Hypothesis: hostility toward 'social justice' from self-described moderates stems from a neurotic need to always be (or feel oneself to be) correct.

Reasoning and implications in thread.

No one ever gets social decency 100% right. Ever. Societies are super complicated, with many many ways to go wrong. Getting it right is often a matter of balance: don't attend too much to someone's identity, but also don't ignore it completely, etc. 1/9

Since there are so many ways to go wrong, you'll inevitably make mistakes. And if you do so in public, there will be someone around to point out how the mistake makes their own life go worse. 2/9

If you are neurotically disposed to need to feel that you always know the right answer or do the right thing, this experience will be extremely aversive. Not only are you wrong, but here is an authoritative person catching you being wrong! 3/9

Notice this is a special problem for the self-described moderate and *not* for the overt bigot. The bigot doesn't agree about how to do right, so they can't be bothered. But the self-described moderate *does* care about social decency, hence they worry if they get it wrong. 4/9

This leads to a dangerous inference. For the neurotic moderate, 'I am being told I've done it wrong' is in tension with 'I need to feel right'. Too often, it's the negative feedback that gets rejected, in order to protect the neurotic self-conception. 5/9

In practice, this means refusing to listen to, even mocking, the claims of those who point out how one has gone wrong. Do this often enough, and it requires a justificatory ideology: people who talk about social justice are irrational complainers, etc. 6/9

That's really sad. The people who follow this path start off with the right motivations (opposing bigotry) but they end up with a destructive mindset because they can't handle accepting their own vulnerability to error - a vulnerability that, again, is simply inevitable. 7/9

Obviously none of this is made any better by social media mobbing, which only encourages the neurotic fear of ever being wrong. When you get mobbed for one inevitable mistake, you start to fear all your other inevitable mistakes. Feedback becomes a threat, not help. 8/9

Lessons:
Society is complicated. Mistakes are inevitable.
If you dismiss 'social justice' (but care about decency), try asking yourself how much it has to do with fear of making mistakes in public.
Everyone needs to stop social media mobbing, which makes it all worse. 9/9