The Unjust World Axiom

Recently, at the invitation of our leadership, my parish’s Knights Council held a pre-meeting one-hour session on active shooter training, presented by a brother Knight who’s a security consultant and former police officer. Sutherland Springs, Texas is 280 miles south-southwest of Denton; to say the mass murder of 26 First Baptist Church members last November struck close to home is not that much of an exaggeration. Active shooter training is probably the up-and-coming industry; even clergy are participating in it.

Delayed by home duties, I came in at the end. The brother fielded a couple of questions about firearms training and concealed-carry permits, showed off a Glock 9mm pistol, and handed out ballpoint pens specially designed to be used as “field-expedient” weapons (I got one, too). I have no idea how many times he said this during the presentation, but the brother said it at least twice during the wrap-up: “Don’t be a victim!”

Left unstated was the implication: If you’re a victim, you deserve it.

If I’d asked the brother if that’s how he felt, I’m sure he would have denied it. No one deserves to be a victim of someone else’s malice or insanity. He’s simply encouraging others to take such prudent steps as they can to protect themselves and their loved ones. But in my mind, I could hear George C. Scott speaking to unseen soldiers at the beginning of Patton:

Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time! Now, I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. … Because the very thought of losing is hateful to the American.

Victims are losers, you see. Just like poor people on welfare are “takers.” People get what they deserve; what goes around comes around. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is the ultimate expression of materialist karma and social Darwinism: People get rich, powerful, talented, and famous because they deserve to. It’s called the just world hypothesis:

… [P]eople have a strong desire or need to believe that the world is an orderly, predictable, and just place, where people get what they deserve. Such a belief plays an important function in our lives since in order to plan our lives or achieve our goals we need to assume that our actions will have predictable consequences. Moreover, when we encounter evidence suggesting that the world is not just, we quickly act to restore justice by helping the victim or we persuade ourselves that no injustice has occurred. (Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez, “The Just World Theory”, para. 2)

But we know better. People succeed who don’t merit success; people fail who don’t deserve failure. (The Peter Principle: “Managers rise to the level of their incompetence.”) Whether or not they deserve success, they don’t succeed once for all time; they have to work to stay on top. It’s much harder to work up from the bottom than it is to fall from the top.

We know that actions can have disproportionate consequences. We know that stuff happens which can’t be predicted and for which no one is to blame, whether you call it “unanticipated consequences” or “the butterfly effect” or just plain bad luck. None of the 909 people killed or injured at the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting could have prepared themselves for that attack any better than they had.

Life is not fair. This is not a theory but a fact, an axiom incontrovertible as any law of nature.

“… [God] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). That God is just is fixed and certain. But just as certain is that He “does great things which we cannot comprehend” (Job 37:5). “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor” (Romans 11:34; cf. Isaiah 40:13-14)? Ever since the parable of Job was written, we’ve lived with the knowledge that God transcends the limits of human understanding and that what He does or permits is for reasons beyond our comprehension. Since the time of Christ, we’ve lived in the hope that one day we will fully know even as we’re fully known (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:12). For now, though, it remains for us to simply trust in His benevolence and surrender with the most difficult four words of all: “Thy will be done.”

It’s wrong for us to deny our culpability for our wrongs or to act without prudence. But it’s also unhealthy (and even a kind of reverse sin of Pride) to assume responsibility for things beyond our control. It’s also wrong to deny predators their moral agency and assign blame for their actions to their victims. It’s also wrong to withhold works of mercy and charity to the poor and distressed on a presumption that their suffering is merited by some fault.

I suppose we could live in a constant state of paranoid hypervigilance, staying at home behind locked doors and bulletproof windows, traveling when we need to in armored cars, dressed in tactical gear and packing weapons even when shopping for groceries or going to Mass. But who wants to live like that? At the end of the day, how are we any more free as individuals and as a nation by living in permanent fear of terrorists, whether those terrorists be home-grown (as most of them are) or foreign imports?

Or we can take to heart the paradoxical wisdom of St. Paul: “…I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). We can act within the limits of our prudential foresight and moral agency, then place everything else in God’s hands, trusting that whatever we lose in this life will be recompensed a hundredfold in the life to come (cf. Matthew 19:29). We can also feed and clothe the poor, shelter the stranger, and visit the sick and imprisoned (cf. Matthew 25:35-36), knowing that we are not called to judge their souls or their lives.

The only answer to an unjust world is to deal with one another with mercy and charity, to speak the truth with love, and to live our lives knowing that all things are ephemeral.