just world model Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

The Just World Model, faith in the will, and institutional racism

Mural of George Floyd — Photograph by Omer Messinger / Sipa / AP

Why do some Libertarians have so much trouble with the concept of systemic/institutional racism?

Why can people who believe complicated conspiracy theories not believe that a little bit of racism on the part of a lot of people adds up to a lot of racism? Why can people who believe that government regulations are oppressive refuse to think that oppression might have valences? Why can people who believe that big institutions do everything wrong not think that they might also get issues of race wrong?

The contradiction is particularly troubling when it comes to Libertarians, since, in my experience, they strive to be consistent and logical in how their policies relate to their beliefs (unlike, for instance, Trump supporters). And Reason talks about institutional racism as a problem, so it isn’t that Libertarianism is essentially hostile to recognizing institutional racism.

Libertarians say that the basis of their belief is that individuals should be fully free in order to achieve what they can. Obviously, a person born into poverty isn’t as free in terms of the possible achievements as someone born into wealth. So, were Libertarians genuinely committed to a notion of a system that made sure all individuals are equally free, they would fully support systems that levelled the playing-field, so to speak, of the rich and poor, the abled and disabled, the stigmatized and the privileged.

In this post, I want to talk about the Libertarians who refuse to support such policies, and that isn’t all of them (in other words, #notallLibertarians).

These Libertarians like the strictures of birth that make sure the game is rigged, but they don’t like the strictures of government that try to make sure that individuals are free to achieve their best. They don’t want a fully free system, in which all people are equally free to achieve all things; they want a system in which they can thrive without restriction. They argue that help from the government creates dependency, while accepting the help they’ve gotten from their birth hasn’t. That doesn’t make sense. If accepting help creates dependency, then they’re dependent on their birth.

I have spent a non-trivial amount of time arguing with this kind of Libertarian, and my experience is that their entire way of arguing makes no sense unless you assume the just world model, and engage in a non-trivial amount of “no true Scotsman.” When pushed on the point that they can’t actually defend their position, they start the whaddaboutism. I’ve also never met a Libertarian who knew much of anything about the economic history of the nineteenth century, but that’s a different crank theory.

I like Libertarians. In my experience, they’re logical af. Thus, unlike people on various other points on the political spectrum (it isn’t a binary or continuum), most of them are consistent regarding their major premises. They follow their arguments out. I admire that. They take unpopular positions because those positions logically follow from the premises they value. They reason deductively.

That they are true to their principles makes them very different from a lot of people with whom I argue, and I think they should praised for that consistency. The problem is that some Libertarians reason from the premise that all individuals should be equally free to achieve, while some reason deductively from the just world model and faith in the will. Let’s call this latter kind of Libertarian Just World Libertarians.[1]

The “just world model” says that people, products, and ideas that are good will succeed. As a corollary, the most successful people, products, and ideas are the best.

The “just world model” is one of those models not smart enough to be wrong. Its adherents (they’re all over the ideological spectrum) can find data to support the just world model, but arguing with them always reminds me of Catholic arguments for the virgin birth (involving parrots and light through glass). They refuse to name the data that would prove them wrong. The just world model supportable, but non-falsifiable. They almost always end up in the “no true Scotsman” fallacy or Gnosticism.

There is an old joke: someone says, “All Scots like haggis,” and Joe says, “I’m a Scotsman, and I don’t like haggis,” and the person responds, “You don’t count. You aren’t a true Scotsman.” That’s how the “just world model” works—it’s an Escher argument, in which each claim disappears into the premise that can’t be falsified.

The second non-falsifiable principle to which Just World Libertarians are committed is that if an individual wants something badly enough, they can get it. It’s still “no true Scotsman” because an individual who doesn’t achieve their goals can be dismissed as not having enough will.

Libertarians are far from alone in reasoning about politics in this way—they have premises that they refuse to consider rationally. Were I Queen of the Universe, I would dictate that instead of talking about a binary or continuum of left or right, we would map the spectrum of political affiliations in terms of how people reason about politics, rather than what their politics are. Thus, people who refuse to look at disconfirming data, read opposition information, or identify what would make them change their mind would all be grouped together, regardless of how they vote. Unhappily, I am not Queen of the Universe.

What matters in a democracy isn’t what your political affiliations are. Democracies can manage a lot of very different political affiliations. What matters is our commitment to democracy. It doesn’t matter if media would say that you’re “left” or “right” or “centrist.” If you aspire to a one-party state, if you think your policy agenda is obviously right and people only disagree with you because they’re deluded or corrupt, if you refuse to look at information that contradicts what you believe, if you don’t worry about whether your argument is rational, you’re opposed to democracy.

