Social Justice Usage
Source: Sensoy, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, first edition. Teacher’s College Press: New York, 2012, p. 68.
The belief that your group has the right to its position [is an ideology of the dominant that maintains dominance]. Ideology is a powerful way to support the dominant group’s position. There are several key interrelated ideologies that rationalize the concentration of dominant group members at the top of society and their right to rule.
One is the myth of meritocracy. Meritocracy is a system in which people’s achievements are attributed solely to their own efforts, abilities, or merits. Meritocracy posits that starting points don’t matter and that the son of a day-laborer has as much chance of “making it” as the son of Bill Gates, as long as they work hard. Canada and the United States are presented in dominant culture as meritocratic systems. From this perspective, those who don’t succeed are simply not as capable or don’t try as hard as those who do.
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Source: Sensoy, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, first edition. Teacher’s College Press: New York, 2012, p. 74.
All the dominant ideologies in society support willful ignorance. The ideologies of meritocracy, equal opportunity, individualism, and human nature we described above play a powerful role in denying the “current” and insisting that society is just.
New Discourses Commentary
Social Justice does not like the idea of meritocracy, so, as you can see, it immediately strawmans the concept and insists that it tends to be used in terms of a wholly meritocratic society rather than one in which it is recognized that merit is relevant, if not highly relevant, to generating success (especially relative success, given one’s starting positions). It also assumes that people who advocate meritocracy believe it has already been fully achieved rather than something they still strive for. It then insists that meritocracy is an ideology that dominant groups employ to (falsely) justify their privilege and thus attempt to maintain it.
The problem Social Justice has with the idea of merit is that one’s advantages in society aren’t unfair if one has earned them (or, to some degree, inherited them from a family that did). This can make them difficult to problematize or construe as a systemic injustice that needs redressing and reparation (see also, equity).
As Social Justice Theory sees it, the “ideology” of meritocracy enables dominant groups to maintain “willful ignorance” about the contribution of their privilege to their success and thus avoid developing a critical consciousness about it (see also, white comfort, white equilibrium, and white innocence). This leads them to reject Social Justice prescriptions for redistribution of various resources under policies of equity, and resistance as such is usually understood to be reasonable because it is unfair to take was fairly earned. Thus, Social Justice Theorizes meritocracy as an illusion, an ideological myth propagated and believed by members of dominant groups so that they can justify their dominance and rationalize their marginalization and oppression of other groups. The ideology of meritocracy allows dominant group members to put the responsibility for any relative lack of success on the individuals involved rather than on the system that Social Justice believes was rigged against people in certain groups (see also, individualism and responsibilize).
The goal of casting meritocracy as an ideology promoted by and for dominant group interests is to undermine belief in the role that merit plays in success, thus allowing Social Justice to make two of its core claims. First, it can claim that success wasn’t genuinely earned by any member of a dominant group so much as it was the result of privilege that hasn’t been sufficiently considered, acknowledged, and (perhaps) problematized. Second, it can claim that any failure that occurs within the members of minoritized groups had nothing to do with their effort, preparation, ingenuity, industriousness, or other markers of ability or merit. That is, their failures aren’t their fault and thus aren’t justly experienced. The system is credited with the unfair success of members of dominant groups and the unfair failures of members of minoritized groups.
This kind of trick is common within Social Justice thought: characterizing a concept as its most extreme interpretation and setting it against the opposite extreme, which is cast as being more socially just. That is, it (seemingly intentionally) misunderstands ideas so as to present a false choice between something extremely chauvinistic and something comparatively just (even if ridiculous). It then accuses people in the “dominant” (read: disagreeing) groups of maintaining an extreme position that they usually do not hold as a means of attempting to make their position look absurd, extreme, or evil. (See also, biological essentialism and sex essentialism.)
Related Terms
Biological essentialism; Critical consciousness; Dominance; Equality/Equal opportunity (ideology); Equity; Human nature (ideology); Ideology; Individualism (ideology); Injustice; Justice; Marginalization; Minoritize; Oppression; Privilege; Problematize; Responsibilize; Sex essentialism; Social Justice; System, the; Systemic power; Theory; White comfort; White equilibrium; White innocence; Willful ignorance
Languages
Revision date: 2/5/20
4 comments
I. The Nature of Ideology and Action
Every human being acts purposefully to remove felt uneasiness (Mises, Human Action).
All social phenomena, including “hierarchies,” “privilege,” or “dominance,” are outcomes of countless acts of valuation, exchange, and preference — not decrees of metaphysical injustice.
To label meritocracy an “ideology of dominance” presupposes that social position is determined not by action and exchange but by arbitrary power. Yet, this premise itself is ideological — a Marxoid metaphysic of conflict, where every structure must be read as oppression. The Woke theorist thus begins not from the logic of human action, but from a moralized myth: that inequality can have no legitimate origin.
