The False God of Equality
In modern political discourse there’s much talk about the political ‘right’ and the political ‘left’, although there’s very little discussion as to what these concepts fundamentally are.
The argument put forward by Paul Gottfried, Professor Emeritus of Elizabethtown College in the United States, is that the key difference between the left and the right is the issue of equality. At face value, that may seem merely an assertion, that equality is the driving force of the political left, but if you look at the thought of leftist political theorists such as Karl Marx, moral theorists like John Rawls, modern politicians like Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn or Julius Malema, the fundamental driver is unquestionably equality to some or other degree. The aforementioned politicians push primarily for equality of wealth, leveling what they perceive to be the excesses of the wealthy and giving the loot to the deserving. But equality isn’t always advocated for on the basis of material wealth.
In the United States there’s been a tremendous amount of pressure from the left for social equality of the transgendered. The push wasn’t that the law should be changed to cease legal oppression against transgender individuals – there is no legal persecution of transgendered persons in the United States, who make up a very, very small portion of the population – but rather that the benighted masses accept their lifestyle and gender dysphoria as equitable with their own with the state hopefully providing the muscle to make that happen.
The push was for transgenderism to not merely be tolerated – which it absolutely is – but heralded and that backwards institutions opposed to such lifestyles be attacked, like the church or other civic organizations and groups of free association. The mere fact that groups existed, which didn’t hold transgenderism to the same esteem as their own in-group practices and beliefs, was a moral outrage that required massive pressure to lobby for state-sponsored sanctions against free association and the use of one’s property as they saw fit. Whether or not the state should have the ability to force people to associate with each other or that people should be told what to do with their property was a question never raised by the left.
In the South African context, the left has pushed for lower fees at university and ultimately-free tertiary education. Why? Because of the belief that it’s an intolerable injustice that some people cannot afford the cost of a tertiary education, already largely subsidized by the state, and money must further be drawn from the taxpayer to provide to the unfortunate poor who, apparently, have a natural born right to a collegiate education.
The ‘Fees Must Fall’ movement was a call for legally-sanctioned equality of experience, in this case university experience, and that the state should make it so that anybody who wishes and who has a knack for book learning be allotted the positive right to study at the expense of others in the name of equality and social justice. Regardless of the policy, whether it’s Malema’s calls to ‘take back the land’ or Sanders’ wish to redistribute wealth from the ‘top 1 percent’, social agitation in the United States for transgender bathrooms in private businesses, or student protests at the University of Cape Town for lower fees or free college, the goal is always the same: equality.
The pull on the left’s political compass – what steers their values and policy prescriptions – is and has always been the pursuit of unbridled equality. Leftist equality is unbridled in that it comes before property rights, legal precedent, thought for unintended consequences, economic implications, or social cohesion. These things must first bow to the god of equality and come following on the coat tails if they can survive.
The right, to varying degrees and for various reasons, rejects the notion of equality as a rebellion against reality, history, culture, and the constraints put upon all of us by existence itself. To the right, inequality is a fact of life, pleasant or not, and in some cases it’s a good thing. A very smart and enterprising person who creates a product or service that improves the lives of millions and employs thousands of people is obviously superior in their knack for business and richer than the average person. There’s an inherent inequality between me and that person, and thank God for that.
That exceptional entrepreneur in effect has benefited an enormous amount of people and effected real change in a way I couldn’t. The doctor who invents a lifesaving medication or surgical practice has a superior knowledge of the human body and a higher demand for his scarce labour than the plumber whose skills are comparatively commonplace.
https://rationalstandard.com/false-god-equality/