The two premises of Just World Libertarianism—people get what they deserve, and an individual can achieve whatever he wants with sufficient will (the gendered pronoun is deliberate)—are confounded by African-American men being stopped more often, searched more often, charged more often, and getting harsher penalties than white men. If our system doesn’t treat African American men in the same way it treats white men, and therefore African-American men are not equally able to achieve whatever they want, then the major premises of Just World Libertarianism are wrong.

And they are. Racism isn’t the consequence of individuals who deliberately choose to engage in racist actions out of hate or fear. Racism is a system that ensures that people of variously imagined stigmatized “races” are held to different standards from others, given diminished options, and perceived as deserving their diminished status because that they have a diminished status is proof that they are worse.

And that’s why Just World Libertarianism is racist. The adherents of that ideology are, in my experience, non-falsifiably committed to exactly the premises that fuel institutional racism. Of course, it isn’t only Just World Libertarians who are irrationally committed to the just world model and faith in the will—so are American fundagelicals.

And that is why fundagelicals fling themselves around like over-tired two-year olds when anyone talks about institutional racism: because if institutional racism is a plausible explanation about how the world works, then the basic premises of their political agenda are flawed. It is, and they are. And they’re racist.

[1] In my experience, the self-described Libertarians who consistently vote GOP are in this latter category. So I suppose someone could say, “Not real Libertarians.”

Privilege, ableism, and the just world model

In a footnote on another post, I mentioned that the just world model is ableist. Someone asked that I explain.

Here’s the explanation.

The “just world model” says that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. It provides a kind of security: you can keep bad things from happening to you. The just world model says that: someone who was assaulted shouldn’t have had an open window (or gotten drunk, or worn that dress), the Black driver should have been more polite, the person who died of a heart attack shouldn’t have been such an over-achiever, the person who got cancer doubted God.

The just world model is a world in which individuals are in perfect and complete control of our lives. It’s a really comforting narrative. It’s magical thinking. It says that if you do this thing and don’t do that thing, you will be protected from disaster.

I have a crank theory that people look at a homeless person and respond in one of two ways: 1) I would never let that happen to me, and that person should just suck it up and get a job; or 2) There but for the grace of God go I.

My crank theory is that acknowledging our common humanity with a homeless person, that something like a TBI could put us in that situation, is terrifying for some people. Some people find the notion that individuals do not have perfect agency unimaginably threatening. Republicanism has embraced the just world model, especially in its attachment to neoliberalism (which is pure just world model), but also in its commitment to the Strict Father Model (if you exert complete control over your children you will raise them to be good).

Various non-partisan ideologies similarly say that, if a bad thing happened to you, you did something to deserve it (anti-vax, a lot of “healthy lifestyle” rhetoric, the idea that people who get cancer or have heart attacks had personality flaws that brought those conditions on). Thus, what might have its origin in an irrational desire to feel more comfortable about how much control we have in our own life ends up enabling a kind of political hardheartedness regardless of Dem v. GOP affiliation.

Regardless of whatever psychological needs the just world model soothes, the consequence of attachment to it is that it drops a sociopathic curtain between us and victims. One of the ways it does so is by closing off any possibility of talking about systemic discrimination.

I work on a campus much of which was built when the assumption was that anyone in a wheelchair shouldn’t be in public. There are steps everywhere. There are steps that aren’t necessary from an engineering perspective, but are there for aesthetic reasons. The way the campus is built means that there is an extra burden on someone who has even the slightest mobility issue—it’s harder for them to be a successful student, staff, or faculty member.

At this campus, being able-bodied gives a person a fair amount of privilege—it’s possible to schedule classes back to back that are in distant buildings, it’s easy to get to office hours regardless of where they are, there’s always a bathroom nearby you can use, you don’t show up to class or meeting already exhausted from negotiating the trip there. The just world model says that you earned that privilege by choosing not to have a disability—the people who are encumbered by the building design brought it on themselves. Since they could simply choose not to be encumbered, it isn’t necessary to do the expensive work of ensuring the buildings are accessible. There isn’t a systemic problem—there are just individuals, all of whom are getting what they deserve. So, the just world. Model simultaneously reinforces privilege and denies its existence.

