Quality or Equality?

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut illustrates this point really well.

You can read the whole thing using the link. I would just like to point out that to really achive equality, you must handicap the better as well as give worse advantage. So hopefully everybody meets at some boring mediocre level. But of course two things happen:

• You kill every ounce of enthusiasm, curiosity and motivation. So you would keep moving the mediocre lower and lower.
• The worse wouldn't take advantage of the advantages you offer. They are worse not because of some unfortunate event, it's because they don't make the effort. The unfortunate are rare exceptions.

This would fuck everything up, everyone ends up worse. Because you punish the better for being better and rewarded the worse for being the worse.

Of course those who campaign for equality doesn't really want equality. But that's another topic. This post is about the logical error in the idea of absolute equality. For me it's also a moral error.

I believe in evolution, not equality

we want improvement in life even if it's uneven

The funny thing is, most people want this too. On a personal level, everyone wants to be better off than their peers; everyone wants to be the rich and popular one, which necessitates having some less-rich, less-popular people around you in order to elevate you by contrast. Only the relative rank really matters, too; people seem to be happier being the big fish in the small pond. More concretely: If you earn $40k and everyone else you know earns $30k, you're the rich guy, but if you earn $50k and everyone else you know earns $60k, you're less happy.

We don't want equality on a personal level. We don't want everyone to look the same, like the Groove Armada said, because we'd get tired of looking at each other. What people want is large scale normalization or compression, to borrow from the audio world: they're fine with individual variation, as long as everyone's above and below some thresholds, which are pretty arbitrary.

However, when so-called social justice (aka Cultural Marxism) comes into play, that variance is no longer acceptable, and further, the fact that that variance has an interplay over generations is deemed even less acceptable.

In the normal state of affairs, inheritance is the most logical and reasonable thing: a dying father bequeaths all of his possessions to his wife and children. Over many generations, this results in good families (e.g. those who have good genetic traits and strong cultural values and traditions) rolling up a "ball of wealth" over long periods of time which is used to buy property, fund education, and propagate itself.

However, this entirely reasonable phenomenon punishes those with poor or absent cultural values, those without the willingness to work hard, and those with too much Time Preference (wanting stuff Now as opposed to saving for Later). These families don't roll up a ball of wealth to help their grandchildren have better lives - they spend it all now on disposable material possessions, sometimes even going deep into debt to have unnecessary things now, the polar opposite of saving.

Normal Marxism would have us "correct" those economic disparities, taking from those with more - who often have more purely through that hard work over generations, though some have wealth through corruption or crime, separate issues mind you - and give it to those with less, even though it's clear that many of them will continue on their path of time preference over saving, doubly so since they now have a guaranteed source of income.

Cultural Marxism is applied to everything else, beyond economics: the goal is to equalize all Privilege, without ever wondering what privilege is or where it came from. It is assumed to always be injust, and evil, without considering how it evolved into its current state and how it can and will evolve in the future. Rather than trying to build up these privileges in people who do not have them, Cultural Marxists act like it's a zero-sum game, that there's only so much to go around, and that the only way to make a more equal playing field is to tear down others.

We literally don't care if someone else chooses a low quality lifestyle because we see that as their freedom of choice, but we want to be better.

And if your dad did that, and his dad, and his dad, you will be raised in an environment where that is expected of you, and the tools to do so will be provided.

And if your dad chose a low quality lifestyle, because his dad did, and his dad before him, than you will probably do it too, unless you break the cycle.

I submit that we must provide the tools for people to break the cycle; we must provide some amount of free education, we must extend a hand to people who want to climb the ladder. We have to give people the chance to be better than their fathers; it's the only way to raise people up.

Cultural Marxists want to burn the ladder, and cast those on it downward, so that we can all sit at an equal level in our own filth, like the proverbial crabs in the bucket. This is evident through their social policies that effectively make it easier to stay in the ghetto than to leave, that make it easier to be a drug dealer than to be employed gainfully. This is evident through No Child Left Behind, which seeks to equalize a useless variety of generalized intelligence via juked metrics to paper over the fundamental inequalities between different people rather than actually teaching people how to do something productive that fits into their skillset the way we did hundreds of years ago.

If you are ever in a position to describe your philosophy and don't want to mention Red Pill

You should never mention Red Pill unless you are 90% certain that the person you're talking to already knows what you're talking about or would jump at the chance of finding a place to read more.

You must play the politically correct game. You want to stay employed, right?