[H]ow it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him…. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they, but simply, it would seem, delighted and charmed by the name of one man alone whose power they need not fear.
We seem to need some kind of an explanation of why so many of us bend over backwards to defend systems that intentionally harm us. Why do exploited people so often become defenders of their own exploitation? The ideas of System Justification Theory (SJT) attempt to confront this paradox of consent and to help us understand how our deep desires for stability and meaning are actively manipulated to keep us docile. SJT has some clear implications for those interested in a free, equal world without needless suffering. This body of literature deepens our critique of ideology by providing an empirical picture of the depth and power of ruling class ideological dominance. SJT offers a picture of the psychological mechanism we need to explain why objective material interests so often fail to produce class consciousness. It gives us new insights as to why oppressed people often sincerely adopt harmful legitimizing beliefs related to their own subjection and subordination, indicating an active, motivated dynamic rather than mere passive deception. It also suggests strongly that exposing system-justifying ideological systems will be necessary to transformative social action.
SJT began as an attempt to bring together the insights of two distinct traditions within different disciplines: the Marxian social-theoretical lineage, “and the other coming from [Kurt] Lewin, [Gordon] Allport, [Henri] Tajfel, and their scientific heirs in experimental social psychology.” SJT’s core prediction is that people will rationalize and defend the prevailing political and economic system even when doing so runs contrary to their own interests. Introduced and developed by John T. Jost and Mahzarin R. Banaji, the theory suggests that people have a fundamental psychological need to see the society they live in as essentially legitimate and just, helping people manage existential uncertainty and process social disruptions, as well as offering the appearance of stability. Jost’s own formulation of SJT presents three partially independent motives (epistemic, existential, and relational1), and he has defended that tripartite framing in major reviews. This is arguably the canonical statement of the theory. When he submitted the paper that kicked off this literature, then-PhD student Jost opened it with two quotes, one from Marx and Engels, one from Allport:
“The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production . . . .” - Marx and Engels (1846)
“[T]he rationalizing and justifying function of a stereotype exceeds its function as a reflector of group attributes.” - Allport (1954)
Part of what Jost wanted to show is that stereotypes and other manifestations of system justification arise for just this reason, that is, as after-the-fact attempts to explain or provide grounding for the systematized exploitation of certain groups of people. With Marx and Engels, SJT picks up Gramsci, Bourdieu, Habermas, et al., to set out a “social-psychological account of false consciousness and hegemonial ideology, which serve to mute group conflict and justify existing inequality.” Improving this account remains a subject of vital interest, as the ideology of the ruling class today seems more invulnerable than ever. SJT’s empirical studies have revealed a complex of persistent views, including the notion that people get what they deserve, and that inequalities are naturally justified by differences in talent or effort, etc. The research even shows a pattern of out-group favoritism, whereby members of a lower-status group will praise the high-status group or reflect on its superiority. Such toxic meritocratic ideologies and the fatuous nonsense that everything has gone fairly are designed to persuade the working class and the poor that they should blame themselves for their station and admire the rich as clearly more deserving:
Consumption culture is the everyday, lived substance through which these mistaken beliefs play out, designed to produce passive and predictable subjects focused on working themselves sick and buying all the things. We have discussed the relationship between smartphones and our culture of meaningless, depressive consumption; they seem to function as consumption devices and vehicles for ads and brand-affiliated content. In a concrete sense, smartphones have become the material anchors of system justifying-ideologies. The numbing effect of this enshittified culture serves to depoliticize us. Our constant immersion in spectacles of consumption and our endless scrolling through seas of slop have left us desensitized and socially and politically paralyzed. This culture is designed to numb and exhaust, to reduce the cognitive and affective resources we can draw on for criticism and action. SJT shows, if nothing else, that we desperately want to believe the world is fair, and we will bury our heads in the sand to preserve that picture. For many, the preservation of the state and capital subconsciously represents stability and meaning; they may accept even the most brutal exploitation if challenging the current system would undermine their worldview or disturb their desperately glued together sense of control. It is clear enough that people have an overriding motivation to justify and legitimize, by absolutely any measure, the existing political-economic status quo, even if they are members of class being devoured by that status quo. In acceptance of the status quo, we may find ways to reduce cognitive dissonance, tending to an illusion of order and control, some transcendent certainty. System justification theories could help us explain how the state and capital persist. Many think, “There is nothing I could do anyway, and sticking my neck out does nothing for me.” Of the reasons people are willing to accept the political-economic status quo, perhaps the most powerful and invulnerable is America’s culture of wealth and status signaling. Our culture is, I suppose it goes without saying, obsessed with getting rich, being rich, looking rich, acting rich, with the relentless pursuit of success defined as accumulation and conspicuous consumption. Our cultural obsession with consumerism and with communicating wealth in this way, flexing as it were, strongly reinforces economic class hierarchies and thus domination, doing the state’s enforcement job for it.