Confusing conversations about police violence

Five men falsely accused and imprisoned — Image from https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/central-park-five

When the videos came out of Rodney King getting assaulted, I found myself in a conversation with a Libertarian (call her Emma Libertarian) who said something along the lines of “What the police did was justified because he was driving drunk.”

I don’t exactly remember what I said, but I think I tried to point out that a beating is not the punishment for drunk driving, that King hadn’t even been convicted yet, so shouldn’t be punished, and that beating would be cruel and unusual punishment. What Emma was advocating would violate the Bill of Rights at least twice. To me, that seemed the opposite of Libertarianism.

I misunderstood Emma’s commitment to Libertarianism.

There’s another conversation in which I’ve found myself so often that I’m not even sure I can pick a specific episode (call the interlocutor Hubert Lawandorder). The police officer does something illegal—in other words, commits a crime—and the victim of the crime refuses to go along with it. And so the officer escalates the situation, and the person who objected to a crime being committed ends up arrested or perhaps dead.

So, for instance, an individual gets the attention of a police officer. An officer insists that the person leave their house, submit to a warrantless search of themselves or their home, not have a gun, confess to a crime, not ask what the charge is. What’s confusing about this conversation with Hubert Lawandorder—which I have had far too many times—is that Hubert agrees with me that the officer is violating the rights of the accused, and even violating very specific laws and regulations. We agree that the officer is breaking the law. But Hubert, who sees himself as a believer in Law and Order, not only believes that the police don’t have to follow the law they are supposed to be enforcing, but that the officer is justified in arresting anyone who objects to the police officer’s illegal activity, and that the officer is justified in escalating the interaction.

Hubert, like Emma Libertarian, believes in police vigilantism. To me, that seemed the opposite of supporting Law and Order.

I misunderstood Hubert’s commitment to Law and Order.

There are lots of ways of explaining why they don’t see their position as contradictory, and I kept thinking that with Emma it had to do with varieties of Libertarianism, and with Hubert it was something about a higher Law. I misunderstood that too.

I realized that I’d misunderstood why they didn’t see their positions as problematic when disagreeing with a Hubert Lawandorder, and I finally asked the question with which I should have started every one of those conversations: “So, if a police officer asked to search your house without a warrant, you’d say yes?”

[I’d sometimes asked, “If a police officer handcuffed you just because you asked why you were pulled over, would you be okay with that?” And Hubert would say, “I’m always polite and deferential to officers, so that would never happen to me.” That response meant we ended up in a weird argument as to whether the victim of police abuse had been polite.]

But the warrant question got a different response. Hubert would say, “No, I wouldn’t let the police search my house without a warrant.”

And, then, quite often, Hubert would say, “But I would never give the police reason to suspect me.” So, it wasn’t about a principle of searching with or without a warrant—it was about a failure of imagination.

It was at that moment that I realized that, while both Emma Libertarian and Hubert Lawandorder talked a lot about principles (people should respect the constitution, people should respect the law), that talk had as much relation to their thinking as the word “quality” (in quotes) in a business logo has to the quality of the products. It’s just a sales pitch.

Were those actual principles, they would apply across groups, and they didn’t. Emma Libertarian wouldn’t think it okay if the police pulled her out of a car and beat her just because they thought she disrespected them. Hubert Lawandorder wouldn’t say “Well, okay,” to a no-knock warrant that meant people who might not have identified themselves as police crash into his house at night with weapons drawn. It isn’t that they thought police vigilantism was always right—it’s that they couldn’t imagine it happening to them. They imagined themselves as people protected, rather than endangered, by vigilante police not beholden to the law.

They did so because of what’s called the “just world model.” The “just world model” says that, if something bad happens to you, it’s because you did something to deserve that outcome. The just world model is attractive for two reasons. First, like all magical thinking (if you do this, that will definitely happen), it takes a world of inexplicable outcomes, a world we can’t actually control, and draws it into our control. It enables Emma to believe that something like police violence won’t happen to her because of what she does. [1]

Second, and closely related to the first, it says that we aren’t called to help the marginalized—the poor, ill, elderly, the victims of racism–, nor are we facing systemic injustice. The just world model is radically individual (which is why it’s so closely associated with neoliberalism). If you fail in life (or get cancer, or get shot by the police), it wasn’t because of larger issues of poverty, pollution, racism, or a police force indoctrinated to see itself as an army of occupation.[2] The just world model says we earned what we have, and are entitled to keep all of it.

The just world model is racist.

