philosophy; justice, guilt
i've been asking questions off and on the last few weeks about justice. nothing particularly incisive, just trying to get away from tired framings that left me wanting... justice has felt a fraught concept for me for some time and i want to elaborate why, and see what is salvageable in it.
who or what is the subject that can enact justice?
who or what is the object of justice?
what is the method of justice?
what is transformed by justice?
in our society, the Subject that enacts recognized and "legitimate" justice is The State. so what is the object of The State's justice? prison facilities are often called "correctional" facilities. what is being corrected? the actions of the individuals deemed guilty.
what is guilt? how is guilt determined? is the method of justice the determination of guilt? or does justice come when the guilty are punished, corrected, fixed?
here, i think is the first great mistaken thesis of justice in the modern world; the attribution of guilt to individuals, as if their soul is blighted by their actions. as if it's their soul that needs to be cleansed by the unmoving gears of the State's Justice System.
what is the object of justice? well, at minimum, the object of the State's justice is the soul of the individual found guilty.
so far, in looking at our own world as it is, we see Justice as The State mediating a transformation of guilty individuals' souls.
so what is the method of transformation? the correctional facility. the separation from outer-society, and the monitoring and regulation of individuals activities at all times. here, the hope of getting out is determined by those in charge. the violent and armed enforcers who are in coordination with one another to keep prisoners acting the way they want even when an enforcer isn't around.
the method of transformation: forced submission. violence til compliance.
the justice of our world aspires, at its best, to be transformative domination.
how can we ever hope to be free from the consequences of domination if our own justice starts from premises resembling these?
philosophy; justice, guilt
@exiliaex justice is just a word that's invoked when the story hasnt been made "right" it's literally just a product of expectations in social contexts and media. things arent how they ought to be and how they ought to be is based on prior expectations and those prior expectations were set by a deeply reactionary society so the call for justice is always reactionary or invites reactionaries in
philosophy; justice, guilt
@ZiaNitori i'm curious zia, do you think there is wrong in the world? and do you think wrong can be righted? (and to be clear, i don't mean any sort of objective and pure wrong)
philosophy; justice, guilt
@exiliaex no, i think things are the way they are. coming to know myself and what i want has just put me in conflict with society so i try to use evocative language to express that. seeing where things are likely going and seeing that it leads to the extermination of me or my future kids certainly doesnt feel good but "wrong" doesnt capture that because i just dont think like that. frameworks of wrong and right seem to be predicated on assumptions of agency and i genuinely feel like making choices is illusory. all i can do is hope the predictions i make drive me into a happier life. if when i was in a cage i thought about how wrong it was for me to be in a cage, i might still be in that cage, instead the only thought running through my head was how to escape it. people only think about justice when they feel someone else might hear them and sympathize (consciously or otherwise) and i'm not looking for that
philosophy; justice, guilt
@ZiaNitori in all honesty zia, i dont think i believe you believe any of that.
philosophy; justice, guilt
@ZiaNitori idk i've known you for a long time and i don't believe you. i don't believe this angle you're playing right now.
philosophy; justice, guilt
@exiliaex if it were as easy as flipping the switch in a trolley problem to change the current state of affairs i would, but nothing ever works like that. i dont want to rush in to get defeated like every other wannabe hero gets baited into doing. if there is a way to change things it's not going to come from immediately reacting to the situation, leviathan knows how to counter all the reactions it produces. i think that if there's any shot of liberation it's going to come from people who have had enough space from that beast to think with a clearer mind. that being said my life goal isnt the liberation of others, it feels like those desires are mostly a product of media that play into my grosser tendencies to want to fix other people and make them more convenient for me. unlearning that stuff dissipated my revolutionary fervor and has got me more focused on creating my own happiness
philosophy; justice, guilt
@exiliaex i'm not a monolith, but this is what i currently aspire to be to the best of my knowledge even if there are many inconsistencies
philosophy; justice, guilt
@ZiaNitori i'm sorry to say, but at this moment and my understanding of what you mean, i can't hope you reach that aspiration.
