The Problem of Equality. Part One.

The Problem of Equality.

By far one of the most puzzling quandaries of our time is this problem of Equality. The meme of egalitarianism threatens all social institutions that were built to strive towards a higher plane, bringing man as close to God as possible. And whilst some of these institutions were evil, and demanding their destruction was good, to tear them asunder in a way that justifies their destruction, putting in their place a GREATER good, requires a moral discretion that has largely been lost. The same tool that could be used to supplant a tyrant could be used to kill not only a crusader, but all that that crusader has fought for.

Allow us first to examine the fruits of Equality that have not gone rotten.

Born into the world, I am not at fault for the sin of birth. Christian society has tried me for birth as though I were GUILTY of my own conception, yet thankfully existential thought and post-modernity in general have dealt a blow to this attitude. There still are many Christians ensnared in the patriarchal trends of the past, who raise their sons to be possessive by denying them access to the fruits of others’ labours. The effect of this is a redundant pattern: the sons continue to hoard the fruits of their OWN labours, resentful of their fathers but claiming to love them, really hoarding these fruits in SPITE of their fathers, so that should the father go bankrupt one might choose to be either a benevolent or malevolent tyrant towards that patriarchal figure. Either would be a form of vengeance. But supposing that the father never did go bankrupt, for his hoarding of his own wealth rendered him financially secure. (with the aid of course of a state that chose to nurture his patriarchal estate, for its own purposes, since it has use for the producer of hard-working, ungenerous children.) Now the son’s resentment can only find release in the next son. And thus the cycle continues, until broken by a son either so generous that he feeds beggars that would otherwise have become employees (thus robbing the rich of their most precious resource, LABOUR, by the very act of giving to the poor) or so gloriously self-entitled that his refusal to work for his own food leads others astray as well.

Having been both I can say confidently that the latter is the stronger of the two, yet both are stronger than the former, the traditional patriarch.

So Equality is a form of Freedom in such cases as self-entitlement. Yet self-entitlement is only valid insofar as it is towards one’s own needs. All societies that practice yoga preach the renunciation of the fruits of one’s own actions. Once the work is done, the work is the reward. The remaining labour is then to share the fruits of work with all one’s kin. Only thus can one be freed of work, for all work becomes not one’s own struggle against others in a COMPETITIVE WAY (a hallmark of the THIRD CHAKRA) but instead a struggle FOR them in a COOPERATIVE WAY (a hallmark of the FOURTH CHAKRA.) Thus the karma pent up in the last of the three “animal chakras” is released, and one is free to experience the Divine Love and to develop it along noble lines.

This Spiritual Elitism has an equivalent in Western Thought, and that is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. As in Hinduism, Maslow’s elitism is based in egalitarianism. All human beings have the same BASIC needs; all that differs is what they do WITH the energy they receive when those basics are met. So Maslow becomes the perfect Marxist. He would have us give from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs, and this would be not only ethically imperative but clinically so. Since we all have equal needs, each of us gets an equal cut of the cake. Since we all have different abilities, it is ridiculous to expect that each of us would put an equal part INTO the cake. Yet each contribution, even the most menial, is a contribution, and can only be incentivized by the promise of EQUALITY. There can only be one way to bypass this sort of lure: to promise something greater than Equality, and this would be SUPERIORITY. Yet obviously this cannot be promised with honesty to all. So evil has found a way to SEDUCE people into competition and in effect slavery by promising the INDIVIDUAL, an isolated unit, the right to rule the masses. And this Elitism underlies the Egalitarianism of the American capitalist.

Now we see all ready where Equality has become a devious problem. One view of Equality which is psychologically healthy is based upon the acknowledgement of our independence as individuals as well as our interdependence as people. It is based upon the awareness that we are BASICALLY all the same, though at our FINEST and most REFINED we are totally different. And it is aimed at accommodating all of us according to both that BASIC universality and to nurture thereby that crucial and TRANSCENDENT peculiarity and diversity. We are all plants in one pot of soil, if we are to agree with Maslow’s model, and frankly this writer has not seen any evidence against him, only dogmatic complaints without warrant.

But there is an other and more prevalent view of Equality in the United States, and this is a corrupted form that a corrupt oligarchy has circulated by way of cultural warfare. And this is the notion NOT of equal pay to all, regardless of unequal work, but an attitude of SELF-ENTITLEMENT according to which “equal work creates equal pay”. Of course this is but Fascism in a thin veil. For who is to be appointed to judge work to be EQUAL? The only measurement for such an Equality [even M.S. Word rebels against me, underlining my words “an Equality” in green to tentatively suggest a grammatical error, as we speak.] would be by TIME. And hence we get the corporate slave state, with its insistence of claiming ownership of a good third of your life, and half of your waking life. (Presuming that you choose to sleep according to a clinically healthy standard. This is all so presuming that one works seven out of seven days, eight hours each, which while it may be more than the conventional formality of forty hours a week it is not uncommon for people short on money, and where this is not the case weekends are still spent predominantly in sleep or laziness, owing to exhaustion, so they may be dismissed from the denominator of the fraction.)

