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Saturday, November 3, 2018

Justice

I am finally writing about something which is a bit of a personal problem with me: I have a real issue with the concept of justice.
I think the reason for this is that as it is often understood, justice is seen as coming from outside oneself. Justice is seen to be decided by official arbiters and is closely related to another personal bugbear, which is the idea of rights.
I am not into these concepts for the simple reason that they appeal to external authorities. I believe myself to be a more than adequate agent to decide how I should behave towards others and what is right and wrong. You may say that laws are needed because some people aren't bothered how they behave. Well, they're not going to be bothered by breaking a law either, are they? I don't have an answer to this problem I've created, it's basically to make the point that those who know how to behave don't need laws, in my humble opinion.
There is another problem with justice, which is the blindness of justice, the idea also represented by scales or feathers. The idea that justice takes a full account and metes out what we deserve. There is the problem with this that as we act in various situations we can never truly see everything involved and so can only act on our understanding.
The idea of deserving is also tricky. There is a human tendency to think that we should be treated as we deserve, rather than arbitrarily, which is perceived as being unjust.
Don't get me wrong, if, say, my employers set up policies then ignore them to my disadvantage, I will hold them to them, because that is the contract. But on the whole I don't see things being done with justice in nature. Disasters just...happen, and it is only religious nuts who claim they are caused by gays (we,re powerful, see).
The problem of blame and entitlement is also found in the modern discourse of traditionally disadvantaged groups, which if repeated enough becomes so fixed they remain oppressed. We become what we think.
The idea of justice is also bound up in self image. Some people will always be genuinely happy in their skin. Some people are unhappy and blame themselves, so either end up in a well of misery or change what they do.
Some other people are unhappy and are convinced it's someone else's fault. They either get a chip on their shoulder and become resentful of their perceived oppressor, or they try to level it out by bringing the oppressor down to get a bit of what they've got.
Some other people (and they're really scary) think every human emotion and action is fake and behave accordingly.
I know this may seem to be far from justice, but the purpose of my post is really to express my own dissatisfaction and not to describe a whole alternative social system. The illustration of the Justice card has a purpose, to point out that there is a tradition that the rope around the neck of Justice is the same rope suspending the Hanged Man. Justice is a dangerous thing...

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