The Compulsive Explainer

Equality was just an ideal that sounded nice. Real life is different.

Everyone will say this, if they trust you enough to be honest. They don’t want to understand the idealism of our early republic—and they don’t want to admit this. They just let the drift to inequality continue—or they give it their active support.

An outside observer, like me, has to infer their motivations. I think there are three things happening here.

First of all, inequality has been a dominate feature of civilization—which is not the natural state of man, but has been in effect long enough to make permanent changes in the way we feel. I have no idea where these permanent changes reside, but the location is probably not in our genes, which take much longer to change. They are probably in our memes, our social memory. We are used to speaking of kings and queens, and authority figures in general, and this bias is built into our language, our attitudes, and our religions.

Second, was the Enlightenment. Man was beginning to understand himself, and eager to throw off the cloak of tyranny. We have forgotten about this entirely, but it did result in the American Revolution—which, it was hoped, would be the salvation of the world.

Third, was what really happened. This was a gradual process that took centuries—but the end result is what concerns us here. This is where we are—and it is hardly equality. It is a society where what you have, and what you are, depends on your position in the world. And some people are more equal than others, as Orwell said.

It is easy to be morally indignant about this situation—and then let it continue. I think we have to work harder, and see what is really going on. I think we have to live with the uncomfortable contradiction between equality as an ideal and our innate drive for power, as individuals and as groups.

The Enlightenment did not take this into account. This was long before the social sciences. They have learned much about us—and not all of it is flattering. Unfortunately, our primary mode of learning, our so-called educational system, especially at the primary level, had not educated us about what was going on in the American Experiment. Why was this?

Because the local boards of education didn’t want it. Because they were part of the trend away from equality—and they wanted students who fit themselves into the privileged niches that were forming. I ought to know, I became an engineer, where I made good money, even though I was not doing much that was useful.

Today I see the same thing going on now: people are looking for advantageous positions, to take advantage of current trends—which are changing all the time. Examples are the stock market or the real estate market—or climbing the corporate ladder. Or neoliberalism.

I am not against people helping themselves. But I am against the destruction of an equitable social system.

This is what is happening. Equality has been forgotten.