Equality

Discussion

Francois Tremblay

"The word evokes two general extremes. One is the total dehumanizing equality that reduces man to a machine, famously parodied in the story Harrison Bergeron, where people are made scrupulously equal in capacities by burdening them with crippling handicapping devices or weights. The other is the absurd capitalist concept of “equality of opportunities,” meaning nothing more than “you can get what you can get” (which leads today’s “socialists,” who are in fact as capitalists as everyone else, to try to make opportunities available to everyone, instead of correcting the more fundamental problems).

Therefore the question is: if you seek social equality, what is it that you seek to equalize?

To Benjamin Tucker, equality means “the greatest amount of individual liberty compatible with the equality of liberty,” or more clearly, to first equalize everyone’s freedom to a straight level, and then to maximize that level. But then we must ask: what is freedom? I think a simple definition can be given along the lines of “to be free means to be able to act according to one’s own desires to a certain degree.” It is of course impossible to act as one desires in an unlimited manner: no matter how much humans would like to have a native ability to fly, this is not possible." (http://accesstoinfo.blogspot.com/2010/03/any-hierarchy-that-exists.html)

Hierarchy and Equality

Francois Tremblay:

"Why are hierarchies inherently anti-freedom and anti-equality? Because they are predicated on the principle that a small group of people must and should control the vast majority, which implies a severe limitation of freedom. Their operating mechanism is organized and formalized control for the benefit of a few (and, by extension, for the survival of the hierarchy), leading to the accumulation and acceleration of inequality. Certainly, if we look at history, we see that inequality stems, in an overwhelming majority, from the accumulation of inequality inherent to the existence of hierarchies (organized religion, government, corporations, etc), and very little from man’s bodily or mental inequalities, which are much more limited in scope.

The opposite of a hierarchy, which is predicated on a strict relation of obedience between superior and inferior, is equality of authority. None may order anyone else to act against his values, because every individual’s values are as important as everyone else’s. Following the universality principle, if one person or a group of people have the authority to issue orders regarding a specific domain, then all people have that authority, or none may have it. Any hierarchy is therefore eliminated." (http://accesstoinfo.blogspot.com/2010/03/any-hierarchy-that-exists.html)

More Information

• Extended discussion of the concept at http://accesstoinfo.blogspot.com/2010/03/any-hierarchy-that-exists.html

• an extensive discussion by Daniel Bitton, in his critique of The Dawn of Everything: "what the term “egalitarian society” implies, followed by an examination of the history of the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunter gatherer societies." [1]