Introducing the Social Injustice Warrior

Why today's social justice activism looks a lot like narcissism

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Is it? Photo from Substack collection.

I’m about to describe and analyse a specific archetype of social activist that first came to my attention in 2015 in women-only online communities. I have since witnessed many forms of activism on online social media platforms and in institutions that follow a similar pattern of birthing, gaining momentum, institutionalisation or radicalisation, self-destruction and demise.

I also feel anxious about this piece, as I’ve felt with other pieces, because I describe human behaviours, relational patterns and traits that we all exhibit, and their developmental and emotional drivers. This can cause readers to feel ashamed, exposed or angry when I don’t align with either the victim or perpetrator - oppressed or oppressor - that I described. I won’t pathologise or label people based on behaviours and beliefs or do the things that others have done to me to make themselves seem superior. I try to take a rational approach to seek to understand what’s behind any behavioural pattern.

I also feel a collective apprehension to speak about this topic because the very people I’m describing are the first to lead a crusade to silence those who believe are their critics or threats to their agenda.

This is not going to be an inflammatory hit piece against woke or anti-woke activists. There are plenty of those already out there.

The rationale for writing about the Social Injustice Warrior archetype is a reminder that we’re all capable of exhibiting these traits when we have benevolent intentions, a strong desire to prevent harm of those we see as disadvantaged, threatened or deceived, and want to take actions for social change in order to bring society to justice. This is a cautionary tale of what happens when any one of us try to make others, society and the world in our image, regardless of how rational and reasonable you think you are. Each one of us is capable of moving from good intentions to what I’m going to describe here.

There are real tragedies, harms and injustices occurring around the globe. In a culture focused on trauma awareness and prevention, the attention has turned from resilience to safety, conflating discomfort with unsafety, hurt feelings with harm, shaming as activism, and unpalatable statements of belief with injustice.

I want to frame this piece on the Social Injustice Warrior with a description and an analysis of the most important model I’ve been introduced to in my life - Karpman’s Drama Triangle. I describe the concept then provide my analysis that elaborates on the original author’s take, and how this sets the scene for what I’m going to define and describe as the Social Injustice Warrior.

I hope you stick around for the whole thing.

Please listen to a description and analysis of the Karpman’s triad and another version of the framework (image below).

A modified version of the Karpman drama triad that reconfigures the roles of victim, persecutor and rescuer as oppressed, oppressor and saviour respectively. Each role is played out unconsciously and perpetuates injustice rather than resolve conflict.

What is a Social Activist?

As we move closer to the guts of this piece, I need to differentiate between humanitarians, social justice advocates, activists and warriors. There’s a lot of overlap among these identities and some distinctions. Humanitarians and social justice advocates are often connected to organisations and institutions that coordinate activities in response to crisis and disasters or provide resources to those in vulnerable situations, respectively. Social justice activists develop communities or organisations to support a specific group or social issue while social justice warriors can be affiliated with a number of groups, communities and issues and tend to focus more on awareness raising activities and signalling online than providing resources to communities in physical settings. All of these activities toward social change are underpinned and sometimes regulated by moral philosophies, theoretical, praxis and ethical frameworks to guide activities and personal actions.

Social justice activists and warriors seem to have captured the attention of all ends of the political spectrum to spark counteraction against narrative capture on a number of social and political issues.

Before 2011, the term social justice warrior was used as a compliment to describe someone who genuinely cared about the disadvantaged and wanted to advocate for change. Since then, the term became more of an insult.

According to Know Your Meme, a social justice warrior is:

a pejorative label applied to bloggers, activists and commentators who are prone to engage in lengthy and hostile debates against others on a range of issues concerning social injustice, identity politics and political correctness. In contrast to the social justice blogosphere at large, the stereotype of a social justice warrior is distinguished by the use of overzealous and self-righteous rhetorics [sic], as well as appealing to emotions over logic and reason.

In other words, a social justice warrior is synonymous with an unreasonable, hostile, outraged, and self-interested internet user with a progressive agenda.

Communal Narcissism and the Saviour

I’ve hinted so far that social justice activists and warriors employ narcissistic behaviours in order to further their agenda, such a sense of superiority over others. These communal narcissistic traits trap these activists/warrior/crusaders in an Injustice Cycle (see figure above) rather than liberate through their activities.