Powerful institutions and pervasive social practices and beliefs lean on us to adapt and find meaning within the status quo, even if it is patently exploitative and socially destructive. The popular masses make their peace with the economic system precisely because the individual lifespan is limited, and most people will want to maximize their quality of life on the personal or individual level. What’s more, historically one’s longevity and personal wellbeing would be inseparable from social connection and group acceptance, which would practically entail a level of mental adaptation to repeated injustices. The strength of the culture of conformity overrides every instinct for fairness or harm-reduction, because conformity offers the benefit of surviving (no small thing). Someone else can worry about the world’s problems, or perhaps that conversation can be deferred. (It can be deferred indefinitely, right?) Many feel powerless, fearing the consequences of using their short time here to focus on actively fighting back against injustice. If they happen to be among the lucky who are quite comfortable in 2025 America, then it is unlikely they’ll feel compelled to move positions substantively in any way that will expose them or their loved ones to a material risk. On the other hand, if they’re only barely scraping by, the situation is even worse, the pressures to conform much stronger.
Interesting and productive parallels emerge from putting SJT into conversation with historian Gerald Horne’s ideas on the relationship between racism as an ideological system and the imperatives of the broader economic system. Given the disciplines within which they work, SJT and Horne address different levels of abstraction. Where Jost and Banaji want to build a psychological account of what is happening when individuals internalize and then recreate dominant ideologies, Horne is a historian providing a macroscopic account of events unfolding across centuries. Horne sees anti-Black racism as among the key ideological instruments of capitalist societies, particularly in the colonial context, helping to naturalize and legitimize deeply entrenched and powerful social hierarchies dedicated to exploitative economic relations. For Horne, racism is structurally necessary to the economic system in that it operates as an after-the-fact rationalization, advanced to publicly justify the ongoing theft of Black labor and resources within a system of political domination and economic superexploitation. In this way, Horne’s account makes racism a paradigmatic case of a system-justifying system of ideology or belief, hiding the actual causal mechanism (the historical and material relationship between authoritarian political power and exploitative economic power) behind a made-up faith in the natural inferiority of Black people. SJT likewise posits that stereotypes and similar ideological phenomena operate first to reinforce and rationalize systems of power, with even marginalized and victimized groups themselves accepting them:
Both Horne’s framework and SJT’s converge in their depiction of ideology as a social device that is fundamental and functional, a key structural reinforcement for exploitative social relations. This means that harmful stereotypes are more than mere accident or misunderstanding; they come about to make pre-existing relationships of intense exploitation and suffering seem okay, indeed practically demanded by the laws of nature. We say we know better today, yet we continue to behave as if these hateful views reflect something true about social reality. Horne is among the materialist historians who explicitly push back against the notion that racial categories and attendant hatreds are somehow timeless, natural or primordial features of humankind. Horne argues instead that racial categories are in fact contingent inventions of modernity, colonial modernity in particular, and that when they arise, it is specifically to reinforce a particular political and economic system, a brutal and bloody system few Americans today can imagine (and most still do not understand). Much of mainstream and/or liberal discourse today risks falling into a kind of primordial view of race and racism, with racism as perhaps something that just occurs spontaneously when people encounter difference; this, in turn, arguably gives the impression that racism as we know it in modernity is a transhistorical phenomenon that emerges in the same way across history. This way of thinking about racism completely abstracts it from history and makes it a matter of individual psychology, reducible to irrational or immoral views. This non-structural way of thinking about race and racism is, of course, a better fit with the political and economic status quo of the year 2025.
Psychology is a contemporary cultural obsession, and this approach also quite helpfully allows us to steer around pesky questions of power and class relations in society. Psychologizing on the individual level what is very clearly bound to capitalism and colonialism at the level of society and history amounts to another victory for the ruling class. Psychology is a safe framework for dealing with race in the United States. We never have to talk about the documented historical and empirical connections between white supremacy, slavery, capitalism, colonialism, etc. We can talk about prejudices and biases, have a pleasant moment of self-congratulation, and nothing changes. There are several historical dimensions of the conversation about race and slavery that too many Americans, even progressives, seem unready to face. First, race is an instrument of political economy. This fact is one of the most conspicuous features of American history, but we haven’t yet come to grips with its implications. Part of what this means is that racism was never simply about hatred of difference or something else abstractly psychological; the racial hatred comes after the relationship of economic class rule is established. Horne remains an important voice on these questions because he demonstrates that capitalism and the slave trade were historically inextricable, and further that the system of racism was a legitimation strategy for an extremely violent and exploitative economic system.
