In Praise of Hierarchy (Part 2. Why Equality Appeals)

I ended Part 1 with a template, a “perfect version” of how belief in equality corrupts a person. But that only happens for as long as the belief in it persists, or rather, as long as the desire to believe in it persists.

In real life, these usually don’t persist, at least not in the cartoonish way that one believes in equality - and desires to believe in it - when one is a teenager. Speaking for myself, once in my twenties I naturally - and rapidly - grew out of the notion. I think this is true for many people. Reality intervenes on our ideals and we become more realistic. Our own drives intervene and we become more pragmatic. Maturity, the simple process of witnessing people, intervenes, and we become less blindly optimistic.

Or at least, that’s how it should be. What is perhaps unique about our age is that ideology then intervenes again, in the form of constant propaganda, to bolster the belief in equality and stop adults from letting go of it.

But even with that help, equality is a difficult thing for a grown adult to keep believing in since it is so palpably untrue.

The main “cope” that people use is:

Of course different things aren’t equal. They’re different. But they are of equal worth!

But why are two things that are different of equal worth? It sounds unlikely, not to mention entirely untested in the real world. The answer would be:

Different things can have the same worth. It happens all the time - for example, when different products are given the same price.

This opens the door to arguing that there are multiple ways of evaluating a product, with its market value being only one of them. It will, in other evaluations, fare differently from other products which happen to have the same market value.

But that avenue is for philosophy students to explore. I personally can’t bear the tedium of exploring things we already know to be a fallacious waste of our time.

What I would say to someone making the “different but of equal worth” argument is:

Which two things in your life are of equal worth to you?

And I think, if my interlocutor was honest, he would have to admit that he does not value any two things equally. Let’s call him Daniel. He does not love anyone else in the same way, or to the same amount, that he loves his mother. There is no love equal to, and therefore worth the same to Daniel, as that one. Moreover, every other son on the planet loves his mother in some unique way different from how Daniel loves his. You might think that all sons surely love their mothers equally, but even there, you will find no consistency and no equality whatsoever. Every relationship is unique, and even if it has features in common with other relationships of the same type, it will have differences too.

All of objective existence, like all of our subjective experience, is without any shred of equality whatsoever. The cosmos is, and we experience it as, a dizzying maelstrom of boundless, confusing and somewhat maddening variation - variation that is limited only, and only just, by the constraining forces of DNA and physics. Among all of this variation, why we should feel the same about any two things, or ascribe them equal worth in any sphere, is beyond me.

So, the “different but of equal worth” notion doesn’t work either, and even sounds unlikely. But the real issue is the concept of equality itself.

As an abstract social ideal, equality is psychologically appealing to many people, but it rests on a premise (actual innate equality between things) that contradicts their inward desires and their perception of outward reality.

Nobody, not even the most desperate equalitarian, seriously thinks the two women above are “the same” as two ordinary women. Their physical beauty, their poise, their manner of dress - everything says “quality”. Whether the quality is innate or learned is irrelevant. You cannot value anything, or even notice anything as being distinct from its alternatives, if all things are equal and of equal worth. That is clearly a lie, and not how anyone actually lives, therefore we can conclude that equality is a chimera. It is something that appeals to people in the abstract but is impracticable, undesirable and useless to them in real life.

---

It is often said that equality is fundamentally a feminine concept, but that women themselves don’t practice it. I think the truth here is complicated.

A healthy woman wants equal provision for her children so as to maximise survival likelihood for all of them. Thus, her instincts compel her to demand equal provision for them from her husband. But she also wants her children to be as “high quality” as possible, so will go for the “highest quality” man she can obtain. She is not interested in her children being equal to any other woman’s children - quite to the contrary - and therefore is not interested in her husband being equal to any other woman’s husband. As an animal competing in nature, she wants the best husband and the best children. Only when it comes to competition between her children does the fierce drive for equality emerge. This is where that drive in her begins and ends, but it is so powerful here that it dominates her psyche. This indicates how predominant in the female psyche is the mental furniture related to rearing children, and how strongly optimised women are for the domestic sphere, not the public sphere. To listen to a woman advocating social policy is to listen to a mother displaced from the domestic sphere and projecting the needs of (her) children onto grown adults.

