Saturday 18 January 2014

Calls to treat different things (or people or groups) 'equally' are ALWAYS, eventually, *totally* destructive

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Very few things in nature are equal - perhaps no two things are truly equal: certainly no two people are equal - because no two people are the same (not even identical twins).

Equality always collapses its meaning into 'the same' - whatever sophisticated and nuanced distinctions may be drawn between equality and sameness, always equality is in fact, in the real world, interpreted as 'the same'.

So to ask for equality is to ask for the impossible - which is why its pursuit is *totally* destructive.

Equality can never be attained because sameness can never be attained - and because it can never be attained then the process of trying to establish equality will never stop until everything is destroyed (or the attempt to impose equality is abandoned - which ever comes first).

It is trivially easy to show that two people, or groups of people, are not treated equally, because they never-ever-ever are treated equally: because it is impossible.

If the detection of inequality is taken as an imperative to start imposing equality - then anything can be destroyed, on the grounds that it is not (yet) equal; and everything will in the end be destroyed, as the attempt to impose impossible equality moves from one target to the next.

Yet despite the above, somehow we find ourselves in a position in which equality is regarded as not just something achievable, but as the single most important thing in the world - and the attempt to abolish inequality as the primary political imperative: the primary moral imperative.

So important, that any amount of destruction is justified - e.g. the saying "you can't make an omelet" - that is to say, an equal society - "without breaking eggs".

When the omelet can never, and will never, be made; the result is a world in which people break eggs, heads, organizations and institutions - without compunction, without end.

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6 comments:

The Crow said...

To re-quote the utterly bleedin' obvious, but re-quote it better than ever. The answer to all of this is to reduce it to its simplest terms, and this essay did a good job of that.

stephens said...

They don't actually want 'equality' it's just an occasional tool for redistribution and manipulation.
So if they want people to work longer its 'age equality' but if it's Housing Benefit lets abolish it for the under 25's.
To allocate jobs they must represent all equally (Diversity) yet if it came to filling trenches with 'cannon fodder' I very much doubt those same goals would apply.
Sex Discrimination Act 1975, but still deciding your actual pension age by your sex!
Police fitness test, which one the male or female, they are not equal.
'Equality' will always be abandoned when it is not useful to their cause.

Bruce Charlton said...

@stephens - Certainly. But 'equality' is tactically valuable in the plan of destruction; because in the public realm nobody can argue against inequality; nobody can argue in favour of difference - thus the true nature of things is obscured, and effective action is prevented.

Sylvie D. Rousseau said...

Perhaps no two things are truly equal.
The “perhaps” should be removed: there is not any one exception, even for God, because Father, Son and Holy Spirit, being perfectly equal, are one. All creatures are by nature hierarchical, although there is an overall equality within a nature: all men are equal in certain respects, while being all different, thus necessarily unequal.

The problem of “equality” comes from the French Revolution warping of liberty, equality and fraternity. Chesterton alluded to this problem by saying the revolutionaries used “Christian ideas gone mad.” The French Freemason-inspired revolutionaries conflated justice with equality, evacuated charity (love of God and neighbour) from fraternity, and negated that liberty (or any other virtue or value for that matter) was rooted in transcendental truth. They then begot monsters, with which Leftists-nihilists, and those contradictory people that are secular conservatives and liberal “Christians,” are stuck forever, unless, as you always say, they repent and convert.

False equality, then, is not justice, as it keeps only distributive justice and completely deforms and mostly evacuates commutative justice, thus the use of the other three cardinal virtues (prudence, courage and self-control) as well as, of course, the supernatural virtue of mercy. This is clear in any law or rule not devised by men of goodwill, those who still obey their conscience and natural law, and acknowledge human nature evil tendencies.

Anonymous said...

I could point you to Thomas Sowell ("The Quest for Cosmic Justice". "Preferential Policies" (This interview here is a must watch: http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/12648-1/Thomas+Sowell.aspx)). But I see from searching your blog that you already know the man.

Bruce Charlton said...

Yes - I've read those books and seen the interview!

But my own views are nowadays more hard-line than TS, I think.