It would be IDEAL that one could show up to work at a retail store, get all the necessary work done at one’s own pace, neither having to strain to catch up with the rest nor to suffer the even less bearable burden of BOREDOM in waiting for others to catch up. It would be HUMANE to have such an arrangement, for the worker could then spend one’s post as an old soldier would, reading and writing or playing cards until the next customer. And according to this model all of the NECESSARY WORK would get done, even if some do more of it. They can be a shining model for the slower and lazier workers, who admire them and reward them with gratitude and praise.

Yet our society does not like idealists any more. Nowadays, if you apply for a job, you are selling a third of your soul, and half of your waking soul, for minimum wage. This means that the moment that you sign up you know that eight hours of each day will belong to the company you serve. You will have no downtime except for the fifteen minute breaks and half hour lunch breaks that the Unions have won for you. And that is all ways determined by your managers. They cannot choose to DENY you these breaks. In FACT, YOU cannot choose to deny you these breaks! For fifteen minutes you are not allowed to help ANY customers or to solve ANY problems, for theoretically if you did then you could turn towards vengeance and sue the company. And of course who could be a more pitiable victim than an enormous corporation that grosses millions of dollars, not only from sales but from deals and investments? And when you DO get your break, it is at a time that YOU YOURSELF DO NOT GET TO CHOOSE. So you are free to be a human being only OUTSIDE of the confines of the store. You own no part of the store unless you are a stockholder, and in that case you own no physical STORE but rather a minute fraction of a large [again M.S. Word gets on my case.] revenue that could disappear in one fell* economic swoop. And besides that, you are free only at a time that your BOSSES assign. Is some one outside injured? TOO BAD. YOU have to accommodate a line of bitter consumers buying ribbons or some thing. These may be the sort of people who are so complacent and jaded that THEY would not help the injured person, even though they are not EVEN ON THE CLOCK. But you owe the customer your allegiance, for You ARE on the clock, and you risk termination otherwise. I cannot even elaborate on the idiom “on the clock”, for those people who do not know its meaning, without all so seeming to rationalize what is to an innocent mind a totally barbaric and dystopian turn of events.

*M.S. Word does not even recognise “fell”! (nor does it recognize “recognise”.) It would sooner have me write “feel economic swoop”!

The store is a slave state. Whether you divide your forty hours into one occupation or multiple makes no ultimate difference. You still lose a third of your humanity, time that could have been spent adapting to life AS IT HAPPENS. Your company does not care about the woes of the common man. It barely even cares about its CUSTOMERS. One young woman I knew worked at an “amusement park”, and one of her clients was injured on a ride. She was forbidden to even try to HELP this client, having to wait passively until a more formal source of aid arrived.

I do not know how many of my readers are or have been in the military. But have you ever HEARD of such $#!+?

An other time I can speak for from even more primary anecdotal experience: A woman had left her purse somewhere, and she wanted to check the store to see if it was there. This was a middle aged woman, so for those of you who do not know from experience, the purse meant a lot. It probably carried her economic means, as well as her legal means and several physical means. Well: it was after closing time, by about a few minutes, and the doors had been locked at precisely nine o’clock. We were BARRED from our enemies, who were apparently the very customers that we had had to handle (with such painstaking and subservient care) earlier in the day. And as night was fallen I heard a frantic knock upon the glass door. I heard this desperate woman asking for admittance, insisting that her purse was lost, imploring with some sense of entitlement towards decency that she be let in, if only for a moment and under supervision.

Well: I fetched my manager to unbolt the door. And there I stood, watching my Napoleonic psychopath of a boss tell this other woman to come back tomorrow when we opened. You should have seen the look on the customer’s face. I don’t suppose that she was a customer again after that. I hear many ill reports to this day about that place. Yet the store still runs, for the corporation, like any other hegemonic entity, can spare the occasional disgruntled deviant.

Between the endless stream of busy work and this general ineptness at not merely customer service but all so human consideration, one would have to conclude, if one has worked for one, and one has worked conscientiously and consciously, that a corporation is the most inefficient machine on the planet. It is never self-content; it all ways has more needs to be met. It is perpetually understaffed yet constantly hiring. In service to it one learns isolation and unlearns solidarity. One learns compulsion and unlearns patience. One learns discretion, but only arbitrary discretion that is at the expense of one’s noble Zen detachment, a nobility that all of us are given by birth. The corporation does not even WANT to hire more people, but it must for them to survive, for its presence is so overbearing that few alternate forms of survival remain alternative to the lifestyle of part-time producer and part-time consumer, earning money at the expense of one’s humanity to spend in a feeble attempt to buy it back, only to find survival and diversion.

