The Scam Known As Equality

 

               image credit: https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/Inequality/introduction-to-inequality 

“All men are created equal”, seems like a noble sentiment made to ensure no one is hurt because of who they are. It is like one of those statements which sound very rosy on paper but don’t mean much in practice. Why? Because the very concept of equality is an illusion. No one is really the same, we try to create a sense of equality among by people by bringing surrounding conditions to what we consider normal. This may seem like a weird concept. Let me explain, lets take an example of a student.

We have a Student A, an academically average student. Their friends, the cream of the crop 4.0 students with a bright future. Is A equal to his friends? No. Let us look at why. To A, their normal is getting an average score on every test while their friends’ normal is acing every test. Because of this difference in the definitions of normal, every time they compare themselves to their friends, they feel inferior. Now, for argument’s sake, lets say A changes friend groups to a group where everyone is average. Now their definitions of normal is the same: Average is normal. Let us attempt to answer the same question, is A equal to their friends now? We can say yes because when A compares their grades to their new group of friends, they feel like they are on the same level as them which makes them “equal”.

Where does this discussion lead us? Back to the original assertion: not everyone is equal. If this statement was true, A would feel equal no matter which group they compared themselves to. Instead we find that they feel inferior in one group, superior in another and equal in a third. Depending on what the people A surrounded them with, the concept of being “equal” changed. This brings us to a revised conclusion on the concept of equality. “Equality is relative”, rich people feel equal among other rich people, poor people feel equal around poor people. What I am trying to get at is that depending on how you perceive the surroundings around you determines how equal you feel.

This conclusion can be applied in other cases as well. This time we will look at the concept of “Universal Happiness”. This idea is similar to the concept of everyone being equal. In my view, happiness is the most relative thing there is. Its dependent on so many things that it is impossible for it to be quantified, let alone be compared. Let us go back to the example of student A. Where do you think they will be happier? One could argue that they would be happier in the second group because he is around like-minded people. My question is, can they not be equally happy in the first group too? If someone is so used to getting a certain result in life, would that result not become a normal for them? Meaning that as long as this result is constant, they would stay happy. This could mean that if they kept getting average results (which is a normal result), they would stay unaffected by the results of their overachieving friends.

Following this train of thought brings me to why the concept of universal happiness is false. We determine the happiness of others based on what we feel happy about. This means, the idea of happiness is derived from the happiness of others. If we see someone win a lottery, we say they are happy and if we see someone slip on ice and fall, we say they are not happy. Why is that? It is because we have a preconceived notion that winning the lottery is a thing to be happy about and falling on ice is a thing to be sad about. For argument’s sake, lets assume Person B is from a universe where the opposite is true, they would think that the person who fell on ice is happy while the person who won the lottery is sad.

Through the discussions presented over the course of this article, we can see that the concepts of equality and universal happiness are both impossible in practice because these concepts are defined by individual perspectives. Which means (however depressing it may sound) there always has to be someone who is less equal to us or less happy than us. So unless we all collectively lower our standards of equality and happiness to the ability to breathe, “No man is equal” and there is no “Universal Happiness”

And with this I reach the end of a relatively pessimistic rant about equality. Hope you enjoyed it and stick around for the next one.