Tales of a just world

In Garrison Keillor‘s Lake Wobegon Days an anonymous young man writes a manifesto entitled 95 Theses 95 as a protest against his small-town upbringing and what it made of him.  Among his points are

70.  When I hear about deprivation and injustice in the world, I get up and change the channel.

71.  What can I do?  It’s not my fault.   I didn’t make them.  God did.  It’s His world, let Him take care of it.

72.  Anyway, I was brought up to believe that whatever happens to people is their own fault.  There are few if any disasters that you cannot explain by citing the mistakes made by the victims.  “She never should have married him.”  “He never should have been there in the first place.”  Even if you had to go back thirty years, you could find where they took the wrong fork in the road that led directly to their house burning down, their car being hit by a truck, their hands being eaten by corn pickers.

The manifesto is fictional, but unfortunately the sentiment is real, and example of the Just World Fallacy.  All of you readers have doubtless encountered it, whether in a form like Keillor’s manifesto writer, or a harrumphing conservative explaining how the poor wouldn’t be poor if they weren’t so stupid and lazy, or just some jerk mansplaining that a rape victim was “asking for it” because of the way she dressed.  The phenomenon is documented most extensively by the psychologist Melvin J. Lerner in a book called The Belief in a Just World (and tellingly subtitled A Fundamental Delusion).

For those who want to deny the centrality and pervasiveness of suffering in human experience, belief in a just world makes a pretty magnificent tool.  It enables one to dismiss or demean the suffering of others, because they “deserve” it or “could avoid it if they would just wise up.”  But I also think interestingly that one can turn it inward on oneself and one’s own suffering.  Instead of just thinking that one is suffering, one can think back to the “wrong” fork in the road one took and think “If only I hadn’t done such-and-such…”  (Given the complexity of the world, it is easy to imagine that the counterfactual would be something much more agreeable than what we actually have to live with, and since we don’t actually experience the counterfactual, this imagining has no opportunity to be falsified.)  The thought that we could have done better (because if the world were just, we probably could have) we can be seduced by the thought that if we could just fix some failing in ourselves, if we could just work harder or be more rational or just find the right therapist or be more obedient to the will of God, then things will work out better next time.

In short, believing in a just world enables us to locate ourselves as a protagonist in a sort of story — the sort of story which we hear over and over and over again from earliest childhood, about how the virtuous suffer but in the end are triumphant because it is a just world after all.  And this holds out hope because the possibility of our happy ending is always there, if we can just do the right things and get over that hill…

Too bad the world is made of atoms, not of stories.  And atoms don’t care about justice at all.

Antinatalists who want their view to progress in the world should combat this fundamental delusion.