Communal narcissism, a subtype of overt narcissism, is associated with someone who is often charismatic and engaging, and who believes they are benevolent - fair, just, compassionate, generous, helpful, concerned for the wellbeing of others and the preservation of communal values, but is unable to put those behaviours into practice to have the intended impact. This person can feel entitled to self-anoint as an authority on a specific issue or the needs of a chosen vulnerable group to employ communal narcissism to gain social capital and elevate their social status.

These behaviours are present in humanitarians, medical professionals, activists, white saviours, therapists, yoga teachers, spiritual and religious community leaders, charity founders, influencers and social justice warriors who exploit their chosen group in need on their mission to save the world. This person believes they are improving the situation of a target group who is more vulnerable or disadvantaged to them while using their activities to elevate themselves in their institution or community. Sometimes this person piggybacks onto an existing initiative or enters into a collaboration, wins over the community and takes control of the initiative after the original leader or co-founder has been kicked out, disgraced, cancelled or forced to resign citing ‘irreconcilable differences’.

The Saviour requires an Oppressed (sacred victim) and an Oppressor, whether individual or group, in order to maintain their superiority over the morally inferior Oppressor and the materially inferior Victim. Ultimately, the Saviour is concerned solely with preserving their self-image and sense of superiority, since liberating anyone would render them unnecessary — a form of kryptonite to the communal narcissist. The Saviour, who requires a perpetual victim, sustains the cycle of abuse among the roles rather than being capable of liberating anyone from it.

The focus is on convincing others (and themselves) of their benevolence in a number of ways such as:

• public exclamations of moral outrage to condemn unjust or unfair treatment of their chosen population

• staging or posting attacks on themselves for speaking out to justify counter attacks

• fuelling controversy to keep the attention on them and their cause

• performative empathy toward their chosen population, feigned compassion for their enemy and simplistic explanations about how their enemy’s trauma drives oppressive behaviour

• public accounts of how their work impacts on their personal life, livelihood and emotional state yet the sacrifice is worth it

• recommitment to their cause or mission despite the toll on their life

• proclamations of personal accountability to solve the problem

• call to action for more champions.

While these sound like beneficial actions, these leaders are more interested in the attention they receive and focus attention on gaining popularity using the cause as their attention supply without genuine accountability to the group they have chosen to advocate for, represent or uplift. Demonstrating devotion to the cause takes centre stage over devotion to justice.

In an institutional environment, they are the ‘culture change from within‘ actors and are anointed or self-appointed to initiate activities to buffer against the harshness of their institution or system. In recent times, it’s the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), decolonising, abolitionist, antiracist, burnout prevention, anti-bullying and wellness experts that convince their institution of their competence and are anointed the workplace anti-oppression guru.

Their performative empathy used to recruit champions for their cause is compounded by grand gestures of help giving that does more to bolster the reputation of the institution and the promotion and protection of the leader supporting ‘innovation’ than disrupt status quo to create the change they’re championing.

One of the features of this leadership style is crowdsourcing ideas and personal narratives that they will internalise and absorb into their own personal identity narrative. Once they’ve accumulated enough intel from their knowledge vampirism activities, they will pass these ideas off as their own, only citing influential people rather than the unknown champions who were duped to provide their ideas to this leader.

The need for attention and increasing visibility metrics becomes the addictive driver of these activities, creating stress and pressure to maintain a façade of benevolence and devotion to the cause célèbre. As the addiction pressure and visibility grows, it manifests as hyperreactivity, insta-outrage and self-defensive attacks when anyone challenges their perspective, questions their intentions or implies they are ineffective in their approach. Impression management is everything and justifies all behaviour to protect their reputation as the façade begins to crack.

Introducing the Social Injustice Warrior

To distinguish between someone who legitimately practices principles of social justice from those who are building clout through outrage, discrimination, black & white thinking, moral superiority and other narcissistic behaviours, regardless of their position on the political spectrum, I introduce the term Social Injustice Warrior. I realise I’m not creating anything new, but I do like terminology to accurately describe the impact not the intent of someone’s actions, especially when one’s actions perpetuate a hierarchy of injustice rather than eradicate it.

It’s tempting to vilify, mock and dehumanise this melange of keyboard warrior-online social activist-institutional influencer type of communal narcissism. Wild public behaviours that stoke the fires of controversy and heated debates can look crazy to spectators. Yet, I believe that these characteristics are manifestations of conditions in someone’s life. Most behaviour is automatic and unconsciously motivated. The drivers are emotions, not reason.

