What Went Wrong: Equality

enforcing equality creates inequality

As we leave behind the century of the rule of the educated class and the administrative state, and enter a new era, we need to understand What Went Wrong.

I’ve written about how Finance and Welfare and Education went wrong. Now it’s time to talk about Equality.

What went wrong with Equality is simple. It involves going beyond the definition of equality announced in our Founders’ Declaration of Independence:

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.

Notice the assumption: “all men are created equal.” They have certain “inalienable Rights.” Then what? Then it’s up to them to get on with it.

It is one thing to say that men — and women — are created equal and have a right to pursue Life, Liberty and Happiness. It’s another thing to say that government shall enforce equality. And I suggest that as soon as government goes beyond recognizing equality and begins enforcing equality that’s went things start to Go Wrong.

Actually, of course, genuine equality is impossible. Human society — especially male society — is strictly hierarchical. Men learn their position in the status hierarchy through displays of strength and courage. This is unexceptional: male chimpanzees do nothing except argue over who gets access to the females and patrol the border of the troop’s food-growing territory against the chimpanzee troop next door.

There is a notion, among experts that agree with me, that equality wasn’t a thing until Christianity came along. If true, the question is: why? I suggest that equality only becomes a Thing when a lower class emerges in cities. In an agriculatural society the food growers are subordinate to the warriors because the food growers need the warriors to defend their stores of grain. You will note that St. Paul, native of the coastal town of Tarsus, does not address his Epistles to rural villages but to trading cities on the shores of the western Mediterranean. Then there is the “Nazis’ favorite intellectual” Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote that Christianity involves a “slave morality” that arose in opposition to the Greek and Roman “master morality.”

Note that, if Christianity began as a fight for equality, the Catholic Church in due time became pretty hierarchical. But then came the Reformation with its “peaceful protests” by Protestants and a flattening of hierarchy.

And then came the political reformation of the Enlightenment, with intellectuals and writers in the city protesting for equality against the hierarchy, the kings and dukes and barons, of the old rural regime in the Age of Agriculture. Notice that in the 18th century the intellectuals were advocating for their own equality against the hierarchy of the Old Regime. And thus the French intellectuals destroyed the ancien régime in France in the Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath.

But the world does not stand still. By the middle of the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution transforming the economy, intellectuals like Marx could imagine intellectuals leading the lower class against the new ruling class of bourgeoisie and capitalists. Equality for Workers!

But not just equality for workers. Power to the intellectuals!

From that time till now, in diverse ways, the educated class has advocated for material equality for a lower class, to be enforced by a ruling class of the educated.

Thus, with Feminism, the educated class used its cultural and political power to advocate for women’s liberation against the all-powerful patriarchy;

With Civil Rights, the educated class used its cultural and political power to advocate for an end to racism and discrimination against black Americans.

With LGBT Rights, the educated class used its cultural and political power to advocate for an end to homophobia — and now transphobia — and discrimination against non-heterosexual Americans.

This general political tendency is encapsulated in the notion of Allyship, of Allies fighting for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors. You will note that in 2024 the Allies are almost all educated-class graduates of universities that work in government, education, or non-governmental organizations — in other words the ruling class. The White Oppressors are almosts all ordinary middle-class commoners. And the Oppressed Peoples are whatever group the educated class has chosen to sponsor this week.

Thus the Allies are the ruling class; the Oppressed Peoples are the clients of the ruling class; the White Oppressors are ordinary middle-class people without the power to oppress.

If you want to anderstand anything that the Left and the educated class does, it issues from its dual approach to equality. First, it experiences the unequal material or legal status of various Oppressed Peoples as unjust. Second, it demands the power to establish material and legal equality by government force.

The consequence of this strategy is to increase inequality, because it requires the ruling class to be invested with the power to enforce equality. But there is no inequality to match the inequality between the ruling class empowered to enforce equality and the rest of society on the receiving end.

What would this look like? It seems almost unimaginable. Fortunately, we have the results of social researchers Joseph Stalin in Russia and Mao Zedong in China to show us the unimaginable.

Let me repeat this to make it clear. If you empower the government to right the wrongs of inequality you will create an unequal society and almost certainly increase inequality between the rulers and the ruled. Enforcing equality creates inequality.

But why would a ruling class want to use such a power? It can’t help itself. “There is no politics without an enemy,” according to Curtis Yarvin, interpreting Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. And what is a ruling class that does not use its power against the enemy?