One reason it is important to address this connection is the pervasiveness of a shallow, dangerous account of racial prejudice and similar ideological phenomena that treats them as merely personal moral failures or irrational beliefs disconnected from questions of economic class. It is this, the systematic erasure of the structural role of class, state power, and capitalist economic relations, that must be confronted and combatted. What we need is a historically-grounded account of how particular hatreds (for example, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, transphobia, etc.) come about and reproduce themselves across time. Part of the problem is that Americans seem not to consume much history; if they did, they might notice that historically (through sheer coincidence, doubtless) racial categories emerge at just the moment when the colonial powers need them to rationalize and stabilize a society and economy built on slavery and dispossession. It is as plain as day that race and class cannot be abstracted from one another. Horne’s work also underscores the fact that whiteness as an idea was socially concocted as a way to unite settler classes and foreclose a multiracial solidarity (which might have been a natural outcome in a world in which a very tiny white elite owned almost everything). Horne elaborates on what is still missing from the conversation about race and racism in the U.S.:
Though I use the terms “racism” and “racist” in this book to characterize what has befallen Africans on this continent over the centuries, my own view—as the foregoing suggests—is that a more accurate descriptor of their (our) plight is a collective political (and economic) persecution based on a refusal to accept passively the proclamation of a slaveholders’ regime, then a Jim Crow regime, then massive inequalities stemming from the two. Thus, my deployment of the terms “racist” and “racism” is intended to invoke the political more than the biological or even the anthropological. If the latter were mostly at issue, there would be little need for these Africans to adopt other “black” identities (emphasis added here).
The invention of whiteness represents “the solidification of a categorical Other underwriting the war logic that continues to define modernity.” Horne makes a strong case that if we see race and racism as other than what they are, we risk eclipsing its real role as a social tool designed to legitimize violent domination and exploitation at a particular historic juncture. The idea of race didn’t arise from the ether, from abstract free-floating hatred in some platonic form. Race is a materially constructed and imposed social system built on a foundation of legal and economic rules; its point and reason for being is to create a rigid and strictly enforced racial hierarchy in order to dominate Black workers and divide them from potential class solidarity with other workers, white workers. This system was embedded in every aspect of tangible reality and concrete practice, inaugurating and cementing new categories of race that translated to deeply unequal legal statuses and rights. The early colonial legal system was keen to distinguish between white and Black workers, particularly after rebellions in which workers joined forces with one another. Suppressing such uprisings led the ruling class to believe that the intensification of racial divisions and distinctions would be necessary to maintaining the integrity of the extractive system.
“Ironically,” Horne writes of the American founding, “the founders of the republic have been hailed and lionized by left, right, and center for—in effect—creating the first apartheid state.” In a footnote to his book The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Horne observes similarly, “There have been a number of cases of genocide in past centuries; yet what makes the North American example relatively unique is that the perpetrators of bloody crimes have been hailed—virtually across the ideological spectrum—as being in the vanguard simultaneously of a great leap forward for humanity.” For Horne, capitalism and white supremacist ideology are more than intertwined; they are co-constitutive in that they arose together and continue to inform one another, and insofar as they together form the system that has played out for the past several centuries during modernity. Once one takes Horne’s lesson about the co-necessity and mutual embeddedness of capitalism and racism, they will begin to notice features of the current system that were previously invisible to them. First, at the level of generality, it is embarrassingly clueless to think of historical capitalism in normative terms as a “free market” or anything remotely similar. As Horne shows, the birth of capitalism is to be found in the Atlantic system of human commodification and land theft. Horne’s lesson also means that we can’t treat capitalism as neutral or as purely economic. The violence and brutality of slavery are the bedrock of the economic system, and the logic of white supremacy runs through it. It is a cruel and isolating system in which racial differentiation both structures and explains away the most extreme forms of exploitation. Horne and others like Cedric Robinson suggest that capitalism casts itself in racial terms from the very start. People who believe it is possible to square our current economic system with their turgid rhetoric about liberalism and democracy are still fast asleep. Our awareness of our looming mortality notwithstanding, the vast majority of people seem compelled to submit meekly to alien forces and imperatives, always, largely unwittingly, helping to produce this condition of their own estrangement and exploitation, fully trapped.
Epistemic needs relate to our fundamental desire to manage uncertainty and reduce cognitive dissonance, and we do this by regarding the established order as sound and legitimate. Existential needs are those related to the management of fear responses, which are also partially quieted by the system’s offer of protection. Finally, there are relational needs, the social needs to have a shared reality and membership in a group.