No One Believes in Equality

No one believes in equality, no matter how much they claim they do. To be totally equal, people would have to be totally identical, the way two quarters or two nickels are identical. And being identical, they’d be interchangeable.

The closest to total equality and total identicalness in nature are bees, termites and ants, but even they are not identical and still have a division of labor, so they’re not interchangeable. If we go to a level even more primitive than insects, we can go to amoebae, which reproduce by fission, so each offspring is identical to the parent. This concept, for people, sounds like something out of a bad science-fiction movie.

On TV and in the movies, the closest are the Borg from Star Trek, but they’re still not equal and identical. They’re close, though, for humans.

Incidentally, I was always amused by the Borg Queen’s puzzled question, “Why do you resist us? We only wish to improve the quality of your lives.” As both Jesus and Aesop noticed, all dictators call themselves benefactors. Both referred to tyrants as wolves and foxes, definitions Vilfredo Pareto used – he wrote the first used force; the latter, fraud.

Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine if people were totally equal and therefore identical and interchangeable. We’d be clones, meaning we’d have to take over our evolution, an idea which has made science-fiction writers salivate for a few centuries, long before H.G. Wells and his The Island of Dr. Moreau. We’d either be hermaphrodites or else sexless clones, with babies grown in artificial wombs (the artificial wombs were a staple of the TV series, Space: Above and Beyond).

Loveless, sexless clones, since love and lust are too upsetting to our well-ordered Myrmidon society. Aldous Huxley came close to visualizing such a society in Brave New World, but he didn’t go all the way. Kurt Vonnegut also came close, with his famous satirical short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” in which an attempt at love and inequality were ended with some shotgun blasts.

All of us would look exactly alike to avoid envy, unless we can rid ourselves of it. The British writer L. P. Hartley wrote a novel, Facial Justice, in which women got plastic surgery so no one would be any prettier than another.

We’d have to edit our genes and change our brains and get rid of not only sex and love, but families and religion and other “primitive” things we wouldn’t need anymore.

We’d have to think exactly alike. Isn’t that the goal of Political Correctness/Cultural Marxism, anyway? The only way that could happen is if we were a hive mind (bees, again), such as the one Orson Scott Card wrote about in Ender’s Game. We’d have no individuality whatsoever.

Since we’d be clones with a hive mind, the individual would mean nothing. The death of an individual would mean no more than clipping a fingernail. The white-suited Stormtrooper clones in Star Wars are a well-known example of those fingernails. So are the Borg, for that matter.

What an awful world! It wouldn’t be a Heaven on Earth; it’d be a Hell. Why would anyone want it? Don’t the supporters of “equality” ever think it though to its logical end? If they did, they’d be horrified.

I suppose a few lunatics, probably some man-hating atheistic nihilistic socialist/radical feminist anti-Western New York lesbians, fantasize about such a world, but the mentally-ill hallucinations of one out of every 50 million people don’t exactly count.

We don’t believe in equality in sports. You’ll never see Affirmative Action there. Yet we do believe in it economically, even though it’s a brake on wages and the creation of jobs.

Michelle Obama had a job at a Chicago hospital making some $300,000 a year. When she left the administration eliminated her job. It was a make-work job because she was (is) an incompetent Affirmative Action baby.

We don’t believe in Affirmative Action for romantic relationships. I’ve pointed out to people they should imagine if there were laws enforcing such equality, and to think about the trouble it would cause.

Imagine if women were required by law to ask out a certain number of men a week, keep track of it, and report every week to the Federal Affirmative Action Bureau of Dating and Romance. Then bureaucrats would call the men to make sure the women weren’t lying. If they were caught lying, there would be stiff fines, of course.

There would have to be re-education classes to forcibly remake the hearts/minds of resentful, recalcitrant women, the way men at corporations are required to attend “sensitivity” classes about workplace sexual harassment, etc.

Nonsense? Of course it is. But it’s not much more nonsensical than businesses having to file reams of paperwork to the federal government to make sure they hire they right number of women, blacks, Hispanics or whoever else is the “minority” du jour.

Since equality cannot exist, then what do words such as “sexism,” “racism,” etc. mean? They mean nothing, which means they can mean anything. They mean whatever those who have captured the culture want them to mean. No one talks about “white maleism,” even though Affirmative Action means, “white males need not apply, since you won’t be hired, even if you’re the best-qualified, and if you do get hired, you’ll be carrying the unqualified we have to hire by law.”

If “equality” is not about equality, what is it about? Ultimately it’s about special rights. It always is. It’s about money/political power, one of the worst banes of human existence.

Since we are not going to have equality, being that it is impossible, what we will end up with is what we always end up with until revolts overturn it: a vanishingly small minority of extremely wealthy and politically powerful people, who crush everyone else with the power of the State and try to force equality and poverty on them.

It’s why we end up with loons like the multimillionaire Al Gore (whose father made the family fortune through political connections), who insists everyone else make crushing sacrifices while he lives in a mansion that uses the energy of ten houses. Or how one percent of the population has used the government to appropriate 40% of the national wealth.

