"Discrimination" is dying - why that's a good thing

If you've ever felt discriminated against because of something someone thought about you? How can you ever really know what another person is thinking about you? The truth is, you can't.

Discrimination can be used to add weight to acts of violence. But acts of violence and persecution remain acts of violence no matter what their motivation. "Racially motivated attack" should really just be "attack", and all attacks should be condemned as an assault on personal liberty.

Discrimination has often used is intrinsically tied to the idea of equality and most importantly, equal access. But equal access to what? The most prevalently cited examples are government or semi-government services, such as educational access, suffrage, etc. But if we reject government, where does that leave us?

In business relationship between people, even simple ones such as the one you enter to buy bread in the local shop, each party has the a natural right to enter into business or reject the proposal. In fact this goes for any relationship. No one can reasonably be expected to tolerate coercion to participate in something they do not want to.

Given this right, the motivation behind it is unimportant. I could refuse to enter into business with you because I had promised the bicycle you want to another customer, or because I do not trust you because of how you dress, or even because you are of a certain ethnicity.

It seems almost bizarre to say it in this day and age, but one cannot prove the motivation here, and even if it could be shown to be likely because of circumstance, character witnesses or published tweets, it amounts to thought policing.

You may say, well anyone is free to think prejudiced thoughts, but when those thoughts inspire action, such as refusing to sell a bicycle, they become discrimination. My response is, ... and?

It feels bad to be left out. It might be very inconvenient to not be able to purchase a bicycle, perhaps you really need it. But does your hurt feelings or need for the bicycle trump the right of the seller to choose how, when and to whom to dispose of their property to?

In a free and open society, the "free market of ideas" will show any kind of idiot sales policies to the clear light of day, and customers will decide. Maybe other customers who hear that so and so will not sell to a particular family will have a quiet word with the shopkeeper. Maybe a boycott will be organised. All these things people can do feely in a community. In the end, if there is freedom to choose and live as we please, social and market pressure will balance out. Things will not return so easily to dark days of ignorance. Don't forget that communication and travel are so fast now that comparisons with the past must be taken as in a completely different context.

I use social and market pressure here because I think they are both aspects of public life which work together well though they have different goals. In social life we try to build the kind of place we would like to live in, in so far as we are able. In market life we aim to engage in business relationships which are beneficial to us, even at the expense of the welfare of others. Social life keeps market life in check by making it very bad for business to harm social life too much. Those who do not respond to their environment will not .

Some will say that this will lead our baser instincts to thrive, and for persecution to rise against classically persecuted peoples. I say that I do not need to be taught by the state how to live a moral life, or indeed whether to. I have the rich knowledge of the world and the traditions of my forebears at my disposal, and we are better placed than ever to hear new ideas, see new things. The is constantly attacked in the media, but it's a bit rich of the imposing guardians of "truth" and "facts" to complain about diversity in information when it is they who aggressively move to shut down all sorts of competing sources.

The free market I've described of course assumes that there is not massive interfering by government or other such group. It gets problematic here, and it's too large of an issue to discuss fully right now, because we clearly do not have this situation now, though we may be moving towards it. One point I will make though is that the average person 100 years ago did not have much interaction with the government, and for all time before that, more or less. It has not always been so that government infects our lives.

When the government says to you, you must sell your bicycle to whoever asks for it, it is an infringement on your liberty, plain and simple. It is not based on any moral code, it is based on the homogenising tendency of government. All of us who have dealt with bureaucracy know how it is not a system which is built to handle diversity, it cannot. What we see today as "diversity" is in fact a circus of identities - again, this is just boxes for bureaucrats to fill in, there is no true diversity in this. That we must all appear exactly the same to each other and fit in nice little categories is, I believe, and extension of this work of the government for it's own purposes.

Furthermore, we much not forget that historically the government has seen many powerful figures move through those offices, each with their own agenda in the days of their power, leaving their own mark on the machine that is government. We are left with a hulking mass of contradictions and favoritisms, which quickly become irrelevant as the decades pass. To borrow a software term, it is not and cannot be "agile" - they cannot adjust to change quickly.

Trump has shown that he believes in dismantling some of this hulking mass, and any step in that direction is good. He is also the harbinger of the realisation for SJW's of the end of the idea of "discrimination" in a general sense. It will take time but I believe we will come to see it for what it is: thought control.

Exception to the rule: justice is blind

The exception to this is that when meting out justice, courts should be blind to many aspects of the persons involved. Some things matter a lot, such as previous crimes, etc. Some things should not, such as skin color, sexual orientation, and even character witnesses. Personally I think this last example is a huge problem with courts as they are today. As we see in the Pizzagate scandal and other, the most "respected" members of society are those who can use their power and most important, the cloak of respectability, to get away with heinous crimes.

The question of the existence of courts and such are for another day I think. One thing I cannot say I wish to see disappear is justice, and however we can keep and increase it, we must - state be damned.

Justice should be blind, but shopkeepers and private citizens would be wise to keep their eyes wide open.

Credits for photos

1: by NY - http://nyphotographic.com/, Creative Commons 3 - CC BY-SA 3.0

2: By Kurt Löwenstein Educational Center International Team from Germany (qe07 (3)) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

3: by fugitivesavant https://www.flickr.com/photos/fugitivesavant/16653788255, CC BY-SA 2.0

4: http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com/Wheel-Two-Old-Bike-Bike-Bicycle-190483, CC0 Public Domain

5: The Quaker "Mary Dyer led to execution on Boston Common, 1 June 1660", Brooklyn Museum, unknown 19th century artist, , public domain

6: Source imgur.com, https://giphy.com/gifs/MMhC6UhlZuxwY

7: by Emmanuel Huybrechts from Laval, Canada, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golden_Lady_Justice,_Bruges,Belgium(6204837462).jpg, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic