at the expense of others.
In an amazing instance of Orwellian “doublespeak,” the State categorizes those classes that are unfairly rewarded as “underprivileged” and the people against whom it discriminates as “privileged.” Never in human history have people with “privilege” felt so marginalized. All this cheating is done for the stated purpose of “including” many different kinds of people, but it depends entirely on “excluding” people to obtain fraudulently manufactured and prejudiced results.
None of this is fair. Stealing the earned successes of some, so that others may benefit without sacrifice, has a tendency to permanently scar both the victim of the theft and the supposed beneficiary. When hard work and dedication are spurned, a seed of dejection is planted that can spoil an otherwise promising life. When unearned rewards become expected entitlements, the enriching pursuit of human excellence withers and often dies.
Aside from the damage to individual lives, though, systemic cheating destroys society. If humans are hardwired to prefer “fair” outcomes, then the proliferation of “unfair” outcomes makes life deeply unsettling. If pursuing “fairness” in our lives forms an integral part of our spiritual connection to God, then “unfair” systems cause moral havoc on the soul. Cultural bonds become strained, and the shared respect for rules and laws soon slips away.
What is the quickest path to anarchy and civil strife? The imposition of an unfair and unjust worldview that rationalizes stealing from those who toil and punishing those who succeed. When virtue is mocked as another imaginary form of “white supremacy,” then vice rots society and leads it to ruin.
The cost of undermining fair human relations is immense. The U.S. Civil War took more lives than every other American war combined. The Nazi-implemented Holocaust killed two out of three European Jews. Some fifty million human beings remain slaves today. Wherever and whenever unfair systems are permitted to propagate, immense human suffering is the result. And when those unfair systems are eventually repudiated, further human suffering is the price for emancipation.
One would think that history has been painfully clear on this subject: nations that deny human beings equality under the law will be afflicted with great tribulation and may even disappear. When different rules govern different categories of people, there can be no prospect for future peace.
Every year, U.S. universities pass over Asian-American applicants with higher grades and test scores in order to select new students from specially designated “underprivileged” categories, even though a disproportionate number of these Asian-Americans come from economically modest families who immigrated to the United States in the last two generations. For so many of these Asian-Americans, hard work and discipline have been the keys to their academic success. How have American universities rewarded their virtue? By engaging in blatant discrimination based on the color of their skin. Instead of highlighting Asian-American achievement as something that all Americans should emulate, so-called institutions of higher learning pursue “equitable” solutions that unjustly punish the most deserving.
These same universities — now a century into their transition from repositories for free thought to brainwashing factories growing the Marxists’ hive-mind — have become ground zero for the demolition of Western civilization. In a masochistic form of irony, the same system of education that arose from centuries of Western pedagogy now seeks intellectual suicide. The same institutions that arose from Christian monasteries and cathedral schools now excoriate all tenets of Christianity. Western exploration, scientific advancement, philosophical debate, and rational enlightenment have all become targets for bowdlerization, if not outright censorship. Politicized department chairs regularly remove literary masterpieces from graduate-level curricula in quixotic quests to fight “colonialism” and “white supremacy.”
The end result has been anything but academic. Its real-world repercussions include a century of college students who have only a tattered comprehension of the greatness of their civilizational inheritance and the darkness from whence it emerged. While generations of Westerners have been taught to hate the foundations of their prosperity and strength, Islamic and communist civilizations can only laugh at the West’s self-indulgent nihilism. The universities, having taken their anti-Western zealotry to its logical conclusion, have even succeeded in reigniting an antisemitic bloodlust as rapacious as during the slaughter of WWII. And all of these dangerous consequences have come on the heels of the university system’s full surrender to a Marxist disease that infects students with hate under the pretense of “fairness.”
Having done their job to erase Western history and weaken Western souls, the colleges have filled the ranks of government bureaucracies, corporate boards, furtive intelligence agencies, and military roundtables with “woke,” anti-Western Marxists on foolish crusades for fake “fairness,” too. It is only at this absurd juncture in history — when legions of the indoctrinated and insane have swelled beyond the constraints of reason, rationality, and moderation — that it is possible for the U.S. government to take the official position that it must brazenly discriminate against white people generally (and white males, specifically) simply because of their demographic strength.
White men are passed over for scholarships, awards, and career advancements — not because they fail to compete, but rather because their successes have been judged “unfair.” Jokes are made at their expense because they are the only category of person whose mockery and derision are permitted. When white men engage in political protest, prosecutors target and harass them for alleged crimes that would never be pursued if not for their race. Even as fewer white men attend college and more continue to exit the labor market permanently, they are preposterously blamed for sustaining the dreaded twin-demons of “patriarchy” and “white supremacy.” Morally vacuous Joe Biden lectures the world that the greatest danger to the United States is not Chinese communism or Islamic terror or the World Economic Forum’s emerging globalist corporate oligarchy — but rather the elusive threat from poor, white men and their “hateful” speech.
Is it any wonder, then, why white men continue to exit the military, top businesses, and once respected institutions in droves? They have gotten the message and have no interest in defending a system that uses them as scapegoats. Such is the catastrophic price of sacrificing fair and equal treatment for all when the “woke” lead us into the moral wilderness.
Comments are closed.
