If you’re short of time, and agree about the evils of Equality, skip right to the end.
A proud Norwegian translates the words of her king: “Norwegians are girls who love girls, boys who love boys, and girls and boys who love each other. Norwegians believe in God, Allah, Everything and Nothing.”
It would seem, then, that beside the mandatory joys of sodomy, Norwegians believe in nothing and everything, which is to say, they possess a complete anarchy of the mind. It follows that Norwegians could not even agree on what a Norwegian is, except that the definition is somewhere between everything and nothing.
Yet it turns out there are one or two things do Norwegians agree on. The translator tells us: “We’re proud of our welfare state, winter sports, democracy, and equality.”
The only exceptional item in this list is winter sports, which living where they do Norwegians have little choice but to adopt as their own. The rest is Equality, which is to say egalitarianism, in one of its various forms. It is Equality which gives rise to the welfare state and democracy. It is Equality that rotted the King’s mind.
The King, the very father of his nation and his people, has lost the thread. He has been disarmed. He is bereft of any and all intellectual weaponry. Equality has robbed him, as it robs all of us, of any way to delight in or eschew any difference. Except for cherishing sodomy, itself a consequence of Equality, and Equality itself, there is nothing left to celebrate. But since Equality leads to Equity, which at its ideal is perfect sameness, humanity as a great grey goo, cheering for Equality is to welcome death.
As we saw last time, those who ache for Equity see this, too, and seek death—yours, not theirs—to usher in this Utopia.
It is for these reasons that Stove believes egalitarianism ought to be suppressed. Let’s finish his first essay in On Enlightenment.
Remember the first essay (blog/Substack): INequality, the proliferation of UNequals, is a strict necessity for culture to flourish. It follows that the greater Equality there it, i.e. the closer we are to Equity, the less culture and learning there can be. Everything becomes vulgar. Look out your window.
That equality is destructive of learning, and of culture generally, is one of the oldest objections to egalitarianism. It suggested itself from the start, because the early egalitarian movements consisted almost entirely of very ignorant people…
Babeuf and other members of his conspiracy, therefore, would have been perfectly familiar with the criticism that equality is destructive of culture. They had an answer to it, which they had learnt from their idol, J.J. Rousseau, and which satisfied them entirely. This was that if equality is destructive of culture, then so much the worse for culture…
The critics of Rousseau, in response to this, used to ask whether, even if the Republic had no need of chemists, poets, or historians, it did not have a need of competent architects, engineers, and farm- ers? But Rousseau had an answer to this too, and had taught it to his disciples. It was the same sort of answer as before. That is, if it is true that equality can be had only at the expense of good buildings, good bridges and roads, and good farming—why then, that is just too bad for all those things as well.
The critics then asked, very properly, what was “noble” about a solitary, naked, houseless savage, living in the forest on roots and grubs? But by this stage they had also realized that they were deal-ing with a mania, and they gave it up as a bad job. Even if they had stayed for an answer, Rousseau had none to give.”
They had no answer for the following argument.
No privilege is morally defensible: everyone ought to be equal. This is a premise with Babeuf. But no two men can be equal, he points out, if one of them has more property than the other. Hence everyone should always have equal property. The only way, however, to make property always equal, is to have all property held in common. So, if there is to be equality, there must be no private property.
Babeuf argued “‘either deny equality, and admit that you are defenders of privilege, or admit that you ought to be communists.'”
He won the argument, but, as Stove says, “Winning arguments is never a way to win friends.” The problem for Babeuf is that those who benefited from the Revolution and Terror were now doing very nicely out of it, thank you very much, and didn’t want to give up their UNequal status to become one with the masses. And so “There was therefore never any chance of his escaping the death penalty.”
So much for Babeuf.
He argument on, though. We are now, steadily and increasingly, living out the logical implications of his argument. As we have already seen, with each removal of privilege the more painful the remaining ones seem, and the greater the pressure for their removal. Usually by granting new “rights”. The end of all this, if not arrested, is always the same: blood. Yours, not theirs.
Which brings us back to our question. Stove wanted to know whether Babeuf deserved his sentence, or whether in modern times governments should proscribe egalitarianism/Equality.
That the answer to this question is “yes” seems evident enough. Consider, for example, the situation of the Roman government around 73 B.C., when it was engaged in its life-and-death struggle against the slave-army of Spartacus. Should the government then have proscribed the opinion that everyone ought to be equal? In fact this question did not arise, because, as I said earlier, that opinion had never occurred to anyone. But suppose it had: suppose that this opinion had just lately begun to be voiced, by a philosopher and his students here, a religious crank there, a foreign resident in a third place. Would the government then have been justified in proscribing the opinion that everyone ought to be equal?
Of course. Indeed it would have been, in the circumstances, the height of folly to let that opinion go unchecked, since to do so could only have increased the likelihood that everyone in Italy, not already a slave, would be enslaved or killed. It would have been equally the height of folly for Spartacus to let the equality- opinion go unchecked in his army. Soldiers who believe that they have as much right to issue orders as any of their officers are a great deal worse than useless in a war.
Finally, Stove’s conclusion:
Is the equality-opinion, then, one of those which ought to be pro- scribed at all times? I think it is, and my reasons are these: that the opinion, that everyone ought to be equal, leads, by logic which is clear to even the meanest intelligence, to the opinion that private property ought to be abolished; and that that opinion is, above all others, destructive both of life and of culture. Compared with the opinion that everyone ought to be equal, the opinion that arson is innocent, or that government officials ought to be shot, are minor moral eccentricities.
I realize, of course, the enormous difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of enforcing a proscription of the equality opinion, now or in the foreseeable future. In addition, as I said earlier, the equality opinion is actually more widespread and intense now than it was at any earlier period. Let us suppose, then, that its proscription, however desirable, is impossible.
In that case, very far from communism being dead, as some fool- ish people at present believe, we can confidently look forward to bigger and better Marxes, Lenins, Stalins, Maos, Kim Il Sungs, Pol Pots, Ceausescus, Baader-Meinhofs, Shining Paths, and all the rest, with ever-increasing destruction both of life and of culture, down “to the last syllable of recorded time.”
Equality is upon us like the stink on a Burning Man attendee. It has infected every aspect of society. It has corrupted everything it has touched. It has even humbled kings.
But it has not yet worked itself out to its wretched end. There are still many inequalities left. Fewer with each passing year, but still some.
How do we preserve blessed productive sane inequality? We’ve been lucky, at times, that new toys are invented that help stave off the slide into Equity, like the tools on which you’re reading this. Alas, after we grow used to them, their effects diminish, and those who would have Equity reinsinuate themselves.
Like Stove, I also have no clear idea how to proscribe Equality. My idea is that some great chastisement is needed to shock people back to their senses.
What say you?
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