The Fifth Acceptance of alternative centrism is the acceptance that the Alternative Left is correct when they speak of the importance of justice.
Aristotle considered justice, and the application of justice, the basis of civilisation. “Justice is the ordering of the political association,” he wrote in Politics I.2. His reasoning was that society comes together for the sake of securing and achieving justice. It’s with this aim that individuals form family households, families form village associations and villages become city-states. It’s in the bonds of justice that civilisation can develop.
The Alternative Leftist will claim that justice is the most important feature of society. Without it, no order, freedom, peace or truth is possible.
Injustice is the basis of all political dissent. Most other forms of suffering can be endured with little resentment, but the suffering of injustice tends to bring with it a particular form of humiliation that leads rapidly to political action. The Alternative Leftist would argue – and the Alternative Centrist would agree – that great levels of injustice are why the Western World is in so much chaos at the moment.
The logic of the Alternative Left, and the logic of the Fifth Acceptance, is that all of the previous four positions are unjust in their own way. Therefore, they are all insufficient in their own way.
Without justice, no order can be possible because people will fight incessantly. The Alternative Left argues that the Establishment Right errs on the side of excessive order when it refuses, stubbornly, to countenance the redistribution of property on the grounds that it would be destabilising. Aristotle’s concept of distributive justice suggests that injustice occurs when the wealthy end up with all of the resources, and the lower classes with nothing.
If one looks back at the times of extreme disorder in history, whether global or local, they were usually preceded by times of extreme injustice. Even if the winners of the wars arising from the disorder decide, post facto, that the losers had no legitimate grievance, the perception of one is enough to start a war over it. As David Icke would remind us, perception is reality. As long as the perception of injustice exists, there will be disorder.
Neither will there be any freedom without justice. Most obviously, this is because the unjust will take it away. Examples abound in the countless free speech abuses committed by various totalitarian governments. The injustice of the War on Drugs is a further example. If the unjust are allowed into power, they will inevitably strip freedoms from anyone they don’t like.
The absence of justice has a suppressive effect on freedom even without legislating it away. Just knowing that injustice is rife in a society is enough to make its members watch their backs, speak in hushed tones, stop trusting their neighbours and to withdraw from life. Injustice leads directly to hate and fear, which both restrict freedoms in the search for control.
Without justice, there is no peace for the same reason as there is no order. Injustice leads to resentments which lead to violence. The victims of injustice sometimes choose to not let their oppressors rest. The greater and more widespread the injustices, the more powerful this sentiment. If it gets powerful enough, revolutions or civil wars break out.
Finally, without justice there can be no truth. It might seem that the usual problem is a lack of truth leading to a lack of justice, but it can also be the other way around. As Basil Liddell-Hart wrote in ‘Why Don’t We Learn From History’, unjust people keep telling lies to gain unjust advantage over others. So wherever you have injustice you also have falsehood. Only just people can be relied upon to tell the truth.
As anyone who has studied psychology knows, finding the truth is often hard not because of the intelligence requirement, but because of the honesty one. As soon as people have political or religious loyalties, they also have an interest in telling lies. Invariably, one’s political or religious in-group will eventually commit some immoral deed, and then loyalty to that in-group will make one tell lies to save face. Injustice, then, directly destroys truth even more than it destroys order, freedom or peace.
Thus it can be seen that, from the perspective of the Alternative Leftist, justice is the ultimate value, and that, without the Fifth Acceptance, none of the others can be realised. The Fifth Acceptance accepts that holistic perspectives are sometimes necessary, particularly because they are broad enough to encompass everyone’s needs.
There is a lot of injustice in today’s world, for many reasons. Inherited privilege is one of those reasons. This inherited privilege, over generations, tends to replicate a feudal system, as the inheritors of property can charge rent on it, and then use the rent money to buy more property and so on. Unless there is a major readjustment, in the form of wealth redistribution or revolution, everyone else gets reduced to serfdom. This is why the Alternative Left pushes the idea of universal basic income so hard.
This motivation to push a universal basic income follows the observation that the Establishment Left have abandoned the poor. This abandonment is the essential aspect of the Establishment Left, and how they got to be part of the Establishment in the first place. But it vacated an empty space on the Left for an alternative movement. The Fifth Acceptance acknowledges that the Establishment Left have betrayed the truly disadvantaged, and that the Alternative Left are rightfully filling that empty niche.
The Alternative Left are, in the minds of many, synonymous with Social Justice Warriors. In this sense, they are the new moral puritans, challenging the Establishment Right for most disdain for sex and alcohol. This is one manner in which they are different to the Establishment Left, who have degenerated to the point where they care about freedom more than propriety. The wowserism of the Alternative Left, exemplified by their prudishness around age gaps in dating, reveals clearly that Communism is a religion.
One of the major social trends powering the Alternative Left (as with the other alternative positions) is the rapidly changing nature of information. However, awareness of this has yet to reach the people in power. The heavily-mocked conception of the Internet as “a series of tubes” has hardly been updated since first uttered in 2006; old people still don’t get the Internet or Internet culture. Hence the need for alternative conceptions of justice, fit for the Internet Age.
The Fifth Acceptance agrees that new thinking about justice is required. In some ways, this will require going back to Aristotle; in some ways, this will require a 21st Century perspective.
The obsession with justice goes too far when it becomes an obsession with equality. It’s obvious that people are different, whether individuals or groups. Even if it were true that, on some ultimate metaphysical level, all people have precisely the same spiritual value, this would not manifest as perfect equality by every material measure. To deny this is simply stupid.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.” Hence the Alternative Centrist believes that justice, just like order, freedom, peace and truth, also needs to be moderated, else it begins to destroy the other qualities.
This stupidity of insisting that justice must mean equality by every possible measure is what gives rise to the Fifth Rejection.
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This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.
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