Exploring and exploding the “Just World Hypothesis.”

Exploring and exploding the “Just World Hypothesis.”

You may not have heard of the Just World hypothesis (sometimes referred to as the Just World fallacy) but there’s few people who have not lived some of their life believing in it at some level. The English language is littered with idioms that reflect it: you reap what you sow, chickens coming home to roost, what goes around comes around. It’s basically a belief that there is some form of natural justice inherent in existence, that eventually, the good you do is rewarded and the bad that others do is punished. Dear old Wiki has a good summary:

The just-world hypothesis or just-world fallacy is the cognitive bias (or assumption) that a person’s actions are inherently inclined to bring morally fair and fitting consequences to that person, to the end of all noble actions being eventually rewarded and all evil actions eventually punished. In other words, the just-world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to—or expect consequences as the result of—a universal force that restores moral balance. This belief generally implies the existence of cosmic justice, destiny, divine providence, desert, stability, or order, and has high potential to result in fallacy, especially when used to rationalize people’s misfortune on the grounds that they “deserve” it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

Observationally, this seems to be at the core of much new age philosophy, and some would say that the concept of karma is the same thing. It isn’t, it really isn’t. It’s too much of a diversion to try and explain why it’s a completely different thing but it is.