So what is driving these behaviours?

Grief, shame and vengeance can drive these behaviours.

You might ask, what are they grieving? Or, what might we all be grieving?

Look at the state of the world through their eyes - in crisis, out of control, filled with injustices, on the verge of ecological disaster.

Who’s not grieving the loss of better days when the rules of society and conduct seemed clearer? Institutions, including media, seemed more trustworthy. Political lines were cleaner. Pathways to a certain future seemed easier to attain as long as you took the right steps. Life might have felt more predictable or easier to navigate as long as you followed the rules and challenged them in the morally correct way. We might all be stuck grieving the loss of an idealised past. A fantasy.

Unresolved grief in a grief denying, shame suppressing, control addicted society is going to have consequences. As people ruminate, unable to accept the current state of reality, they can start to feel nostalgic and yearn for an idealised past to materialise in the present.

Nostalgia can self-protect and provide a temporary mental sanctuary from the harsh reality and powerlessness of living in the present. For some, the fantasy can seem within reach in order to preserve and reclaim an idyllic past envisioned by an institution’s founding fathers or a community’s mothers.

Their grief and the disconnection from their ideal reality, makes them seek out connection with others who share their fantasy, convincing them their fantasy is valid, realistic and something they’re entitled to have.

The fantasy involves a world without oppression and clear lines of justice. A world where the right “wrong” people are held to account so they never repeat their crimes to humanity. A world where the right people are recognised and rewarded with good karma for their benevolence. A world where the Earth can start to breathe and flourish again, where extinction no longer occurs, children are safe and we all get along. A safe and comfortable world which New Age devotees call the Golden Age of peace. Who wouldn’t want that?

Except, this world doesn’t exist.

It can’t exist in a society stratified into a hierarchy where power struggles dominate. Being trapped in the injustice cycle using the behaviours of the oppressor to defeat oppression is a fantasy world of justice. Those looking to recreate the world in their image, by overthrowing the oppressors and dismantling the oppressive ways, do so by creating a new hierarchy in which they have power and control in this new world order. This is #justice.

The birth of the Social Injustice Warrior

The Social Injustice Warrior (SIW) doesn’t rise overnight.

The individual likely had their own setback in life ie. a break up, job loss, upheaval of any kind that destabilized them enough to shatter their self-image and fracture reality leaving them in a state of shame and uncertainty about the future. In their state of grief and loss, inferiority, insignificance and powerlessness - they become aware of a void that needs to be filled to feel whole again. The void can motivate restlessness, boredom and escapism to alleviate the discomfort and burden of pain that often masks disappointment and enables dependency on chaos and instability. Rather than hold steady for the discomfort to pass while receiving support to make sense of their grief, the individual will:

• look for new opportunities to reinvent themselves

• deep dive into conspiracy theories and new learning

• join new communities and social networks

• start blogging and posting online about what bothers them

• start a new project or yearn to finish unfinished work

• invent a new professional description, new role, new skillset

• yearn for a Saviour to ‘give them a chance’ or ‘their next break’ or

• become a Saviour through the reinvention of their identity.

This individual also has strong social justice values or an orientation toward helping others. The more they learn about a specific social issue or group of interest, the angrier they get about injustices. They feel they hold knowledge, see the truth of reality or the solution to alleviate suffering of marginalised groups alongside a sense of entitlement to own their power so that others can know their greatness.

Through prompting by a trusted mentor, friend, community support or spiritual guidance, they begin to gather the scattered pieces of their identity to rebuild a new ego and a new vision of the present and future that now carries a modified story of their mission and life purpose. With renewed strength, the activist rises from the ashes like a Phoenix and this new Saviour is ready to find their Chosen group to lead them to salvation, decolonization, liberation, equality, sovereignty, emancipation, anti-wokeness, restoration of ancient ways, financial freedom, political utopia and other aspirational states of being.

The Social Injustice Warrior Playbook

I published the narcissistic relationship playbook in the past and as I was developing this piece, I realised that the SIW activities follow a similar process. I’ve adapted that playbook to highlight the hierarchical relationship between SIW and their Chosen oppressed group while the SIW tries to give the impression of elevating and caring for the Chosen.

The SIW might start off as an advocate and steer away from calling themselves an activist because they want to acknowledge their privilege and not centre themselves among a community of marginalised people. At least not yet. They still need to work out their key talking points and personal narrative to test out with diverse audiences before their identity becomes fixed. These are not only individuals online - these are also institution-based DEI workplace activists, anti-bullying advocates and those who spearhead movements they envision will be as big as other #movements who are primarily active online.

