If what Brian Armstrong is saying here was considered the norm, this article wouldn't even be on the front page.
The role of an employee is to deliver value to the employer during their working hours. The role of the employer is to provide an income to the employee. It’s insane to think that the role of the employer should be to further the political objectives of the employees. By that rationale, having any interaction with any party who’s politics are different from yours in any way is conformism.
Not taking a position is, by default, choosing to uphold the status quo. When the status quo is unjust, it's choosing to uphold injustice.
That's fine, just own up to it. Hiding behind "I'm apolitical" when you're a loyal foot soldier for the current system isn't a good look.
This argument can't be taken as honest or sincere, because with absolute surety I can guarantee that horrific injustices took place today that you have absolutely no concern about at all.
When somebody presents this argument, they are not honestly advocating for justice. What they are actually saying is that "by not adopting _my_ political views, you are acting out evil". Part of any person's political world view is how they choose the issues that they consider to be important, knowing that they only have the span of their short life, and the means of their limited resources to address the problems in the world. You have no right to demand that somebody make the same decisions in this respect as you do. It is absurd, it is hostile to the notion of free democracy, and it is a standard that no living person could ever meet.
And all of that is before you account for the fact describing something as an injustice in the first place is quintessentially an opinion. This sort of thing reminds me a lot of the psychology of warfare, where soldiers are systemically taught to view the enemy as animals who lack humanity. It has a terribly toxic influence on society. Your ideas no longer need to compete on their merits, because the people who disagree with them are the enemy, and the enemy is less than human.
> You have no right to demand that somebody make the same decisions in this respect as you do. It is absurd, it is hostile to the notion of free democracy, and it is a standard that no living person could ever meet.
Well said. It's sad that activists are anti-liberty in this way. It undermines their campaigns.
I had a professor in college tell an entire class the first day - "nobody really cares about you except your family and maybe some friends". You could see the shock to a lot of the students who had been coddled and told how awesome they were their whole life. Once you accept that concept, you can learn to be more effective in communication and not expect things from others.
Most of these activists have no tact.
Neil deGrasse Tyson says in his MasterClass that his father taught him that it's not enough to be right. You must be effective.
The world would be a much better place if everyone followed that.
Unless you mean a critique of the notion of justice in general, that seems to be a bit reductive. Accusations of "injustice" in most societies typically don't stand on their own; they're accompanied by evidence, which is debated, and an ethical stance, which is also sometimes debated. But injustice isn't some Hitlerian discussion-ender; it's an idea and a value set, always selectively applied, just like "fairness", "equality", "utilitarianism", or whatever. It's not like invoking the devil in church.
I'm not GP. I've no clue whether they were being honest in their statements or not, or how they'd choose to back them up, but: at what point is an accusation of injustice not an "opinion", or a "toxic influence on society"? When one person believes it? Ten? Some percentage of society? Some magistrate? When you agree with it? There's no general answer to that question, so saying "they said it was unjust, that means that they're dehumanizing my position and making me into the enemy!" is somewhat silly.
The fact is that every person in the world gets to choose for themselves which issues they consider to be most important to them. They each get to choose which issues they devote their time/attention/money/skills/resources/etc to.
When you account for the total number of all injustices that take place everyday, any person will only ever be able to concern themselves with a minuscule portion of them. By not concerning yourself with a particular injustice, you are in not automatically supporting it. A failure to intervene does not make you responsible for the actions of every other person on the planet.
Somebody who says this is not saying “why are you not concerned about every injustice on the planet”, they’re saying “if your concerns don’t align with mine then you’re a bad person”. Unless they consider themselves a champion of injustice, any person who repeats this is necessarily a hypocrite.
We live in a deeply interconnected world. Most actions, even studied inaction/uninvolvedness, have repercussions on lots of other people--complex repercussions that have to do with privilege and affluence and race and gender and all those other hot-button issues that people get up in arms about. We call that "political".
Now, nobody's making you be an activist (someone who puts a ton of time towards advancing one of those causes). Nobody's making you care. You're free to do whatever you want. But choosing not to care doesn't make the repercussions of your choices any less political.
It weirds me out when people get prickly in response to that pointing out that basic reality, because it sounds very much like "I don't want to acknowledge that my actions have wide reaching consequences."
What you should/shouldn't do about that reality is a separate question: opinions range from "don't tell anyone what to do" to "sell all your belongings in service to $cause right now". But accepting that basically everything we do in an interdependent society is not just tangentially but fundamentally political (yes, even refraining from discussing political topics at work) isn't a super contentious or extreme claim.
Nobody takes that position because they’re concerned that you’re not considering the injustices some random far away people, that neither of you know about, are currently experiencing. People only take that position when they want to bully/guilt/coerce/intimidate others into caring about the same issues as they do.
If taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to supporting it, then the history of humanity has been comprised entirely of absolutely despicable people. Because for every injustice that you have taken a stand against, there is an essentially unlimited number of additional injustices that you have fully supported by virtue of never even knowing they occurred.
The reality is that actions have political consequences. You interpreted that as a requirement to track every possible consequence of your actions. That's a deeply false dichotomy, and is commonly used by people to avoid having to confront discomfort from the more immediate political consequences of their actions: "you're saying I have to worry about everything that might possibly happen as a result of what I do?!".
Nobody's insisting on that. That's a cop-out that allows people to say they're "apolitical" when what they really mean is "apathetic to the political consequences of their actions". Which is fine, sure, but, per the original comment, it's a bad look to not acknowledge that there are consequences when what you mean is that you are not interested in them.
What the "everything is political" folks (and the social justice folks, and the BLM folks, and unions, and environmentalists, and missionaries to a lesser extent, etc.) are saying is that you should care about a given set of specific consequences of your actions.
Whether you choose to agree to learn/care about some of those specific consequences, or none of them, is up to you. Whether you choose to associate morality with action/inaction (i.e. the difference between "taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to actively supporting it" and "taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to allowing it/passively supporting it") is up to you.
Like, there are plenty of things I don't give a shit about. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't. But I don't for a minute pretend that the fact that I don't care about those things means my actions don't affect them in potentially extremely influential ways. Denying that is Bugblatter Beast of Traal[1] logic.
1. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/24779-a-towel-the-hitchhike...
(Speaking of which, what have you done to fight the status quo? Why not more? Why have you not consumed all of your time/money/attention on it? What level is necessary to be considered not-complicit in the status quo?)