Equality

Equality - by P.K. Odendaal
Written June 2011, Rewritten April 2019.

Liberty, Equality and Fraternity was the slogan of the French Revolution - and how many people died for that pipe dream? Before you could say 'kill', they killed the King and Queen and before you could say 'slave', they were back in slavery, oppression and bondage.
I do not want to labour too much on Liberty and Fraternity, as I am reluctant to talk about something which does not exist, and millions of people have already died for this dream. Just to think of those victims gives me the jitters. To think that human beings believe in such a pipe dream is scary to me. I see all around me millions of lives going to waste unliberated and non-fraternised in the name of liberty and fraternity.

However, I know what equality means, as any first grader can tell you. As a concept it is understandable, but as a reality it simply is not, was not and can never be. Even bolts and nuts made by machines are not equal. The have tolerances varying between set extremes. Even snowflakes are not equal, and now we wish to apply the word equal to the most diverse specie of creation in the Universe - Mankind!

We have equal voting rights, but anyone in his or her right mind is able to see that someone who votes for a person he or she knows and whose election manifest he or she knows, should not count the same as persons who just vote for anyone regardless of the contribution which that candidate can make towards the well-being of mankind and just because they are entitled to vote. I should think that people should vote with their brains and not with their pencils.

But the real scary part is this: equality is applied to things or people who are not equal or the same. We know that even in the French Revolution most people were more equal than other people, and it ended up in only person being equal in power and the rest unequal in poverty. Robespierre ended up as the only equal person and equality died with him on the guillotine. So much for the stuff dreams are made of - a lost generation.

So why is this notion so strong, when we all know it does not exist from a human point of view? In fact, its existence in the mathematical or axiomatic world of one plus one is equal to two is already under suspicion.

The creed of humanism, democracy, liberalism, communism and socialism is that all people were created equal and have equal rights. Oh, what a wonderful idea!

If I look at my own fingerprint however, I find that I am the only one in the universe of seven billion people who has this fingerprint. So how can their fingerprints ever become equal to mine?

Or which part of equal do I not understand? We say that we are all equal before the law, and that is a wonderful idea, but it does not exist a priori. It is only legislated that way ... and ... wait for it ... none are in reality or practicality equal before the law, as the law is an ass. People are discriminated against and treated unfairly by the law. There are many cases of people doing time for a crime they never committed and many people walking around free for crimes they did commit. There is always one or other argument, law, circumstance, prejudice, lie, deception or motivation which will make you get a different outcome than a similar equal person for the same case. So forget that argument. Get real.

I also do not think it applies to tests set by inconsiderate institutions of mankind, to test for instance the IQ's or the relative knowledge of people. Why should it be tested when they are all the same or equal? I will have to give up my incorrect interpretation of molecular biology and realise that the DNA of all people are the same or equal.

All job interviews must immediately be stopped. How can you discriminate between equal people?

Well, I have never seen two people who were equal, so even the concept came as a surprise to me. Everywhere you will see people knowing much more or much less than you do, looking more beautiful or more ugly as you do, have more money or less money than you do, is larger than or smaller than you are, is more clever or less clever than you are, have a more introverted or less introverted or extroverted attitude than you have, feels stronger or less strong than you about moral, humanistic or political issues, believes in a completely different set of values or religion, gets cross for other reasons than you do and is inspired by other stimuli than that which inspires you.

So how can we deal with such discrepancies in equality, where the equality becomes nil and the discrepancies all.

To make it a bit easier to comprehend: Let us say all people were equal. Now if we have 10 people with differing intelligences (IQ), we need to take the total and divide it by the number of people writing the test, and that would leave five of them quite worse off. So it seems to me that the only people who would like to be equal, are those who are less than equal of the average.

If one ponders it for a while one will come to the realisation that inequality is really what makes the world go round and equality is what stifles development. This world is so rich in its diversity because it is acted upon by such diverse and varied elements, be that people or inanimate things.

If we want to be equal, we will need to degenerate into a type of lifeless world where there is no initiative, no incentive, no ambition and no competition; what a dreary life that would be? None of us will need to work as we all have an equal right to eat and to live. On the plus side we will all pay the same taxes, regardless of what we have or earn. Wouldn't that be nice!

In fact, one even gets the phenomenon of protection and artificial inequality, where certain people are protected from other people, like minority and even majority rights, different tax allocations. All to make us more equal.

Are the resources of this earth shared equally by all? Not nearly. If that which is easy to share is already not shared equally, what chance do we have to share our equality between ourselves?

The notion of democracy is that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time on more than half of the issues. That gives you a satisfaction rate of less than 12.5%. It could have reached an optimum of over 80% if people were treated more unequally, for the benefit of all - even for the person who voted against it to his own detriment, not understanding the consequences of his ignorance and the real issues involved, as is especially prevalent in populistic and coercive societies.

To quote from Jefferson: If a Nation which expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, expects what never was and never will be.

I have travelled the world, and I have seen poverty and squalor, opulence and freedom, bondage and abundance, highly developed societies and intellectuals.

Those I have met from the more favourable species, were all favoured because of their inequality, and those from the less favourable species were all less favoured because of their inequality. They were only equal in their squalor, slavery and ignorance and in the hopelessness of their situation.