Is this where both left and right politics agree, that exalting the “common good” is how societies improve?
For example, these could be quotes from Hitler or Che Guevara (they are):
“We do assert, however, that we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of nuclear war victims. In the struggle to death between two systems we cannot think of anything but the final victory of socialism or its relapse as a consequence of the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression.”
"Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income.”
"I knew that the moment the great governing spirit strikes the blow to divide all humanity into just two opposing factions, I would be on the side of the common people”
"Because it seems inseparable from the social idea and we do not believe that there could ever exist a state with lasting inner health if it is not built on internal social justice”
Social justice seems to mean justice for group affiliations that have been affected by injustice. Can we we identify such groups without using commonly agreed heuristics? In other words, when we attribute injustice to a category of people, we need to ignore all subtle (or even stark) degrees of differences between those people that put them out of this category.
Likewise we’ll need to ignore all subtle (or even stark) degrees of differences between those other people we categorise as perpetrators of this injustice too.
We need neat categories for both groups in order to have one group of people to seek out social justice from and another group of people to grant social justice to.
These kind of rationalisations need discriminatory thinking at their core for blanket categories to be made and take action from. With that kind of discrimination, it’s just a step away from both the extreme right and left legitimising the indiscriminate use of force to obtain their own brand of social justice, as we can see from Hitler’s and Che Guevara’s quoted appeals.
How does using indiscriminate force based discriminatory rationalisations make better societies?
I feel this question is hardly examined in most political commentary and it appears to me that both the so-called far left and the far right, while appearing distinct are at their substance much more alike than many would hope to admit.