So why do corporations persist?

We have seen them fail time and time again. Where they fail, people die young. A brief fluke in the National Gambling System, the Stock Market, left many jobless Americans to die without a unifying entity to turn their labour into meals and shelter. Based upon the indulgences of a wealthy class, which many middle-class people aspired towards with naiive abandon in the all-too-Roaring Twenties, the one thread holding our interdependent ecosystem, the economy, together was broken. That thread was money, the root of all evil. (I am told that it is the LOVE of money that is the root of all evil. But would hatred of it not remedy this love? Is it so wrong to blame it?)

Corporations are not driven by concern for their people. They exploit people for labour. The slavery of the nineteenth century was peculiar to one ethnic class. History has since then yielded to the progeny of that class, inventing a name for that period: Slavery, and a psychoanalytic label for its instigators and proponents: “racism”. By so doing they accomplished this much: first, slavery is a thing of the past, or if it exists now it only does as it did then, with one CLASS of people being oppressed by an other. Secondly: “racism”, a word more nebulous and equivocal than “bipolar” or “schizophrenic”, was the cause then. If it does not exist now, then neither does the effect. If the effect does exist, then the cause MUST be the same. And so in no case do we admit that the MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN POPULATION ARE ENSLAVED.

The slavery of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not one of a minority class but of a collective class. Its evil is in its subtlety. We are raised as children to believe that slavery is dead. Then we learn that racism still lives, yet this only would inspire us towards competition. Liberals compete with conservatives for the ethical ground, politicians compete with each other and with legislators and lawyers, who all so compete amidst themselves, all for the minority vote. Each group is a minority. The minorities of the American poor all compete between one an other. According to rather arbitrary ethnic distinctions, “white” people compete with “black” people, and so on and so forth.

All the while our only comfort is in this: that we are pursuing equality. And we only feel this when we are at work, selling our souls for whatever wage. We maintain the naiivete of children even in the cynicism of adulthood. We do not want to beat the system, but to refine it to our liking. And this is in fact no different than the complacency that created the Great Depression, for it is a desire to assert our own vision for what should be the paradigm, rather than living without a paradigm at all. The motive, be it equality or money, is all ways the same. TRUE equality would exist outside the system its self. The slavery of the past, up through the first half of the twentieth century, was one of realism. We could not unify as people against the corporations because too many of us wanted to feel Superior, rather than Equal. The slavery of the present hits the mark even less, for even more people are robbed of a conscience, by constant submission to the tyranny of corporations. We are further from “equality” now than we were when only a MINORITY of us were enslaved, for to be enslaved is just as much a sin as to be a slaveholder. To be enslaved is to refuse to rebel, and it is all ways a choice. If all of us are enslaved, rather than only some, then all of us are guilty, rather than a minority. Speak not of the guilt of the masters of old, as well as those who were part of the master class but had no part in emancipation. The victim may very well be the villain if he does not take responsibility for his own rebellion. Only by acknowledging this is a rebellion possible now, for only so can we acknowledge that the time we sold to our jobs was time when we were GUILTY FOR PERPETUATING SLAVERY.

So the slavery of the past was an attempt to choose superiority over equality. The slavery of the PRESENT is an attempt to choose equality over freedom. For we consider one an other equal only to the degree that we are, to use a Wattsism (an aphorism by the Zen master Alan Watts) “equally inferior”. True equality could ONLY exist outside of this economic system, for to be truly equal is and has all ways been to tend to the NEEDS of PEOPLE. Yet so far as we are stuck in this SYSTEM we REFUSE to aid PEOPLE. We can only visit it as employees. We do not feel that we belong to it or that it belongs to us, or if we do it is only a matter of time before reality falls upon us like a brick upon a head. And not unlike that brick, it falls from the crumbling edifice of a precarious and poorly constructed institution.

So “equality” now is the great danger, where before it was the greatest of aims. If the slavery of the past was one of realism, the slavery of the present is one of idealism. Before we blatantly chose superiority over equality, and we were fooled by the fact that only a few could get in on it. Now we choose equality over freedom, and we are fooled by the fact that there can BE no equality WITHOUT freedom, nor vice versa. Our equality has been sold to us, and it has been sold to us with only the intent of slaveholders: to maximize profit, perpetuate privilege, maintain power, divide the population against one an other, and to steal hours of labour. It matters not if you work for three different companies. They all answer to the same corporate oligarchy, whose competition is all so an arrangement, as is the case with all competition. All competition is secretly cooperation, but we shall never win OUR competition with our BOSSES unless we realize that even in competing amidst ourselves we are cooperating. By refusing to see such conflict as Absolute, we can liberate ourselves from our petty squabbles and use our collectivity to challenge the Powers That Be. Yet few now glimpse this possibility, and when they do it is through psychedelic drugs. The experience is in many cases so extreme that they even begin to see how the plight of the worker against the controlling oligarchy is but an other form of arcane cooperation. And so they forget to carry out this fight to its natural fulfillment, pretending that this human hell is in fact all ready heaven, and that the next life will absolve all sins. Yet not one of us can permanently live in such a drug induced nirvana, and a more permanent state of Nirvana, if it is possible, can only be found through rigorous resistance to the temptations of the corporate game.