There is a sequence of activities that gradually transforms a well-meaning individual with communal narcissistic traits into a Social Injustice Warrior.

Note to reader - take a moment to bring to mind someone you consider a social justice warrior or activist. This person could be anyone who has a progressive or conservative agenda who is easily outraged and vitriolic while also charismatic and engaging. Does the following description fit the person you have in mind?

1. Identify the Enemy - the Oppressor

For the SIW to operate, they need to identify their enemy - the Oppressor - and the oppressor of their chosen oppressed-in-waiting. The Oppressor can be anyone, a group, an ideology, an institution that the individual sees as a threat and barrier to their vision/fantasy that needs to be dismantled and eradicated from their current version of reality. The Oppressor can also be a source of envy or shame to serve as a rival that they can blame or scapegoat. Or, the Oppressor can represent someone or an institution that actually caused harm to the SIW in the past through violence or betrayal.

2. Identify the Chosen - the Oppressed

Regardless of where someone lies on a sociopolitical spectrum, there is no shortage of victims, underdogs, oppressed, marginalized or disadvantaged people needing attention, saving and uplifting. The SIW chooses an oppressed group to defend, uplift and protect as their Chosen. The SIW requires their Chosen for legitimacy and justification of their existence. The Chosen needs someone with greater power, status or privilege to advocate for them to complete the symbiotic relationship. The SIW gets to feel powerful for ‘choosing’ to give their attention and energy to their prized vulnerable group.

3. Develop propaganda of the Chosen group’s oppression

The next step is to develop a cherry-picked fallacy or recycled narrative of the Oppressor to construct the propaganda that the SIW will use to recruit members of their flock and build their community of loyal protectors and defenders of the propaganda...and their visionary leader. The SIW isn’t fabricating a story - they truly believe the story they’ve put together based on their interpretation of history, publications, speeches and actions of past activists, political theorists and others who have fought the good fight. They will need to test out their messaging to refine the propaganda into easily digested frames that empathises with and inflames the Chosen all at once.

4. Attract and build their community 

The SIW takes to their favourite social media platforms and digital forums where they are most likely to find their oppressed to test out and refine messaging about their personal narrative, oppression propaganda and mission to begin recruiting their Chosen.

As the SIW begins to groom, connect and trauma bond with their loyal adherents, the individuals’ lived experiences become curated and absorbed through knowledge vampirism into the evolving propaganda so that it eventually becomes more like the SIW’s than the original version, under the SIW brand.

The members of the Chosen, like those of a cult, will believe they are better people who are solving big world problems because they’re accessing exclusive knowledge that only the awakened can understand, transmitted to them by their visionary leader through performative allyship, merely feeding them what was absorbed from others.

There are tactics the SIW uses to recruit their Chosen members using social media posts, digital forums or gatherings.

The Social Injustice Warrior:

• Affirms their moral superiority. They critique, devalue, diminish, demonize or harshly judge another person or group so they feel morally, intellectually or socially superior. Or, they anoint themselves as the righteous authority figure in the dynamic with another person or in a social setting, regardless of their age or status.

• Acts outraged to stimulate emotional dysregulation and instability. Harnessing people’s sensitivities and impulsiveness toward moral outrage facilitates a connection among the group based on an assumption of shared beliefs and values.

• Uses tentative questioning to ascertain if an individual has the ‘correct’ viewpoints about the Chosen group and the SIW to be the right ‘fit’ for the SIW community.

• Uses directed questioning to put people on the spot. This approach asserts authority among a group so the individual will feel intimidated and compelled to respond to the specific questions directed at them (alone or in a group).

• Targets individuals who represent or identify as an oppressed or minoritized social group to form a connection with them AND individuals who seem more passive and sensitive. Some of these individuals also describe themselves as social activists and/or anti-oppression activists.

• Gives the spotlight to suspected or known Chosen member to share their personal oppression story. The individual feels encouraged to disclose their lived experiences privately or publicly. After disclosure, the SIW acknowledges the individual’s courage for sharing and validates their experience so the individual feels seen and understood, giving them the illusion that the SIW ‘gets them’ and is therefore trustworthy.

