What Can Replace Social Justice Fundamentalism?

Intellectual refutations alone cannot dismantle Social Justice Fundamentalism; we must replace it with a unifying framework rooted in empathy and universal human worth.

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Many critics, including several featured in these pages, have been actively combating Social Justice Fundamentalism (SJF) at the intellectual level. This is vital and necessary work.

However, people rarely adopt ideologies solely because they find them intellectually compelling. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind, “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” What this means is that we often embrace ideologies because they appeal to us on a psychological level, and we then use reason to justify the beliefs we already desire to have. Haidt notes that our moral reasoning is “a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to.” He warns that our stated reasons for holding certain beliefs are “mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.”

Haidt’s insights prompt a crucial question: If intellectual arguments fail to address the core reasons people are drawn to SJF, what other strategies might effectively counter this ideology at a deeper level?

Addressing this question is vital, given the numerous negative impacts of SJF ideology on society.