The Myth of Equality
This is the fifth instalment of The God of Scientism. Perhaps the best known description of the early American society is 1835 book, Democracy in America, by French aristocrat Alexis De Tocqueville who, like me was at the time a fresh arrival in the New World. Even heavily censored Wikipedia conveys Tocqueville’s views with the uncharacteristical clarity as it quotes from his book: ”But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom”. Tocqueville had a low opinion of centralized government, which in his view, “excels in preventing, not doing.”
Tocqueville warned 200 years ago that modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny, because radical equality could lead to the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and to the selfishness of individualism. “In such conditions we lose interest in the future of our descendants…and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one”. Tocqueville worried that if despotism were to take root in a modern democracy, it would be a much more dangerous version than the oppression under the Roman emperors or tyrants of the past who could only exert a pernicious influence on a small group of people at a time.
In contrast, despotism under a democracy could see “a multitude of men”, uniformly alike, equal, “constantly circling for petty pleasures”, unaware of fellow citizens, and subject to the will of a powerful state which could exert an “immense protective power”. Tocqueville compared a potentially despotic democratic government to a protective parent who wants to keep its citizens as “perpetual children”, and which doesn’t break men’s wills but rather guides it, and presides over people in the same way as a shepherd looking after a “flock of timid animals”. 100 years later, Aldous Huxley formulated the same exact fears in his Brave New World, soon confirmed by Hannah Arendt’s actual life experience in concentration camps of Nazi Germany and France. If Alexis De Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America today, he would have hard time finding a publisher. As I watch the US media coverage of the world’s political events today, I am struck just how accurate his warnings turned out. Today, US media snuffs out any attempt to promote or praise “inequality”.
Habermas and Kierkegaard provided some insight as they joined Tocqueville and his fear of the “tyranny of public opinion”. Habermas wrote: “as the Public expanded… by proliferation of the Press…the reign of public opinion appeared as the reign of the many and mediocre”. Kierkegaard warns that “there is no way to salvage the public sphere since, unlike concrete and committed groups, it was from the start the source of leveling”. For Kierkegaard, public sphere was destined from the beginning to become a detached world in which everyone had an opinion about and commented on all public matters without any first-hand experience and without having or wanting any responsibility. Equality also means that individuals are not accountable for their action. While left leaning politicians always advocated lenience for criminals from poor neighborhoods on the ground that they could not escape constraints of their environment, recently this argument was used with a strange twist. In 2013, Ethan Couch, 16 at the time, stole some beer from Walmart, got intoxicated and killed 4 people while driving drunk in his dad’s car on Texas road. Surprisingly, judge decided against a prison term, instead giving him 10 years probation and mandating that he gets psychological treatment. Justification for this was that young man suffered “affluenza” — meaning he was a rich kid whose parents didn’t set limits for him, so it was their fault what happened.
Kierkegaard is right to blame the press, which is always fighting to eliminate any remnants of inequality in the US society, most recently pushing for “equal rights” for “LGBT community”, and before that for “Latino community”. What is interesting that press itself created both of these “communities”, as neither one did even exist prior to late 80’s. Before 80’s there was of course feminism. Feminist Betty Friedman published the Feminine Mystique in 1963, addressing the many frustrations women had with their lives and with separate spheres, “which established a pattern of inequality”. Even an outspoken critic of press like Noam Chomsky, accuses James Madison of protecting “the minority of the opulent against the majority”. Media pressure today is enormous, forcing politicians on the left and on the right to proclaim that inequality is the source of all social evils. It may seem strange to hear from billionaires to call for elimination of their wealth and indeed setting up “charities” and “foundations” to give their wealth to “good causes”. As it turns out, charities for “good causes” are excellent tax havens. These men are in position to preach equality, while they themselves are exempt from it. Not only that, they in fact, thrive in conditions resembling a totalitarian system.
As I mentioned elsewhere, in her 1951 book, Origins of Totalitarianism, Heidegger’s student Hannah Arendt places the origins of totalitarianism firmly in Cartesian dualism of western science. Arendt concludes her book: “the condition under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms. But their danger is not that they might establish a permanent world. Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears germs of its own destruction. There remains the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man, politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth, it is indeed every man”.
Alas, sixty five years after the book was published, “sand storms” are still raging. It may seem paradoxical that the unceasing push for “equality” would in the end create a new class of financial elites with a deep disdain for “ignorant masses”, but that is exactly what happened. In response to the British exit from EU in 2016, influential New York Times columnist James Treub wrote an article for Washington Post owned Foreign Policy magazine, which bills itself as “trusted advisor for Global Leaders”. The article is titled: It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses, with a subtitle: It’s not about the left vs. the right; it is about the sane vs. mindlessly angry”. Apparently Mr Treub, an heir to Bloomingdale empire and a member of Council on Foreign Relations, has the ability to separate mankind into these two distinct classes. His article goes on to say: “people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them”. Treub claims that only the elites believe in “reason” and expertise and that “the party of accepting reality must be prepared to take on the party of denying reality and its enablers among those who know better”. He concludes with a statement: “If that is the coming realignment, we should embrace it”.
Capacity of Hollywood to produce conditions favorable to totalitarianism by applying an “iron band pressing masses of isolated men together”, was greatly enhanced by the advent of $200 million blockbuster movie, produced with the help of not only magnetic personalities and talented directors, but also with the help of modern computer generated cinematography, capable of making any type of context and belief appear completely realistic. Hollywood blockbusters create a world-wide population of very isolated men indeed. I believe however, that the centrifugal forces of life will eventually explode attempts of central regulators to keep society in static equilibrium. Modern man has an option to escape his isolation not only through his local social ties but also through internet social networks, person-to-person web services like bitcoin, What’sApp, WeChat, AirBnB and Uber and even through multi-user video games. There is a good reason to believe that Arendt’s message of hope in “new beginning” is real.
As Nobel prize physics Ilya Prigogine and economist Ludwig Von Mises before him observed, open systems such a human societies can not exist in equilibrium, they are dissipative systems, always exchanging energy with their environment, thriving on chaos and existing in a far from equilibrium state. Life is a gradient, and organisms and markets exploit all kinds of gradients. They are always descending through these gradients in search of a stable state, but they never actually reach it. It they did, evolution would stop or, as priest Vito Cornelius in the movie Fifth Element stated with the same clarity: “Life would turn to death”.