• Tests their propaganda with Chosen member. The person who just disclosed their lived experiences and who now feels seen is presented with the ‘big picture’ of what’s behind their suffering. The intended effect is that the Chosen member feels like they’ve been given a glimpse into the truth of reality. They feel awakened, grateful and want to know more.

• Offers invitation to learn more in the SIW community. The invitation includes information about the amazing enlightened community of like-minded souls who are building awareness of the injustices and fighting for justice through numerous activities.

• Affirms authority and legitimacy by telling people an embellished story about the projects they have worked on and are currently doing with diverse Chosen groups to give the impression and stoke the illusion that they are truly living and breathing justice work. Community members in the Honeymoon phase of the relationship with the SIW and the community feel morally righteous and superior for being the relative few who are awakened to the truth. The SIW is not trying to lie or deceive - they truly believe their projects and activities are going to produce the outcomes they seek.

• Extracts personal narratives and lived experiences from the Chosen members who now trust the SIW and open up about their difficulties. The SIW use the propaganda to affirm and provide more in depth explanations about the Oppressor’s role in causing and maintaining the Chosen member’s oppression. This strengthens trust between Chosen member and SIW and encourages the Chosen to continue to share their unique knowledge with the SIW. The SIW absorbs this unique knowledge and incorporates it into the Oppressor propaganda that will be told back to Chosen members in future discussions as if it was the SIW’s knowledge all along.

• Laments about the difficulties of justice work especially when they’re the one doing most of the work and not enough people are taking action. They have moments of Saviour victimhood because they feel like they’re not doing enough, others are not doing their part, or feel worn down by all their critics.

• Tests community member’s loyalty by exposing critics, staging rivalries and showing trust toward a special few by giving them more attention and responsibilities/authority in community activities. The members who come to the vocal defence and empathises with the SIW pass the trust test while others will eventually become members of the Oppressor group.

• Recruits allies from the trusted among the Chosen to spy on threats, collect intel on critics and rivals, and take down enemies within the community and beyond.

• Reinforce messaging about the importance of the specific anti-oppression mission is and that it’s not possible without the support of the Chosen community.

• Keeps the community busy, engaged and connected with public forums, community action gatherings, watch parties and informal gatherings to continue to expose the Oppressor’s oppressive activities, reinforce and evolve the propaganda. This increases the likelihood that the Chosen will internalise the ideology and will adopt it as truth while also embodying the SIW mannerisms, turns of phrases and intonation. The emotionally bonded community members are hooked and keep needing their dose of their leader’s wisdom to believe they are involved in something important, groundbreaking and justice-promoting. The Chosen members become more indignant, righteous, and unified in their activism.

5. Expose, publicly shame and attack the Oppressor

Those who represent the Oppressor go beyond the originally selected out group. The Oppressor can include adherents who vocally challenged the leader or who have failed to participate and contribute as originally intended or expected to build and sustain the leader’s status and privilege.

The attacks will involve the leader publicly sharing their mission, the evidence of their ‘work’ and ‘impact’, their victim statement (ie. ‘people who don’t like my message are trying to take me down'), statement of their commitment to their cause, their desire to awaken humanity and promote justice, and acknowledgement of the strength they feel from their community to keep them going.

What won’t be visible are the private messages of threats, targeted bullying and harassment by the SIW using anonymous accounts and their flying monkeys who all believe that silencing their opponents through intimidation tactics and multi-pronged attacks, doxxing and other assault tactics promote justice.

6. Disgraced, exposed and rebirth

It can take time, years even, from the birth of the SIW to their disgracing and downfall. As they’ve repeated steps 1-5, they’ve been curating and building their community of the Chosen as a cult devoted to the ideologies embedded in the propaganda and the SIW leader. Good devotees defend and protect everything about their community using victimhood and assault tactics to empower their activities. Eventually, excommunicated devotees who failed the loyalty tests, and who deprogrammed from the internalised propaganda will want others to see how dangerous the SIW has become. They will attempt counterattacks and in-fighting that will prompt the SIW to engage in activities described in section 4 to manage and protect their reputation.

For some SIWs, as has happened to many cult leaders, they will be fully exposed for their activities and be seen as a self-serving, self-anointed fraudulent activist. Once disgraced and unable to restore their reputation, their mission will self-destruct and the community will disband, except for the few true believers who will continue to stand by the SIW. The SIW will go through the cycle that led to their birthing to either critically examine their actions and discover their underlying motives driving a self-serving and exploitative agenda or reinvent themselves and remain trapped in the injustice cycle behaviours to repeat the process again.