philosophy; justice, guilt
@exiliaex how do you liberate people who dont want to be free? who live in a set of circumstances that punish them for trying to be free? i dont think you can fight incentives like that, i think even if it were your life goal to change this state of affairs, the best hope you have is catching the people who fall out of the machine and hoping for a better opportunity in the future to cause the machine to fall apart. i genuinely think "doing communism in your backyard" ie, trying to create a better world in the one that exists is the only way to create people who wont reintegrate into the body of the machine, like a benign tumor with the potential to turn malignant at the right time and even then i'm very pessimistic about the power of it's immune system. to me the appeal of this is not in it's liberatory potential, but the fact that it leaves me in good company. i really want to reiterate, i think this idea that we need to make things right is a very critical piece of social control. heros exist to justify the fantasy of pigs and to get anti state actors to reveal themselves so they can be dealt with and this is how the state exterminates resistance to itself over time. it's just a eugenics project to eliminate all but the most programmable people so the cogs can work together as efficiently as possible. trying to create a space for that difference to survive is my goal because i feel alone when i talk to cogs and i dont want to feel alone
philosophy; justice, guilt
@exiliaex btw i dont want to discount the idea here that you know some aspect of me better than i know myself, i just wanna share where my head is at on all this atm
philosophy; justice, guilt
no, i shouldn't say i know you better than you. that was wrong of me. i should've first assumed i misunderstood or that you misunderstood and worked to clarify and rectify.
but, what i'm trying to say, i think is, maybe making things right isn't about being a hero that maybe it's more about showing the right kind of kindness, lending the right kind of hand.
i don't care the terms we put it in, right vs wrong, ethical vs unethical... there are things i find intolerable in the world. i am in agreement with you to the extent that, to a very very large extent we are determined by forces beyond our control. but, outside of absolving oneself of the potential of searching for possibilities, i have never seen a compelling reason to act as if things are purely deterministic, as if i have absolutely no say in the choices i will make.
when someone experiences abuse, say, a child at the hand of their parents, how we, the others around, understand and treat that child can transform how that child understands what happened. and thus, can transform how the child interacts with their feelings about it, and the choices they feel like they have the power to make from it.
i don't believe this is unique to children, and i don't believe what needs to be rectified is unique to abuse.
the violences we experience and the violences we inflict ripple through time. they change us and they change others.
when the police kill children in their neighborhoods that changes the neighborhood.
when value abstracts things, which exist relationally in the actual world, to numbers in a virtual world, and act on this knowledge, under this paradigm, and thus destroy the world around them, this changes those who relied on that world.
we can't give any community their dead child back. the violence happens. it changes us. would it "right the wrong" anymore to inflict violence on those who committed it? i don't think so, not inherently.
if it is the history of the world that determines us, then in those terms, i believe it is the history of the world that can be mended. not in one fell revolutionary swoop, but in every moment. each moment, especially moments spent with others, as the eye of the needle through which the transformation of history passes through by our hand.
if we find nothing intolerable and refuse to act on anything beyond ourselves we have already lost to domination.
philosophy; justice, guilt
i dont think that's wrong of you at all. i think we understand ourselves so much less than we understand others around us in many many ways and i want to be open to the idea you see something i dont because i've learned that could very well be the case.
i think that when you show people that a more preferable state of affairs is possible they will try to seek it out for themselves, but the way they've been conditioned to get there is by relying on using rhetoric to amplify their will using others as pawns to bring about a new world, but this kind of behavior can only lead to the creation of another leviathan, it's just another domination game. i think the goal for radicals and people who want to actually live is to exit this game, to become as independent from the movements of the machine as possible, to give as little input into it as possible and take from it as little as possible. only then can they learn to move freely and in doing so create the space for a different world to emerge. if people have the capacity to wake up in the face of catastrophe and famine than they will and this new world will take over the old, but i suspect that this is not the case, and it will only be a world that exists hidden away in the periphery, only accessible to those who dont fit into the machine enough to want to seek their own liberation. i think humanity is committed on it's path to become a superorganism with religious fervor and i think the rest of us animals need to learn how to survive in this dangerous ecosystem and count on our resilience to survive the coming mass extinction event brought about by humanity ignorantly imposing the logic of value onto that ecosystem it depends on to sustain itself.
regardless of my predictions or pessimism my opposition to making things right is a response to ugly things in myself that want to shape and change others to be more convenient for me especially by telling them how them being more convenient for me is better for them too. in many cases this impulse is benign or even positive, just a case of simple conflict resolution or problem solving, but when it comes to wishing for a different state of affairs it really just seems to be a manifestation of impotent rage and my life and relationships get better the more i let those feelings go
philosophy; justice, guilt
@ZiaNitori you don't think it's, in some way, intolerable, unacceptable, wrong, for people to be kidnapped and held against their will? you have absolutely 0 values that lead you to believe that is something that shouldn't happen? something that you want to act to make not happen? something you want to prevent from happening?
you experienced it, thought "oof ouch owie, this hurts, i need to get out of here" and never once conceptualized "maybe this machine is harmful, maybe it hurts others, maybe it doesn't have to be like this, maybe the world can be better"