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Graham Cunningham's avatar

As I find myself keep saying (to anyone who'll listen) Social Justice is better understood as a Psychology than as an Ideology. As an ideology it holds no water....in our time white people are not more racist than other ethnicities but less so.....homosexuality is not demonised but valorised etc etc. So the Social Justice belief system survives and thrives in spite of, not in accordance with the evidence. So why does it? Because it makes people FEEL good and FEEL sophisicated. It also gives its adherents a free pass to vent their bile and animus against their peers (as in Freud's Narcissism of Small Differences). On a theoretical level I would say that Lasch's 'Culture of Narcissism' has more depth than Henderson's (somewhat over-hyped in my view) Luxury Beliefs meme.

I understand though that your field is empirical research and so I would suggest that in order to understand what is driving its upsurge in recent times, the Social/Evolutionary Psychological disciplines are important avenues.

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Mike Hind's avatar

I never saw Henderson's LB idea as anything more than an observation. I've never seen him advance any actual evidence of real world causation for it. What would a test of its explanatory power even look like? (Rhetorical question).

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