A Quote by Reinhold Niebuhr
The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.
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Any Organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.
Social justice is group psychology, it's group rights, it's collectivisim, and it's a negation of individual responsibility, which is what the Bible teaches. Individual responsibility. And of course, social justice leads very quickly to socialism, and ultimately to communism.
Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.
We deem valuable whatever is likely to meet our needs or wishes (individual values) and whatever is likely to help protect or attain social goals (social values). However, this is not a dichotomy, for some individual values, such as truth, are needed to secure some social values, such as mutual trust, and some social values, such as peace, are required to pursue some individual values, such as good health.
Social justice is collectivism. Social justice is the rights of a group. It denies individual responsibility. It's a negation of individual responsibility, so social justice is totally contrary to the Word of God.
As a group, housewives to-day suffer more from social isolation and loss of purpose than any other social group, except, perhaps, the old.
Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.
The unit of effectiveness of education is not the individual but the group. An individual's moral values are primarily important for society as they contribute to a moral social climate, not as they induce particular pieces of behavior.
It is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment.
Any group or "collective," large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the "rights" of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights.
At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.
Individual talent is too sporadic and unpredictable to be allowed any important part in the organization society. Social systems which endure are built on the average person who can be trained to occupy any position adequately if not brilliantly.
There is the emergence of a militarized society that now organizes itself for the production of violence. A society in which the range of acceptable opinion inevitably shrinks.
There is a very broad theory that society gets the right to hang, as the individual gets the right to defend himself. Suppose she does; there are certain principles which limit this right. Society has got the murderer within four walls; he never can do any more harm. Has society any need to take that man's life to protect itself? If any society has only the right that the individual has, she has no right to inflict the penalty of death, because she can effectually restrain the individual from ever again committing his offence.
No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.
We need to be clear that there is no such thing as giving up one's privilege to be 'outside' the system. ONE IS ALWAYS IN THE SYSTEM. The only question is whether one is part of the system in a way which challenges or strengthens the status quo. Privilege is not something I take and which I therefore have the option of not taking. It is something that society gives me and unless I change the institutions which give it to me, they will continue to give it, and I will continue to have it, however noble and egalitarian my intentions.
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