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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In a related vein, “researches” have discovered that intelligence limits peoples’ proficiency with computers. Their solution? Dumb everything down equally.
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-09-person-intelligence-limits-proficiency-previously.html
All (as if I arranged it),
All remaining hereditary peers will be removed from the House of Lords next summer, ministers announced as they said the “accident of birth” should not give people the right to make laws
Should hereditary peers be removed from the House of Lords?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/09/05/hereditary-peers-removed-house-of-lords-next-summer/
Bah — /blockquote
Inequality based on merit, intelligence, talent, etc. is good. Inequality based on birth (House of Lords) is absurd. Much of what you get consists of dopes like Harry, Andrew, Charles, et al. Not that our elected and appointed officials are any better.
In more cynical moments, I sort of maintain that a nuke lobbed at Tel Aviv that misses By just enough to land in Gaza would do the world a world of good. In a less cynical moment, I read your stuff today and was reminded of a better idea from some years ago – so I rewrote that and put it on sub stack at Paul530.substack.com. A very conservative approach to equality.
Equality is not the ultimate goal, righteousness is. That is – right relationship with God and with man.
…
For when Your judgments are in the earth,
The inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.
Isaiah 26:9(b)
When I was studying for a B.Ed. in 1968-69 Dalhousie, a lecturer said: There is nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequals.
> shock people back to their senses
This is a phantasy. While it might work in some special circumstances, like when people get overcome with panic and you slap them back to their senses, these special circumstances generally involve timescales of minutes. But here we’re talking about timescales of decades at the lower end and centuries at the upper end. You can’t slap people out of that. By the time the first half of the first decade passes, the natural plasticity of the human brain allows the brain to conform to the new reality and therefore the brain can’t be slapped back to the previous state. “Chastisements”, as in “divine chastisement” only works if the people being chastised KNOW what they’re supposed to be doing but deliberately choose not to. Can anyone look at the modern blue-haired trannies and seriously tell me the trannies KNOW they’re not supposed to transitioning themselves? Oh sure, they have intellectual knowledge that some old religions forbade such things – to an extent – but so do we have intellectual knowledge wartime rape of conquered women is a decent method for spreading your seed. If we were to receive a general “chastisement”, would we ever make the connection the chastisement is punishment for us not going to war and raping women? And in the same way, if trannies get some general “chastisement”, how will they ever make the connection between the “chastisement” and their tranniedom? And if they don’t make the connection, how will they change themselves.
No, the solution is much more involved. Right now I don’t know what it is but I’m getting ever more struck by the similarity between humanity’s progression in the last ~150 years and Calhoun’s experiments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o In short, Calhoun discovered there are at least two lineages required to keep a population alive: the biological lineage, meaning the base transmission of life, and also the psychological lineage, meaning the transmission of … behavior and innane traits that allow the organisms to live themselves out. Look at the degeneracies present in the late stages of his experiments: pansexuals (in humans, bisexuals and trannies), somnabulists (in humans, welfare drones)… Calhoun managed to kill off the transmission of the psychological lineage by manipulating the environment. Perhaps there’s something about the Industrial revolution… or urban environments… that prevents the transmission of the psychological lineage in humans? And if we could discover what it is, we could fix that and restore… well, not sanity althought it would be restored as well, but we could restore the continuation of the species. Because that’s what we’re facing right now. Humanity is facing extinction, because of sub-replacement fertility (the only exception is Africa, but what if Africa goes under too after it industrializes – China is working hard to industrialize Africa).
We will only reach Equality when all men are bald!
The women too.
A Divine illumination of conscience beforehand. Followed by an outpouring of Grace for the survivors.
But, of course, many will still reject both of these. Because it is painful to face one’s own sins, and many are too proud, even when faced with self-destruction – after all, it is not about what the actual consequences are – it is about the power of one’s own will being exercised. And doing what thou wilt is all it is about. They’d rape themselves if they could, just to spite God and you while proclaiming,”Yay! Freedom!”
I came here to question this quote:
But noticed the comment on the House of Lords. Since I am British, I feel that I ought to respond to that first. Do I support Starmer’s move to complete the abolition of the heredity peers which was started by Tony Blair? Absolutely not. The House of Lords is a revising chamber. Its purpose is to look through the bills passed by the (elected) House of Commons, and point out the mistakes and bad consequences of those bills and suggest that the House of Commons reconsider them. In other words, its job to to identify the various blind spots that the members of the House of Commons (who these days almost all come from the same political or legal classes) failed to consider. It will do this most effectively if it is independent of the House of Commons, which also means that the people in the House of Lords should come from a wide range of backgrounds, but few of them from the same strata of people who form the House of Commons. They won’t find the flaws in the legislation if they are equally unaware of those flaws. Of course, the House of Lords so constited will also have blind spots which the House of Commons lacks, but if you make them different blind spots then you have a greater chance of catching a mistake in one of the two houses. Selecting people on the basis of their birth is one way of making the House of Lords independent of the House of Commons in the sense described above. I’m not sure it is the best way of doing so, but it is certainly better than the usually proposed alternatives of having an elected second chamber (i.e. populate the House of Lords with another group of politicians) or (worse) political appointees (who will invariably share the same ideological flaws as the one who appoints them).
Now onto privelege against communism. The problem with communism is that group ownership of some commodity is a fiction. This is obvious when we think through the details of how it would work. What happens if person A and person B have a dispute about how that commodity is to be used? The only solution is that person C should have the power to arbitrate between them. Now share this across every commodity. In other words, you are making person C the effective owner of everything, and person A and B the owners of nothing. It doesn’t matter how person C is selected, whether democratically or via appointment, on a tempoary or permament basis (or even if the community as a whole takes a vote on each individual dispute) — and none of these methods mean that he will be competent for his task — you are giving him all the power and privelege, and denying it to those who would want to use the commodity. The ownership of private property might lead to an unequal distribution of that property — although not an unequal opportunity to earn the ability to own property — but it is less unequal than comminism. At least here everyone gets something of their own.