When no one has any idea how medicine works and most people who go to hospital die, a bad medical outcome is comprehensible as "the doctors tried." When medical science is really good and almost no one who goes to hospital dies, a bad medical outcome seems like an injustice.

I think that this sort of thinking is at the core of what makes Critical Social Justice so seductive to people who ought to know better. When things are really, really good, remaining shortcomings become rare and thus seem more unfair, or even unjust.

In such an environment, when negative outcomes happen in ways that seems statistically implausible at first blush if we live in an equal and fair society, it becomes very easy to believe that systemic oppression is the root cause without even having to define it clearly.

More obvious factors like economic differences and cultural values having different outcomes can easily be swept up into an argument that those economic differences only exist because of the systemic oppression, and differences due to values result from imposed values systems.

Theories like Critical Social Justice are therefore a way to lose the plot. There are definitely identity-based factors that have led to statistical differences between identity groups, but this doesn't mean that they're "systemic racism" without contrived definitions.

Believing that different values would always, in a fair society, produce similar results is absolutely asinine. It's so transparently false that it's laughable, but in a situation where systemic oppression seems plausible, it's easy to mess this up completely.

When the medical system doesn't really work at all, it's easy to see it as "doing its best." When it works really well but still imperfectly, it's easier to believe there must be something fundamentally wrong with the whole program that prevents perfection that's easy to imagine.

When a system is working extremely well but imperfectly, it's very easy to see those imperfections as profound injustices and then use that emotional response to justify bad analyses that connect it to other injustices. This is our present moment.

The upshot, of course, is that the emergence and widespread plausibility of Critical Social Justice implies that our system is working *very well* (though necessarily imperfectly). The down side is that we risk throwing it all away because it's so easy to lose sight of this fact.