What can someone genuinely committed to justice do (and no longer do)?

Those who lead a campaign of hate against any group or holders of a specific ideology do it to alleviate the pain of their own insignificance.

It’s human nature to want to be recognised and be Chosen for greatness by any authority figure - a dominant parent, a teacher, manager, institution, government body, political leader, CEO, celebrity and public figure. And a Social Injustice Warrior. How else to override the constant presence of feeling insignificant and inferior? And if you can’t be Chosen, in the right conditions you might make yourself the authority figure who has the power to Choose and experience your greatness through the eyes of others. This establishes a relational hierarchy, a parent-child or master-servant dynamic, and also a barrier to mutuality, reciprocity, equality and justice.

As history continues to show, hierarchy is a social order that wants to be preserved and its beneficiaries are conditioned to preserve it. We, the beneficiaries, are programmed to re-enact hierarchical behaviours and thinking until we seek to co-exist in communities of diverse ways of seeing, knowing and being in the world. In a hierarchical social order where power corrupts, justice is the exception and injustice is the rule.

“For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

-Audre Lorde

For the Social Injustice Warrior who attempts to build their image of a just world in which their beliefs, behaviours and rules reign supreme only equipped with the master’s tools - the new reality of justice will behave a lot like the old one. The Oppressed becomes the Oppressor, or the Oppressed gets a new Oppressor.

A world in which everyone can live with dignity, access resources to help them flourish, give and sustain their community, ensure that others have what they need to navigate complexity and innovate to overcome life’s challenges, isn’t led by a saviour or an institutional authority. The inhabitants of this world reluctantly accept that justice exists because corruption and evil must also exist.

Those committed to justice also acknowledge that they are vulnerable to corruption, virtue signalling, attention-seeking aggrandising behaviour and defaulting into familiar hierarchical relating patterns in moments of insecurity and intolerable uncertainty.

Justice involves a commitment to no longer do what you’ve come to see as harmful behaviour to others, even if your enemies are doing those things to you and your group. It’s liberating yourself from power struggles and the trappings of the injustice cycle so you can support others to do the same.

Justice is movement toward a new destination, not the fantasy where one way is supreme. It requires traversing the rocky terrain of unmarked paths scattered with traps and pitfalls with others who use inquiry, critical reflection and share practice wisdom. We can also use the wisdom of our ancestors and those who have walked a similar road before to facilitate the changes that benefit us now, and take individual and collective action to no longer repeat injustices of the past and present.

As for the Social Injustice Warriors you encounter online and in your institutions: your individual action toward justice also involves depriving attention to those who need it to fuel their efforts.

Just keep scrolling.

Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, subscribing and supporting my work,

Nathalie Martinek, PhD

The Narcissism Hacker

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to

The Naturally Social Science Writer

Dr. Jordan Schaul for contributing ideas to earlier versions of this piece and for continuing to inspire insights through our discussions. This is also the result of many analytical discussions about social media antics for over a year with

Katherine Brodsky

and NK who have helped me test out and crystallise ideas, while also affirming what we were each witnessing. Thanks

A rant, Christopher Sweat

for suggesting I record an audio analysis - I gave it a go! I also have many patient friends Katie, Matangi, Nicole, Laura and Rupi to thank for reading iterations, editing and ongoing discussions about this intriguing topic. Infinite gratitude for this collective effort.

References of Interest

Davis, Lisa Selin. (2023). How Therapists Became Social Justice Warriors. The Free Press.

Elnakouri, A., Hubley, C., & McGregor, I. (2022). Hate and meaning in life: How collective, but not personal, hate quells threat and spurs meaning in life. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 98, 104227.

Fuller, D., & Kitchin, R. (Eds.). (2004). Radical theory/Critical praxis: Making a difference beyond the academy?. Praxis (e) press.

Karpman, M.D., Stephen B. "The New Drama Triangles USATAA/ITAA Conference Lecture" (PDF). karpmandramatriangle.com.

Lorde, Audre. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110- 114. 2007. Print.

Reudell, Ryan. (2021). The Dark Side of Social Justice Activism.

Savage, Luke. (2023). Conservatives Need a Safe Space From the Imaginary Threat of “Woke Capitalism”. Jacobin Magazine. April 24, 2023.

What is social justice? Origins and definitions, plus social injustice examples. Taylor & Francis.

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I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

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