It may seem weird to say that it’s racist, since it doesn’t say anything about race, and neither Emma nor Hubert said anything about race. But racism isn’t necessarily about what you’re aware of believing—it’s often (most often?) about what you’re able to avoid thinking, seeing, or imagining.

Since racism is a “hot cognition” issue, it might be helpful to talk about the just world model in regard to something not about race. The just world model says that people who are financially successful did something to deserve it, so they must have good judgment. It’s interesting to think about the number of CEO who were praised as geniuses just before they were exposed as frauds (such as Elizabeth Holmes, Kenneth Lay, or Adam Neumann). It’s a scam going all the way back to the Segestans (who conned the Athenians)—if you look wealthy, people will think you are.

They’re often successful in that scam for quite a while. So, were those con artists good people whom you should trust because they were rewarded with wealth? The just world model says they are. The just world model says you should have given all your money to Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, Kenneth Lay.

The just world model gets you scammed.

And it does so by triggering an aspect of confirmation bias that enables deflection of uncomfortable information. That was a complicated sentence. Here’s what I mean. We are primed (biased) to notice information that confirms what we believe. Let’s imagine that I believe that people who own poodles are snobby jerks, and I love Great Danes. I am likely to notice every instance of a poodle owner being a jerk. More important, I’m likely to interpret ambiguous data (a fight between a poodle and Great Dane) as the poodle being at fault. If it isn’t ambiguous (the Great Dane attacked the poodle), all of my first impulses will be to blame the poodle—it provoked the Dane; it deserved it. That is the just world model.

What’s funny about people who believe in the just world model is that, when they find themselves on the wrong side of policies or decisions, they whine like an over-tired toddler. Where is your just world now?

The just world model is a complete failure of empathy. And that’s why it’s racist.

A white person saying that anyone who gets shot by the police deserved it is unintentionally acknowledging that we have a system in which white people are protected. Because they’re admitting they don’t think it can happen to us. All those white people confronting POC in parks, pools, sidewalks of their own homes—that wouldn’t happen to me. Not because I’m polite. But because I’m white.

If you, as a white person, have any POC in your world (if you actually “have a black friend”) then you have heard them describe experiences with the police you have never had. If you have never heard (or listened to, or read about) those experiences, then you’re racist. Not because you act with feelings of aggression, but because of your failure of imagination. You never listened.

If, having heard that POC behave just as you do, and yet they get hassled, harassed, or even arrested by the police, and you still blame them for what happened, you’re racist. You’re also an asshole.

If a POC individual can behave as well as a white individual, and get shot or arrested, then policing is racist.

And here is the other point. If police officers can’t enforce the law without thereby making themselves someone who should be arrested for violating the law, then there is something very wrong with the system. We need a different system.

The argument that the police shouldn’t be held to the law is an admission that it’s a broken system—it isn’t about a few bad apples.

When pushed on this point—that they don’t imagine themselves on the wrong side of a vigilante police officer who will violate the law in order to arrest them–, people with whom I’m arguing sometimes show what’s really at stake. Some of them say that it’s okay for the police to treat white people differently from African Americans because African Americans are more criminal. (This claim is often premised by “I’m not racist, but it’s a fact that…”) They say that the African-American community (that isn’t always the term they use) glorifies criminality, promiscuity, drug use. Their evidence for this stereotype about the African-American community is what their media tells them about rap music. (I’m not kidding—that’s what they cite as evidence to me. Sometimes they cite Ben Carson saying the black community is bad. They used to cite Bill Cosby, but they don’t anymore.)

Emma and Hubert are racist. They might never have said the ‘n’ word; they might even give to “liberal” causes; they might have a relative or friend who is POC. But if they refuse to see that policing is racist, it’s because they’ve got blinkered loyalty. And it’s blinkered to keep them from acknowledging racism.

Ian Kershaw, a scholar of the Holocaust, famously said that “The road to Auschwitz was built with hate, but it was paved with indifference.” I would put that somewhat more strongly. It was paved by people willing to rationalize the injustice. Emma and Hubert are busily engaged in paving a road.

[1] Self-help rhetoric does this a lot. (“The three tricks that successful investors have…” or CrossFit). I should say that I, personally, have found a lot of self-help rhetoric tremendously helpful. When it gets into reinforcing the just world model is when it makes claims about “all you have to do is” or this method “guarantees” an outcome. Anytime it says that success is guaranteed if you have sufficient commitment or will, it’s toxic, and quite possibly a scam.