“Equality” itself is a fraud, one that many people believe in unwittingly. It doesn’t lead to equality at all, just wealth and power for a handful and poverty for nearly everyone else. The German psychotherapist Hans Prinzhorn called it “the tyranny of a clique in the name of the equality of all.”

The writer Richard K. Morgan (author of the amusingly preposterous satire, Market Forces, a leftist stab at what I call Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations, the kind that finance both sides in a war) made this comment about such a tyranny: "Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses."

About the time Morgan was born, back in the middle Sixties, Norman Spinrad wrote a bloody, gruesome and sometimes repulsive novel illustrating Morgan’s comment – The Men in the Jungle, a book that is an example of Dostoevsky’s observation in The House of the Dead that "Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed; the mind and the heart are tolerant of the most abnormal things, till at last they come to relish them. The man and the citizen is lost for ever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible."

It’s not that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. There are people who haven’t been corrupted by power. It’s far more accurate to say: blood and power intoxicate, and immunity corrupts. If one sentence defines the abuse of government, that’s it.

There are people who believe they are intellectually and morally superior to everyone else, and who are convinced they can “rationally” plan society and move people around like chess pieces (Michael Oakeshott called these people “rationalists” and Thomas Sowell sneered at them as “the Anointed”). I don’t really understand the mentality, being that it is so alien to me, but it certainly exists.

It’s a tribute to the empathic power of the human imagination that I can comprehend at all the mentality of such people. Still, I find it nearly impossible to understand their blindness and hypocrisy.

Their names are legion – Ralph Nader, Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Noam Chomsky, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Kennedys, Nancy Pelosi, Cornel West, John Hagee, Jesse Jackson, George Soros – and all of them believe they are better than the dim-witted unwashed masses and should rule ever them. As long, of course, as they are extremely wealthy and politically powerful -- and their subjects are not.

In other words, everyone but them is supposed to be an identical, expendable worker-ant. Does anyone really believe that universal health-care and the rationing and lack of quality it will create will apply to our rulers? Of course not. It’s only for the anonymous, expendable masses, not the politically powerful.

I am amazed that so many people are hypnotized sheeple who never wake up until many of them have followed their leaders off a cliff. The blind leading the blind, right into a ditch. Many see the government as a never-empty breast from which all goodness flows – ignoring the fact that perhaps 200 million people lost their lives in the 20th Century to government-created wars. Only those who have been blinded by propaganda believe the State is their friend.

Maybe the Grand Inquisitor was right in The Brothers Karamazov when he said that people are desperate to give up their freedom to a leader who will take care of them. Apparently there are contradictory impulses in people: one for freedom and one for being taken care of, which, when it comes to the State, is another word for slavery.

I am quite sympathetic to libertarian anarchists who believe there should be no government at all, although they live in a fantasy world that will never exist. Americans at one time understood the government is not reason, it is force and fraud – as George Washington noticed, it is, like fire, a handy servant but a dangerous master.

Some writers have been so frustrated with the blindness and stupidity of people/herds they’ve written novels in which we’re ruled by benevolent robots. Harry Bates wrote a story – “Farewell to the Master” – which was filmed as The Day the Earth Stood Still and featured the famous robot, Gort.

Jack Williamson wrote The Humanoids, in which each person had a personal robot to watch over them and make sure they did no harm. These stories may sound silly, but I understand the sentiment -- left on their own, the narcissistic/psychopathic minority appropriates wealth and political, economic and often religious power and crushes the half-asleep sheeple.

One of my friends, who is over 80 years old and who was involved in politics his entire life, told me he’s met one honest politician in his career. The rest had sex, money, drug and alcohol problems. I think history confirms his observations. And it’s the public that pays the price for politicians’ flaws.

What to do? The public schools, from beginning to end, are hopeless about teaching children about the nature of the State and the tyranny of the few and the forced equality and poverty of the many. If I had my way, I’d close them down. These days, much of the time, they’re not educating children; they’re traumatizing them with leftist fantasies.

Churches have failed, too, being that so many are busy with their Tribulation/ Rapture fantasies about how Jesus is going to come back, kill two-thirds of the Jews in Israel, convert the rest to Christianity, then rule the world for a thousand years. If they’re not teaching these “Left Behind” hallucinations, they’re supporting open borders to increase their congregations.

So it’s up to people to educate themselves. Government should be the servant, not the master; the more local and smaller it is, the better and more efficient; politicians are always to be closely watched, never trusted and to understand they can be removed in a heartbeat. The federal government, which originally wasn’t to do much more than build some roads and run the Post Office, has now turned into an unmanageable, unsustainable, war-mongering, economy-and society-destroying behemoth, one that is the implacable enemy of the citizenry.

Since we’re always going to have government, I’d be satisfied if people stopped seeing it as an omnipotent benevolent parent and instead saw it as the eternal oppressor and murderer that it is.

The political scientist Kevin Phillips pointed out that countries go through three phases – agricultural, industrial, financial. In the past when they have become financial empires they have always collapsed. The United States has become a military/financial/corporate empire, with a concentration of financial and political power in a few hands and the enforcement of an impossible equality – but a most definitely possible poverty – on everyone else.

Being that such empires are houses built on sand, I see no way for the United States, in its current form, to be able to endure.