For men it is completely different. The healthy man has no use for equality in his life. He wants a hierarchy and, while he would prefer a high position in it, most important for him is that he knows his position, whatever it is. Better a disappointing certainty than the chaos of some equalitarian situation where he doesn’t know what is going on or where he stands relative to other men - his rivals, his leaders, his followers.

So, for both men and women, the drive for equality is not innate. How then does it “get its teeth into” people?

I think, in women, it is simply a media-driven subversion of their instinct to ensure equal treatment for their children. One can see this, grimly, in how women talk about refugees; there is a very clear similarity with how mothers talk about children. They also talk about groups within a multicultural society in the same way: all of them equally important, valuable, deserving, and justified in being here. That is a completely unrealistic view which is bound to lead to severe problems - and as we see in the real world, has done so.

In men, the drive for equality is more strange. The obvious explanation is that men, especially young men, will say whatever it takes to please women and get them into bed. But obviously that is not enough of an answer. There are men who clearly need, or desire, equality in a way that goes far beyond a base pragmatic desire to earn women’s favour “by any means necessary”.

I think in some cases it will be due to a failure on the man’s part to flourish, to find his niche and “become”; he feels intense disappointment with himself, so he wants equality to obfuscate the fact that other men are more successful - and more given to success - than him.

In other men, the drive probably stems from childhood experiences, feeling vulnerable to the more masculine boys. (Many a conceptual artist must have been created this way: not talented enough to be a real artist, but not masculine enough to be anything else.)

Then, there is the very socially attuned man, who is hyper conscious of his social position and feels great resentment at the fact that other people are “above” him. But why would a man be obsessed with his social position? I would suspect a deeper problem: a profound lack within himself. He is hollow, or shallow, or insufficiently masculine. Because he cannot derive assurance from within, he must get it solely from his social performance, his position in the social hierarchy. He knows he will not excel there, but he can at least advocate equality, to obscure his own low status. This explains that certain type of man who is obsessed with equality yet nasty to people whenever possible.

Then there is an innocent desire in people to be fair to others, kind, and open-minded. The first two are probably innate to European people, certainly European women. Being open-minded is a more recent virtue, though I think derived from innate European traits.

Then there is the ugliest motivation to believe in equality: the simple spite of the masses towards the high. This is often claimed, on the Right, to be the main and only reason why leftists advocate equality - as a cope for their mediocrity, a salve for their burning inferiority complex.

However, I think the truth of this is limited. Undoubtedly there are some who seethe with the unadmitted knowledge that they are unremarkable, and who attempt to blot this out by claiming that their superiors are actually their equals. But by the same token, there are superior people who believe in equality out of guilt and discomfort regarding their specialness, and a sense of obligation towards their inferiors. This is what, in social terms, is called “middle-class guilt”.

Finally, there is the simple fact that people want to conform to social ideals, no matter what those are, and today the social ideal is equality. So, people “believe” in equality not because of any attributes of the idea itself, but simply because one benefits socially from claiming to believe in it.

As an extension of the above, we could talk about the different ways of believing. But that would take time. For our purposes here, it is necessary only to say that, much as an appetite grows with the feeding, a belief grows with the voicing of it. Perhaps it would be more true to say that the behaviours attendant around a belief become strengthened when one claims to hold it. In other words, people might only claim to believe in equality because of the social benefits, but eventually, if they keep claiming to believe, they will be behaviourally indistinguishable from someone who really does believe. Their entire way of presenting themselves and relating to other people, and perhaps even of conceiving of themselves in the world, will be that of someone who genuinely thinks equality is real. At that point, wishful thinking has entirely subordinated rational thought and become, as far as that person is concerned, reality.

In Part 3 I will discuss what I think is, along with the desire to socially conform, actually the most common reason why equality appeals to people.