From Equality to Equity: How Social Justice Becomes Ideology
6/3/202659 min
Jon Mills, a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist, joins Michael Shermer to discuss how social justice ideology has moved from a concern with fairness and equal treatment into a rigid moral framework built around oppressors and victims, privilege and disadvantage, good and evil.
Their conversation focuses on the tension between compassion and truth: how to take injustice seriously without reducing people to identity categories, what happens when clinicians bring activism into the therapy room, why biological reality has become politically charged, and whether "wokeness" is beginning to lose its hold on public life.
Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is Honorary Professor, Department of Psychosocial & Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, on faculty in the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, USA, and on faculty and a Supervising Analyst at the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, USA. Recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship including 5 Gradiva Awards, he is the author and/or editor of over 35 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies including most recently End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate. In 2015 he was given the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Canadian Psychological Association.
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First 90 secondsRyan Reynolds0:00
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Speaker 20:18
Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com Wanted to ask you about victimhood status.
Michael Shermer· Host0:32
You know, what is the psychology? How would you treat a client that said, "You know, I'm a victim. I'm female or Black or gay or whatever my intersexual bullet points are, and this is why my life is not going well," but they seem to insist that it must be true, almost as if they like being a victim. It's weird. I don't know what to make of that. You mentioned psychoanalysis being somewhat corrupted by anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism. That's quite ironic since Freud was Jewish. [laughs] You know, and there's, there's a strong Jewish element in the origins of psychoanalysis. What's going on there? Why are they doing that?
Jon Mills· Guest1:04
Well, I think there's a confluence of many things that happened. Like I said, when the George Floyd Black Lives Matter movement really took off and there was so-called racial reckoning in the States, it's actually quite troubling to hear some of the developments, whether it be in social work, whether it be in psychology. It affects training, formal education at the graduate level. It affects codes of ethics. It affects degree