Khelly wrote:
If the person of "weak character" believes in a just world in which there exists no injustice then they cannot be the one facing an "obvious" injustice because it doesn't exist to them. Someone else of different character can face the same situation and see it as an injustice. I hate it when Railey tries to make people assume things like "obvious injustice" to exist equally between everyone.
Someone who doesn't think that that rainbows exist can't just UNSEE this colorful thingie that appears whenever rain and sun come together outside. They will see it when they look up at the right moment. However, they might choose to not go outside whenever there are rainbows, or they might try to find an alternative explanation, aka
it's not real rainbows but something the government put in the water and air.
Most people roughly share a definition of justice. It's unjust when you don't "deserve" it. You don't "deserve" it when you didn't do something equivalent to the thing that's happening to you now. This is how the words are commonly used and understood. In the rare case that someone uses them completely differently, you might want to apply a different logic to them. But this is rare and not relevant to this discussion unless you want to split hairs.
Now, similar to the rainbow, people can't just UNSEE it when something obviously breaks this definition of theirs, but they can choose to ignore it or
explain it away, aka
If you got raped and murdered even though you led an innocent life, it must have been because you had bad karma from a previous life, so in reality you DID do something equivalent to the rape and murder now. Just in a different life, but it's ok you got your divine punishment now and it's all fair and just after all.
You see, the mental gymnastics that people go through to justify their just world hypothesis are astonishing. It is one way to deal with obvious injustices (and I hope that term is clear now). Next to the other factors, it leads to people being less compassionate toward humans than animals, since animals are usually not included in the just world hypothesis.
The bottom line is:
Things go awry when people try to justify things because they can't bear the thought that some things just aren't just. This leads to them losing their compassion when they try re-interpret the situation in a way that a victim stops being a victim, but instead "had it coming". Or whatever you want to call it.
I hope that explains it in a way that everyone can understand. Brian already explained it very well too, minus the existence is absolute part. I never said that, and it's not needed for this model as long as the overlap between peoples perceptions is big enough, which it is.