In our beloved Declaration of Independence, the Founders declared:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
But the next thing that happens is that men are not equal, not after creation. Some men are stronger than others; some men are smarter than others; some men are luckier than others. Indeed, men have a culture of hierarchy, and it must be so.
But women have a culture of equality, because, as long as her plumbing works, no other woman is better than she.
We live in a society where our rulers, at the top of the social hierarchy, believe in equality, as in “Equality Never Hurt Anyone.” It was Rousseau that lit the flame:
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Actually man is chained to the hierarchy of his local brothers in the tribe or troop, unless he decides to leave the troop and join another one. Woman is in chains to the opinion of the neighborhood women, for the rest of her life.
The dream of a Land of Equality drives writers like David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything. But writers like Francis Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order propose that only non-state societies can hope for something close to equality. A state society means hierarchy, with a monarch and an army, and you better know your place.
This is not that hard. Since men live a culture of hierarchy, we humans can only achieve equality by force, as social scientists Josef V. Stalin and Mao Zedong proved in the 20th century.
Why then are people so hung up on equality in our society? Clearly, it arises in part from the situation of people at the low end of the hierarchy. It is easy to think “we was robbed,” particularly among the young educated who seem to have a lower position in the hierarchy than uneducated and undeserving businessmen and oligarchs that have more money than the deserving educated.
But apart from envy, the belief in Equality arises, experts agree, from the Political Formula of our rulers, that they are the Allies of the Oppressed Peoples in their fight against the White Oppressors. Political Formula is a concept created by Italian intellectual Gaetano Mosca in his book The Ruling Class.
Ruling classes always invent a moral or legal basis for their power. Mosca calls this a political formula.
Our rulers rule on the basis of the saving truth, the political formula, that they are fighting for equality for the underprivileged: that is the moral basis of their power. In its original formulation at the end of the age of feudalism, the rising educated class saw itself as part of the lower class, allied to the workers of the industrial revolution fighting against the oligarchy of the upper-class landowners and capitalists. But in our age the educated class has become the upper class, and their political formula now refers to an over-under coalition fighting against the middle class.
And as prophesied by Eric Hoffer, the mass movement of the educated and the workers for equality has turned into a racket, a scam.
So you can see why the educated class loves equality. Equality means a big government and jobs for the educated class. And a big government provides status and importance for the educated class. What’s not to like?
Indeed. What’s not to like, if you are in the educated elite? It’s great, until the day when it isn’t, when the Age of Equality is over.
And today, the Age of Equality is dead, because the God of Equality is dead. It is Nietzschean:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
The God of Equality is Dead because it is a false god. Because there can never be a society of equality. Instead of equality, we need hierarchy.
The whole point of politics and morality in the last two hundred years has been the worship and the building of equality. We Educated Ones, we Evolved Ones, we Expert Ones, were called by History to build a City of Equality upon the plain.
That age is dead. Because the educated class killed it.
The educated class killed equality because, in building a society of equality you actually create its opposite, a regime of cruel and murderous inequality.
The fact is, as Jordan B. Peterson has described with his lobster story, that hierarchy is a way of reducing violence. In a hierarchy the only time you get violence in when some male wants to change his position in the hierarchy.
And the whole point of human society is to reduce violence, to turn from war into peace. Because the alternative is the “war of all against all” according to Thomas Hobbes.