I took the time to read some Social Justice literature a few years back, so I might have some insight on this. While alternating between being bored out of my skull and annoyed at the authors' complete lack of grasp on the concept of causality, I noticed a common thread through most of it:
Social Justice seems to heavily emphasize the concepts of "agency" and "oppression", and because of that it characterizes all its enemies as trying to oppress and to remove people's agency. Being poor isn't bad because it's the result of a sequence of tangible and traceable economic issues, phenomena or bad decisions likely going back generations. Being poor is bad because you don't have agency to do whatever you want. Not having agency means you're oppressed. And it's never your fault, because "who would give up their own agency?!".
The Patriarchy is essentially Social Justice's Satan. And I mean that as a direct theological comparison to Satan. It's the amalgamation of all that Social Justice finds bad, corrupt and despicable in the world. It's the theological enemy they must fight against and it's also a dark deity that corrupts people and robs them of their precious agency so they become pawns in its nefarious designs. Seriously, it's one stop away from Alex Jones-level mind-control conspiracy thinking. That's why they screech about people "voting against their interests", and why they immediately disown any minority who doesn't toe the party line: as far as Social Justice is concerned, those people aren't just misguided or misinformed, they have been corrupted and lost their agency. So they deserve no mercy.
Does that sound absolutely medieval to you? That's because it is. Social Justice has evolved into a cult, and Social Justice Warriors see themselves as shining genderfluid caffeine-addicted mixed-race pangendered knights on mighty cruelty-free steeds riding into glorious battle against the dastardly devil worshippers those who support the Patriarchy.
The few reasonable-sounding SJWs out there are either not fully informed of the tenets of their religion; bearing reservations about the ideology but fearful of their head being the next going on a pike if they speak up; or so focused on one "battle" Social Justice is fighting that they don't care about the rest. Those last ones are usually the ones you see fighting the hardest against one -ism but being at the same time completely insensitive against a cartful of other -isms that don't matter to them. TERFs come to mind.
Either way, this is all insane. And it's all in the literature. They exteriorize blame harder than a gay Catholic politician in denial. It's never them. Self-awareness has no purpose outside of illuminating how terrible you are and how you should be a better SJW. They're Social Justice's Chosen People, they're on the right side of history. Anyone who stands against them is evil.
What's interesting is that the remedy for this is not to give more agency to the oppressed. Not only don't the oppressed have agency, they
can't. The answer is to blame the issues that arise from the responsibility gap, on the side of the gap that is built to accept responsibility: men. Because when you have agency, you have responsibility to change things.
The Patriarchy is men's fault. When women support it, SocJus says that they've been brainwashed, so the responsibility lies in the environment, and not them. There is no body acceptance movement for men, because the attractiveness of a man is their responsibility. When there aren't enough women in positions of corporate leadership, the environment needs to change to accommodate women.
Since SJWs are always the victims, they always lack responsibility and agency. If they want progress, they have to make their pains visible as possible, so you take to Twitter to complain about how much they suffer and how much the world should change to accommodate them. Conversely, if privileged people suffer, they're the ones with responsibility and agency, and their suffering begins and ends with them, so they should get up and fix it themselves. Their suffering doesn't count because privilege. Complaining about it is just an entitled demand for the non-privileged to manage their emotions, therefore they are not deserving of sympathy.
Privileged people could solve the world's ills—income inequality, climate change, structural racism, etc.—but they don't. Therefore, they are doing evil by benefitting from such ills, or at the very least they are willfully ignorant. To deny this is to absolve them of blame for how bad the world is and place blame on the victims, and we certainly can't have that.
This is a philosophy that erodes a person's sense of agency and mires them in victim mentality, since it sends the message that not only can't they affect change, they shouldn't. They generalize their own lack of agency and feel stuck at the bottom (top?) of the suffering ladder, but since they are absolved of any responsibility, they can—and should—demand that their suffering be removed for them, even if such demands are impotent or ridiculous.
The external locus of control is also another way of absolving one of any consequences of their actions or the political responsibility to act to change their own condition. For someone who needs to abdicate their sense of responsibility or agency in order to relieve their anxiety, this is very appealing. Fat Acceptance, for example, is rich in this style of thinking, since it adamantly maintains that weight less is impossible, and will attack anyone who dares offer proof otherwise. In claiming the status of victim and by assigning all blame to others, a person can achieve moral superiority while simultaneously disowning any responsibility for one's behavior and its outcome. The victims 'merely' seek justice and fairness. The victim is always morally right, neither responsible nor accountable, and forever entitled to sympathy.
