I have long suspected that critical theory and social justice advocates are, in part, motivated simply by a childlike incomprehension of complex achievement.

 From Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall. 

As in all professional careers, particularly those dependent on large organizations, managerial work requires a psychic asceticism of a high degree, a willingness to discipline the self, to thwart one’s impulses, to stifle spontaneity in favor of control, to conceal emotion and intent, and to objectify the self with the same kind of calculating functional rationality that one brings to the packaging of any commodity. Moreover, such dispassionate objectification of the self frames and paces the rational objectification of circumstances and people that alertness to expediency demands. In its asceticism, self-rationalization curiously parallels the methodical subjection to God’s will that the old Protestant ethic counseled. But instead of the satisfaction of believing that one is acquiring old-time moral virtues, one becomes a master at manipulating personae; instead of making oneself into an instrument of God’s will to accomplish His work in this world, one becomes, variously, a boss’s “hammer,” a tough guy who never blinks at hard decisions, or perhaps, if all goes very well, an “industrial statesman,” a leader with vision.

On one hand, such psychic asceticism is connected to the narcissism that one sees in executives of high rank. The simultaneous need for self-abnegation, self-promotion, and self-display, as managers work their way through the probationary crucibles of big organizational life, fosters an absorption with self and specifically with self-improvement. Managers become continually and self-consciously aware of their public performances; they measure themselves constantly against others; and they plot out whatever self-transformations will help them achieve desired goals.

Such discipline and effort comes at a cost but:

However, for those with the requisite discipline, sheer dogged perseverance, the agile flexibility, the tolerance for extreme ambiguity, the casuistic discernment that allows one to dispense with shop-worn pieties, the habit of mind that perceives opportunities in others’ and even one’s own misfortunes, the brazen nerve that allows one to pretend that nothing is wrong even when the world is crumbling, and, above all, the ability to read the inner logic of events, to see and do what has to be done, the rewards of corporate success can be very great. And those who do succeed, those who find their way out of the crowded, twisting corridors and into the back rooms where the real action is, where the big games take place, and where everyone present is a player, shape, in a decisive way, the moral rules-in-use that filter down through their organizations. The ethos that they fashion turns principles into guidelines, ethics into etiquette, values into tastes, personal responsibility into an adroitness at public relations, and notions of truth into credibility. Corporate managers who become imbued with this ethos pragmatically take their world as they find it and try to make that world work according to its own institutional logic. They pursue their own careers and good fortune as best they can within the rules of their world. As it happens, given their pivotal institutional role in our epoch, they help create and re-create, as one unintended consequence of their personal striving, a society where morality becomes indistinguishable from the quest for one’s own survival and advantage.

Three paragraphs of deep insight into a common phenomena which are rarely discussed and yet central to many outcomes.  I have long suspected that critical theory and social justice advocates are, in part, motivated simply by a childlike incomprehension of complex achievement.

What they claim as systemic and unearned privilege are really complex behaviors and skills which they can neither see nor interpret.