10 phrases about injustice to reflect on

The impact of injustice on the brain

“Hunger for Justice” is a more accurate phrase than one might imagine. When a person feels treated fairly, the same area of ​​the brain is activated than when you eat a tasty meal, receive a gift or admire a pretty face.

According to scientists from the University of California-Los Angeles (United States), this shows that justice is a basic need for human beings.

The experiment was simple: a group of participants were brought together and informed that they were to be distributed a certain amount of money. He “justice area” it was only activated when the amount received was fair. Instead, when it was unfair another area was activated, the insulalinked to the regulation of negative emotions.

Ethics of care or instinct to help?

The desire to care has a biological basisis a “natural virtue”, and therefore it is more reliable than justice inspired by ideological values. As is well known, what is right and wrong can differ between employers or workers, believers or atheists, to give just a few examples.

The affectionate care that parents offer their children, and the understanding of their mistakes, should inspire social norms and sharing of responsibilities. When we hear a child cry, we react immediately, but we cannot do the same if the baby cries in another house or thousands of kilometers away. The institutions they have been created in part to bridge these gaps.

On the other hand, a grown person stands on his own in many ways, but he is not an island. Societies organize to meet needs whose attainment eludes individuals. if society fails in this sense, the person feels unfairly treated and seeks guilty.

In this situation, you can fall into the temptation to invent a culprit (interior or exterior) to punish. This avoids tackling complex issues whose solution would surely imply a division of responsibilities.

He victimhood It is a strategy with many followers. There are people who feel harmed by the system. They often find direct culprits and sometimes the whole life seems unfair to them. play the victim can be used to get attention through emotional blackmail, but above all it serves to run away from the real problem and of one’s own responsibility.

Victimism is common in people with low self esteem who have felt unloved or abandoned. The problem is that by going as victims they fail to establish positive relationshipsnor receive the disinterested affection that they are looking for and instead of changing their attitude strengthen their conviction.

They tend to be in addition people who find it difficult to express what they really want, perhaps because wait for others to guess as a token of affection. If it doesn’t happen, they have an excuse to launch their complaints or accusations.

The trench of victimhood

Another victimizing tendency is to take any difference of opinion as a personal attack, which allows you to impose your own without having to explain it convincingly. This people they think they are always right and they do not usually analyze in depth their beliefs.

Describing victimhood is useful because it can serve to avoid falling into its trap. One of them is listen carefully to arguments of the person with whom there has been a conflict in order to detect the attack personal or injustice, which justifies their own anger and complaints.

This is such a frequent reaction that it can be defined as normal, but it is preferable to seek a constructive solution. Whenever possible, one should look for bridges of communication and allies that allow you to move on.

Empathy helps to be fairer. It is convenient to put yourself in the shoes of the other, think about what their living conditions, personality, desires or limitations are to understand their way of acting. The same goes for not being unfair to others. At all times it is convenient anticipate what the person in front of us feels or will feel based on our behavior.

Some flexibility is also needed. It is a good general rule of thumb to put people ahead of ideas absolute. The obsession with principles such as fidelity, obedience or many others has generated a lot of suffering.

The importance of an even look

If we feel unfairly treated, instead of getting angry or denigrating the other, let’s look for his look and expose ourselves serenely before him or her. The gaze must penetrate to the most intimate depthwhere we are all equal and conscience tells us what is correct.

Meeting and open dialogue should be a requirement in any conflict situation. In Anglo-Saxon culture, many disagreements are resolved in mediation meetingsrather than in court.

The power of the gaze and the appeal to individual conscience as the engine of justice have been understood and put into practice radically by the Religious Society of Friends, whose members are known as Quakers. In their communities, when someone commits an injustice, he is not judged based on a written law or punished, but rather the members gather to watch him in silence. Also, his sense of justice prevents them from punishingimprison or participate in wars, whatever their cause.

This way of doing justice is in the origin of non-governmental organizations very important nowadays greenpeacedefender of nature and peace, International Amnestywhich denounces violations of human and political rights throughout the world, and oxfamwho works in favor of social justice alongside the disadvantaged.

true justice It has little to do with punishing the guiltyAlthough the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth does not lose popularity. It is, rather, the result of everyone’s efforts to relate in a harmonious way, recognizing the rights and obligations of each one. We are all at the same time vulnerable and capable of being a little fairer.

To deepen justice

What is justice?; Hans Kelsen, Ed. ArielA fair future; Several authors, Ed. IcariaThe power of empathy; Ciaramicoli and Ketcham, Ed. Vergara