At my alma-mater you can major in Peace and Justice Studies. Apparently, white guys were jealous of Women’s Studies and African American Studies majors and needed their own way to waste $200,000. The first lesson of this major should teach that economic prosperity correlates almost perfectly with a nation’s levels of peace and justice throughout history. Students would then be forced to intern at oil companies. Instead, they take a bunch of courses that teach how evil America is for being more fortunate than other nations. This doesn’t set it apart at all from most liberal arts courses, but it distracts from the major’s far more nefarious purpose.
If a school tried to offer a major in curing disease, people would condemn it for being a fucking joke. If you actually wanted to cure disease, you would have to study biology and chemistry in undergrad and then do years of grad school and years of research after that before you could even pretend to help in the fight against disease. If anything, society and civilizations are far more complicated than the human anatomy. Some day we will cure cancer, but we will never stop people from killing and persecuting each other. The idea that people expect to achieve this in four years of vacuous watered down courses on white guilt is absurd enough that only a college freshman could believe it.
Peace and Justice Studies isn’t actually about peace or justice. There is no course on the injustices perpetrated by radical Islam or the way physical violence is glorified in urban American society. The major is entirely about getting rich people to give money to useless people who work at NGOs. The statistics about the dire poverty and suffering in which most of the world lives and catalogue of terrible things done throughout history by rich white people that Peace and Justice Studies classes teach are used to trigger feelings of guilt in these same rich white people. This guilt rarely stems from actual imperialism, but from memories of cheating on spouses, sucking up to pompous bosses, and backstabbing friends in high school to move up in the social food chain. Fortunately, the successful have long ago suppressed such feelings and are unable to locate their origin. This leaves them ripe for some one with social conscious (it says so on his business card) to solicit a donation for his do-good organization. The rich person’s guilt is erased, the do-gooder gets to head a prestigious organization without ever learning practical skills in college, and most cities in the world remain urban war zones ripe with disease. Everybody wins.
It’s the oldest scam in the book, and it never fails. Condemn something everybody does, in this case possessing aspirations of wealth and ancestors who acted brutally in the 1700′s, which triggers their guilty consciences. Then sell these same people a remedy for that guilt. The church called their remedy indulgences and made a killing off of it for centuries. The key is convincing people that they’re evil, and then society grants you moral authority, or in layman’s terms a license to print money. Since people are fairly evil as a general rule, the convincing isn’t difficult. On second thought, a degree in Peace and Justice Studies isn’t such a bad investment after all.