[2] The just world model simultaneously reinforces privilege (of class, race, ableism, gender) and denies its existence. But that’s a different post.

“I sent you a rowboat:” Prosperity gospel and throwing others into the flood

chart of deaths from covid — https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en?fbclid=IwAR0ooEsBuC0WlYcZ3byJ1Sz7CA2WfFEuMSYp3rkvPuMHNDiN0otLnErBRA4

The fundagelical Governors of Mississippi and Alabama have decided to resist expert recommendations about COVID-19, with the Governor of Mississippi going so far as to prevent any cities or counties from enacting policies grounded in expert opinion. And many people are shocked that governors would reject expert opinion, but, from within those governors’ imagined world, it makes perfect sense.

I’ve spent a non-trivial amount of time arguing with fundagelicals, and they are yet another set of people who argue so badly that their consistent inability to argue well should make them reconsider their beliefs. But they don’t, because they think they’re arguing well.

They believe that they’re arguing well because they are making claims that they feel certain are true, and they can find evidence to support those claims. [As a side note, I’ll say that far too many high school and college courses in argumentation would confirm that sense of what it means to make a good argument.]

What fundagelicals can’t see (nor can other people who reason badly) is that their way of reasoning is one even they reject as a bad way to reason, but they only reject that way of reasoning when other people reason that way.

For the sake of argument, I’ll stick with fundagelicals, but this toxic approach to deliberation is all over the political spectrum (and also slithers through other fields in which people make bad decisions, such as people who keep having disastrous relationships that don’t make them rethink their way of thinking about relationships).

Fundagelicals believe that everything about your life can be changed if you have enough faith. New Age grifters who have killed people also advocate that narrative that, as do get laid quick and make money fast grifters. Nazis also made that argument. So did Maoists. And Stalinists.

Fundagelicals believe that Scripture is not just soteriological, but politically eschatological. That is, many Christians believe that Scripture tells us about the spiritual journey we as individuals must make (soteriology). Fundagelicals believe that Scripture tells the story of political history (political eschatology). For people who read Scripture as eschatalogical, Revelation is neither a time-specific political allegory, nor a celebration of individual faith, but a perfectly accurate narrative of what is yet to come. The notion that Revelation is a codebook that, if we read it correctly, will tell us when the world is ending, is much more controversial than many people realize.

Fundagelicals have an oddly flat reading of Scripture—Scripture means what it seems to mean, as long as that meaning supports the political agenda they now have. Thus, when conservative Christians supported slavery and segregation, they cheerfully dismissed “Do unto others” (fundagelicals still evade that one) and the very clear rules about treatment of slaves, and they equally cheerfully insisted on odd readings in order to justify racism. In my experience, fundagelicals opt for the literal reading, except when they don’t—there is no coherence to their exegetical method, except political. That is, when reading literally gets them the “proof” they want, they read literally; when it doesn’t, they read metaphorically (or dismiss the passage as a cultural blip).

For instance, arguing for Hell on literal grounds is more vexed than many people realize, and, so, people who want to argue for it have to read a fair number of verses in a non-literal way. They’re literal (to the English translation, a serious problem when you’re talking about a literal reading) when it comes to “homosexuality” (neither a word nor concept that is in Scripture), but dismiss as “cultural” the equally clear proscriptions regarding women wearing makeup, people wearing mixed fibers, the death penalty.

When I’ve argued with fundagelicals about this point, the argument gets hung up at exactly the same place. For instance, on the issue of homosexuality, they cite the clobber verses, and I give them various links showing they’re relying on vexed readings of those verses, and they say, “That is what it says.” (In English, of course, not in Greek. Let’s set that aside.) I point out that they are citing one item from a list of behaviors that are condemned, and those lists always include behavior they allow, such as divorce, women wearing makeup in church, wearing mixed fibers, or benefitting from money loaned with interest). And they say, “Those are just cultural values of that moment.” And, then I say, “So were the practices you translate as ‘homosexuality,’” and they say, “No, those are universal.” They can’t say why they’re universal without engaging in a kind of simultaneously narcissistic and circular way of reasoning: they’re universal because I think they’re universal, and these other things are culturally specific because I think they’re culturally specific.

