The Myth Of Equality By Right Thinking Girl

02 Jun, 2005 by John Hawkins

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It seems to me that if the Liberal doctrine had never been invented, not only would the United States of America be much better off, the entire world would be better off. The tenets of liberalism are anchored in the concept – and falsehood – of equality. Liberalism, Socialism, Communism and even terrorism are all off-shoots of the inability of certain elements of our society to respect the very differences in personality, temperment and circumstance that they claim to want to rectify.

Examples abound. Poverty programs are founded on the belief that we’re all equally entitled to food, shelter, clothing. Affirmative Action assumes that all black people are equal: as long as they’re black, they’re preferred over the white people who have applied for the same job or position in college (especially, for some reason, Law School.) The so-called “living wage” assumes that all people below a certain water-mark are equal and thus all deserving of a baseline wage, even if the jobs performed by the people are vastly different in quality. Even the very idea of “anti-war” is founded in the fundamental belief that all human beings are equal, that there is moral equivalence between launching an aircraft into a building and the human beings inside the building, faxing documents, making calls, and planning lunch.

Differences in success (and the class envy so apparent in liberals) are directly answered by differences in ability, effort, and talent. These qualities are not distributed on an equal basis – nor should they be – and the mixture of traits and qualities that one is granted through the beneficence of God or nature is immutable. There is no higher power to appeal to (for instance, who can I complain to that I don’t look more like Cameron Diaz?) The best one can do is to maximize his own powers, talents, abilities instead of looking at his neighbors and asking for “equality.”

Parity is a concept that only exists in mathematics. It is unworkable in any human endevor, not because of bigotry or meanness, but because our human natures are different. I could no more be an astronaut than I could be a bird. Instead, I am a writer, better suited to imagining the plights of astronaut’s wives, who go outside on summer evenings, heavily pregnant, and look up at the moon and stars and vast black sky, imagining that they can spot the little silver craft their husbands have piloted through the atmosphere, leaving their lives, families, and wives anchored to the earth. Being a writer is not something that anyone has granted me. It’s not even something I would have chosen for myself. It’s just the way I am, and I’ve used it to my advantage. Being a writer, and making money writing, is not taking anything away from another person. I do not want anyone to be my equal. I want to be much, much better. The only people who would want to be equal are the people who are not able, on their own, to achieve my level of success (this begs the next question: why should equality be determined by those who can not compete? In other words, why should the lowest common denominator of our society – the lazy, the weak, the uneducable become the watermarks for all human endevours?). Further speaking to the discrepencies in human experience is the fact that nobody can write the stories I write. They might be ‘better’ or ‘worse’, depending on who is holding the opinion, but they are not, and never will be, “equal.”

Nobody is entitled to success. Success is a result of hard work. Because of temperments and personality, there is no way to guarantee that we will all work equally hard. The best bet for ourselves, and our country, is to return to a time when we were a self-reliant people. Being babyfed Socialist concepts like “equality” has only served to dull the very instincts for our survival that will ensure we attain a level of success that we all proclaim to want.

This content was used with the permission of Right Thinking Girl.