Amerika

Malcolm Pollack over at waka waka waka writes with a quotation from Will and Ariel Durant about the incompatibility of freedom and equality:

Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization. Hereditary inequalities breed social and artificial inequalities; every invention or discovery is made or seized by the exceptional individual, and makes the strong stronger, the weak relatively weaker, than before. Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. If we knew our fellow men thoroughly we could select thirty per cent of them whose combined ability would equal that of all the rest. Life and history do precisely that, with a sublime injustice reminiscent of Calvin’s God.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.

Instead, we might ask why we need either, since both are proxies for something else.

“Freedom” as used in the passage means the ability to not be held back by the fears of others that someone will rise above the norm and become better at something than the rest. The solution to that is not freedom, but hierarchy, so that there is a way to advance this person and give him authority. “Freedom” merely separates him from the rest in a Darwinistic sense, and so accomplishes part of the task, but there are two other tasks: giving this person the ability to exercise this ability, and limiting or removing those who are of substantially lesser ability.

When the Alt Right talks about social order, this is what they mean: no more exercise of power against one another, including rights and freedoms. Instead we need a hierarchy where each person has a place, and those who are broken are removed instead of causing the problems that we see in mass culture and liberalism. At first this sounds cruel, until one realizes that without it, we allow “the rest to oppress the best” and we end up as a disorganized mob of selfish individuals as is the norm in the modern West.

Tags: consensus, equality, freedom, social order