They can’t identify an exegetical method that they apply consistently, other than the narcissistic and circular one, because that’s how read Scripture in a politicized and narcissistic way: they approach Scripture expecting to see their political agenda confirmed, and so they treat every interpretation/meaning as real that confirms their political agenda, and dismiss every one as just an appearance that doesn’t. In rhetoric, this is called dissociation. In psychology, it’s considered an instance of “motivated reasoning,” and most of us do it. I’m saying that, in my experience, fundagelicals–again, like many people–won’t admit that’s what they’re doing, and that is the problem.

That their exegetical method is politicized from the beginning is why they accuse their opponents of politicizing Scripture. Projection is the first move of people who can’t reflect on their own processes.

This discussion of exegesis might seem a long way from why fundagelicals are dismissing the advice of experts (except when they aren’t), but it isn’t.

What I’m saying is that fundagelicals are yet one more instance of conservative Christians for whom being conservative matters more than being Christian. Here’s the best evidence that they are in-group first, and thoughtful exegesis second: when people try to criticize their reading of Scripture, they dismiss those criticisms on the grounds that the critics are bad people. That isn’t Scriptural exegesis—that’s demagoguery. That’s an admission that they are thinking about protecting their political in-group more than being honest and reflective of their methods of reading Scripture.

Or, tldr; they cherry-pick data. They cherry-pick Scripture; they cherry-pick “science.” And, just as their interpretation of Scripture is not defensible as anything other than “whatever supports our political agenda is true,” regardless of method, so is their way of citing “science.” They’ll cite a bad study as true because it agrees with them, while critiquing a study with the same (or better) methodology—on methodological grounds (Family Research Association is a great site for seeing this contradiction).

This cherry-picking of data while pretending to have a principled stance is not restricted to evangelicals. (Do not get me started about raw foodies.) But their cherry-picking of data is important because fundagelicals are politically powerful right now, despite their perpetual and ridiculous whingeing about being victims (talk about “snowflakes”—another instance of projection).

What I think a lot of non-fundagelicals are having trouble understanding about our current political moment is the dominance of prosperity gospel (an example of the “just world model”).

Prosperity gospel is a non-falsifiable interpretive frame that says that, if you have enough faith, you can get anything you want. It’s non-falsifiable in two ways. First, if you don’t get what you want, then you didn’t have enough faith—there’s no way to disprove this explanation of success/faith. Second, if something happens that simply cannot be explained as a lack of faith, it’s just a temporary setback, just God testing our faith. (Although most people tie it back to 19th century movements, it’s close to the muckled 17th century New England Puritan doctrine of signs.)

Just to be clear: I am a person of faith, and I think faith enables us to do extraordinary things. It also enables us to put one foot in front of another through difficult times because faith is the belief that things will turn out all-right. I also tithe. But, I don’t believe that faith guarantees us the outcome we want—that we are entitled to all of our desires being fulfilled by having perfect faith (or giving enough money). Such a belief substitutes our will (our desires, really) for God’s; that seems blasphemous to me.

I’ve also seen that kind of faith, not in God, but in our ability to get our way if we have enough faith, do great damage. It’s the old joke about the person of faith who refused to heed warnings, with the “punchline” of a drowned person of great faith asking God, “Why did you let me drown–I had perfect faith in you?” and God answering, “I sent you a warning, a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter–what more did you want?”

Paradoxically, the just world model, especially when coupled with the notion that we can get whatever we want if we have enough faith, leads to tragedy. People don’t help others because we blame the victims. We ignore systemic failings on the assumption that any problem is always a failure of individual faith. Thus, people who believe in the just world model tend not to recognize systemic problems like poverty, racism, sexism, and they don’t support systemic solutions, such as communities supporting infrastructures (good schools, roads, healthcare). The just world model increases us v. them thinking, The paradox of the just world model is that it leads to an unjust world—whether religious or not (as mentioned above, the idea that you can get whatever you want if you have enough faith/will/confidence is the basis of philosophies as diverse as Libertarianism, Nazism, get rich quick schemes, pseudo-mystical success schemes).

Once a person or community has stepped into this ideology, it’s hard to get out. Rejecting the rowboat and helicopter becomes how one demonstrates faith. The difference between our situation and the guy who rejects the flood warnings is that he drowned; if we sit on the roof, and reject the epidemiologists, public health experts, social distancing, and ventilators to demonstrate our individual (or church’s) faith, we aren’t the only ones who drown. We may not drown at all. But health workers will. Police, EMT, the vulnerable.

We aren’t just sitting on the roof risking our lives. We’re throwing others into the water. Being Christian should mean we care for the vulnerable—we’re being given that chance. God sent us the epidemiologists; let’s listen to them.