Soren Kierkegaard, the Dane, wrote of the problems with Equality as early on as in the nineteenth century. Whilst the desire for superiority could have been said to govern the American psyche at that time, the Danish psyche was one of radical leveling, as would continue in Europe for many generations of socialism, Marxism, and Fascism. Some of these economic systems had a considerable success, yet the attitude of EQUALITY was no less of a danger. Even back then, Kierkegaard intuited that it was a pretense, and thereby he acts as a perfect prophet of the contemporary day and age, the future. To honor his simplicity of vision, I shall elaborate no more upon the thought that equality could have been a good goal back then but a quest haunted by hypocrites. It is sufficient to say that such is the case right now. All that I shall say to accommodate equality in respect to Kierkegaard is what he himself said: that the Age of Levelling could have as its only benefit the development of a radically Individual relation towards the Greater Good. In other words: if all men are equal, all have an equal shot at unriddling the mysteries of God’s Moral Universe, and they ought to do so in isolation as well as in solidarity, and may ultimately have to choose solidarity with God over solidarity with others in finding their own way. Thus Equality serves Individuality, and the two together produce a new Morality. Beyond that aim, however, the failings of the degenerate cannot be justified by Equality, and nor can the complacency of the enslaved.

Levelling is in most cases an attack upon the morality of the individual. It is a cession of responsibility. It may be easy for either an American redneck or an American Marxist to deplore all elitism and condescension, parading a conformist’s view of what “equality” should be. Yet the Right simply argues for equal pay for equal work, according to the Bible and the business interests, and denying that there is a “wage gap”. The Left simply wants to reform the system to resolve this “wage gap”, and they too espouse equal pay for equal work (two sides but one coin). The wage gap is a statistical myth. It has absolutely no significance except in the mindset of American Pride. Both forms of equality are attitudes of gross self-entitlement. The former denies the existence of a slave class, forgetting that it is its self a slave like most others. The latter strives so hard to AVOID slavery that it becomes a master. And all that they spend time debating is a set of numbers published by some mysterious and nebulous organisation that never seems to publish the METHODS FOR ARRIVING at those numbers.

So what we are really working with here is a universal American detest towards Authority. We PRESUME that to condescend is a right so long as it is to maintain competitive equity. Beyond that, condescension is a sin worse than murder, and a perversion more disgusting than pedophilia. To “talk down” to any one can only be a sign of sexual frustration. So it is no surprise that we come to this conclusion: that the egalitarian is the responsible one, and not the elitist. (forgetting all so that that assertion is its self a form of blatant one-upmanship, vengeful of the more blunt yet less vulgar* elitist who at least has no PRETENSE towards equality with others.)

Yet why is the elitist unresponsible? An aristocrat might subject himself and others to incredible extremes of deception, and a bourgeois person might suffer delusions of grandeur. Yet both can at least work VERY HARD to maintain this lifestyle; even if they are not slaves, it would be too great a concession to their RUSE to say that they do not suffer. The myth that the rich suffer less than the poor is used to serve the delusions of the rich, who would love to BELIEVE that they do in fact suffer less, and that for some reason or an other they deserve it.

Of course, the MINUTE class of oligarchs that run every thing might be exempt from all sufferings but the judgment of God. Yet I am speaking now of the AVERAGE millionaire, just so as to draw an example for the responsibilities of the elite. Their only irresponsibility is in ignorance of the equal suffering of the poor. Whether they delude themselves that they suffer more or that they suffer less, the rich elitists are guilty often of this ignorant illusion. And in EITHER case, to claim that the rich suffer less accomplishes nothing. The rich do not care for insult, if they are proud of their suffering. They only care for flattery. If it would not be FLATTERING to a rich person that he should suffer less, he will ignore the insult; if it WOULD be flattering, he would accept the compliment in his stride. The same selectivity applies if he is accused of suffering more. If to suffer is embarrassing, he will ignore the insult. If it is Noble, he will accept the compliment. In neither case does any thing change. It is all but the Resentiment of which Nietzsche spoke, and the complacency that Marx pointed out.

*“Vulgar” traditionally means “public”.

Dm.A.A.