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“Only justice will bring you peace”, a band I like sings. Listening to this song, I wondered: How do you find justice in an unjust world? Consequently, then, how do you find peace in an unjust world? The quick and pessimistic answer is: you don’t. There is no justice in an unjust world, and there is no peace in an unjust world. And yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that first reaction might be wrong.

Finding Justice in an Unjust World: a Matter of Creating the Invincible

The number of blogs, opinion columns, and editorials I read online can be literally counted on the fingers of one hand. There is such an incredible amount of noise out there, that I have made a conscious decision to remove myself from the trash.

In one of those few places on the internet that I follow, I recently read a harrowing narrative. A man – over fifty as he explained – described how nothing had managed to break his will; neither financial problems, nor unemployment, nor hardships.

He was broken, as he explained, seeing people’s viciousness.

What this little anecdote really reveals – and the reason it’s relevant to a discussion about justice in an unjust world – is that we suffer less from suffering in absolute terms, and more from relative suffering. That is, injustice.

The Injustice of Suffering

Imagine that you and a friend work at a warehouse for 8 hours. You do the exact same work, producing very similar results. You are paid $100 and you leave, feeling pleased. Then you learn that your friend was paid $200. You are taken aback.

Think about it. Nothing changed in regard to your own situation. You were pleased half an hour earlier, and you still have the same amount of money in your pocket. The only thing that changed is the knowledge that someone else was paid double for doing the same thing as you.

Injustice is about imbalance, double standards, and discrimination. It becomes more acute by hypocrisy – imagine your friend taunting you, saying “well, you should’ve worked harder apparently”.

It is perhaps this last element – hypocrisy – what greatly augments the feeling of injustice. Another band I like sings: “Another spy comes to justify their lies/ Will we make it while their hate turns black?”

Material and Non-material

We experience the world through our senses, which are directly connected with the material world. Not counting dreaming (which is, still, mostly a reflection of our waking consciousness) we spend the entirety of our time consumed by matter.

Perhaps it’s not too surprising, then, that we’re all focused so much on material things. The problem is, from the perspective of justice in an unjust world, that material things are extremely easy to lose.

The more you fail to understand the discrepancy between even lower middle-class Westerners and the rest of the world, the less likely you are to comprehend how easy it is to lose material things.

There will always be people that are stronger, faster, smarter, richer, luckier, or more powerful than you. If they are malevolent (and power or success predicated on money or strength very often is), they will come together and form groups which will become so ridiculously powerful that nothing can stop them.

They can and will do everything possible (legally, semi-legally, or illegally; certainly unethically) to take any material attachments you have.

Do you have a nice sandwich in your schoolbag? A bully will come and intimidate you into giving it away.

Do you have a small cafeteria? Sooner or later a big chain will come to open shop around the corner and push you out of business.

Do you spend the last years of your life at a public nursing home which you have paid for with your taxes? Be assured, the government will make sure you get less and less quality of services, so that someone else will fill their own pockets.

So, how Do You Find Justice in an Unjust World?

There’s only one way out of this dead-end. You’re not gonna like it.

Injustice is all-powerful in material contexts, such as the ones we saw above. Conversely, injustice is entirely powerless in non-material contexts.

They can take away your money, but nobody can touch your integrity.

Perhaps they can steal the rewards of your work, but its soul is untouchable.

They can, ultimately, take your life. Your sense of self they cannot even see.

What all these cryptic sentences try to convey is a simple thing. However, it’s one we have forgotten in our time of now, gimme, I want it. Material possessions are transitory; achievements are permanent.

Perhaps the book you wrote or the song you composed didn’t sell well. Maybe the app you programmed lies forlorn in the depths of Google Play, surpassed by yet another game where you’re supposed to tap like a maniac to split fruits – instead of something that teaches you a thing or two about patience.

You still wrote that book; you composed that song; and you programmed that app. Or, if creativity isn’t your thing, you perhaps read a book. You thought about philosophy. You spent some time considering chess moves.

You’ve had an idea, and ideas are bulletproof.