The inequalities of wealth and income are the necessary outcome of a social order resting on private ownership of the means of production. To attack them is to attack the very foundation of civilization.
II. What Meritocracy Actually Means
In classical liberal and economic sense, meritocracy is not a metaphysical claim that all men begin from the same position. It is an epistemic and moral principle that exchange and reward should be governed by contribution,not birth or political privilege.
It asserts that the only just “discrimination” is that which results from voluntary exchange judged by others’ valuations— what Rothbard called “consumer sovereignty.”
To the extent that meritocracy exists, it is the spontaneous order of the market:
“The market, in rewarding efficiency and penalizing waste, substitutes merit for privilege.”
It is therefore not an ideology of dominance,but the abolition of dominance — the removal of status-based coercion by replacing it with voluntary selection.
III. The Fallacy of “Starting Points”
Sensoy and DiAngelo confuse *difference in starting points* with injustice.
But no one begins from a metaphysical void — every person inherits conditions, material and immaterial, that others have created.
The Woke critique presupposes a cosmic baseline of equality that has never existed and cannot be defined. It treats inequality as prima facie evidence of exploitation.
There is no sensibly definable state of equality in the realm of human action; inequality of talents and positions is the very reason society and cooperation exist.
To condemn meritocracy because not all begin equally is to condemn human diversity itself — it demands equality of results where equality of nature is impossible.
IV. Willful Ignorance or Willful Abolition of Reason?
Social Justice Theory accuses meritocrats of “willful ignorance.”
But praxeology reveals the inverse: the Woke theorist abolishes causality itself.
If success and failure are never attributable to individual action, then no human choice has moral or causal significance. All becomes “structure” — and man, an automaton.
Rothbard warned:
“If human action is denied, ethics collapses, for responsibility disappears.”
(The Ethics of Liberty)
To deny merit is to deny agency. To deny agency is to destroy both morality and economics.
Hence the paradox: the ideology that claims to fight oppression annihilates the only ground for moral judgment — voluntary action.
V. The Redistributive Imperative: From Ignorance to Coercion
By redefining all success as “privilege,” Social Justice transforms *envy* into a political program.
The cry against meritocracy is a demand that outcomes be leveled by force.
But coercive redistribution does not “correct” injustice; it creates it.
Government/Society ntervention “cannot achieve equality without abolishing freedom,” and Rothbard extended the point: “Redistribution is aggression; it violates the self-ownership of the producer.”
Social Justice replaces the discipline of the market with the dictatorship on the victim. In place of prices and performance, it installs moral accusation as the criterion of reward.
That is not equality — it is revenge institutionalized.
VI. Epistemological Irony: The Woke Theory as Self-Refuting
If all ideas supporting existing hierarchies are “dominant ideologies,” then their own theory— propagated by a new clerisy within universities and bureaucracies — is itself an ideology of those in power.
By their logic, the claim that “meritocracy is a myth” is the expression of academic privilege seeking to maintain its own dominance through moral intimidation.
Thus, DiAngelo’s “critical consciousness” is simply a rebranded class consciousness, the Marxian dialectic recycled in cultural form — the self-deification of resentment.
VII. Conclusion: The Market, Not the Myth
Meritocracy is not a myth but a market tendency: the alignment of reward with service, discovered through voluntary choice.
It is imperfect, but only because human valuation is subjective and decentralized — not because it is “ideological.”
To destroy merit is to destroy incentive; to destroy incentive is to destroy production; to destroy production is to destroy life.
Freedom/Capitalism does not need to be justified. It is justified because it works.
And as Rothbard concluded,
“Freedom and merit are two sides of the same coin; to abolish one is to abolish both.”
VIII. Final Synthesis
Human action is purposeful; inequality is a natural outcome of diverse talents and preferences.
Any coercive correction of inequality is aggression, not justice.
The “critique of meritocracy” is not moral philosophy but economic illiteracy weaponized by envy.
It replaces reason with ressentiment, liberty with guilt, and civilization with perpetual moral war.
I think meritocracy has been with us since we evolved. Ogg the caveman was better at hunting than Thagg the caveman, so he ate better, got a more desirable wife, had more children, etc.
Codifying something like meritocracy into an ideology or philosophy doesn’t bring it into existence, it just recognizes and names it.
Meritocracy became part of Western culture after the books of the Chinese philosopher Confucius were translated and made available in Western Europe during the 17th century. Which undermines the notion that it is part of “whiteness”.
Thank you for all the work you put into bringing CRT ideology into the open. If you are looking for possible future interviewees, consider the author of this piece https://trulyopenmindsandhearts.blog/2019/12/01/uu-dogma-as-a-tool-of-oppression/ and/or any of the other bloggers of trulyopenmindsand hearts.blog. Or the Fifth Principle Project. Both sites exploring the rift in the Unitarian Universalist Church, with the UUA arguably one of thee strongest embodiments of religous left factions of CRT/Identity/Intersectionality ideology.