Equality and Egalitarianism
I write this on the eve of what may be the final free election in the long and troubled history of our republic.
The fact that the election is too close to call, when the differences between the candidates and the worldviews they represent is so clear, is an unanswerable condemnation of this generation.
How did we become so foolish and so wicked? The scandals of the corrupt are not only shameless and unreported by the news, but that when rumor of the lawless evils done do reach the public square, they are met with either counteraccusations of the same sort, or shrugs of indifference, or brutal rage directed, not against the wrongdoer, but against whistleblower.
Hans Christian Anderson in his famous fable of an Emperor who had no clothes sadly got the ending wrong. When the child cries out that the Emperor is naked, all that would happen in real life is that the Emperor’s loyal guards would beat the weeping child to death on the cobblestones with their rifle butts while the crowd cheers and laughs gaily.
In such times as this, the philosopher’s duty is to speak the truth humbly to all men, just and unjust, wicked and clean, foolish and wise. Philosophers do not speak for the sake of persuading Misosophists, if I may coin the term, haters of wisdom. The words will have their own force if they are true, and even if they are buried for a generation, or for ever, the truth will someday be justified, even if no mortal ear hears.
In that spirit, I take up the pen to remind a world that his lost its memory and a land that has lost its mind, the name and spirit of the land which we once loved, and for which our ancestors shed salt tears and bled red blood.
I name nameless virtue that is the center of the American soul and the source of American exceptionalism.
America is the land of equality.
No doubt the reader expected a different answer: that American is the land of opportunity; or that American is the land of liberty. Perhaps the reader expected that a warning that liberty and equality are mutually exclusive, such that the more we have of one, the less of the other, would be uttered.
Put such expectations aside. Equality properly so called and liberty are one and the same, for no man is free who has a master, but any man who is his own master is free. The reason why America provides more opportunity for lawful ambition than other lands is this equality means no master need be asked let or leave before you seek you dream. You need ask permission of none. (Or so it was in my youth, back when we were a free country.)
Whatever you think equality is, whatever you think the words means, you have heard it more often deceptively, misleadingly, or crookedly applied than you have ever heard it honestly used in its sole right meaning.
The enemies of equality, until now, have been too craven and too cunning directly to attack this pristine ideal, because openly preaching that a master race or master class or master tribe must and should rule over the slave race, the servile class, or the underling tribe, in times of moral health among a morally robust and clear-eyed generation would have been laughed to scorn before the first paragraph of such a sermon had reached its first period. To hear those preaching for a return to benighted and ancient injustices, after man has learned better, is like listening to sick-minded hysterics desperate to convince people of geocentrism, phlogiston theory, or that the earth is hollow, or flat.
If any political doctrine has been or can be more entirely, absolutely, and thoroughly discredited by history, it is the theory of inequality: which is the theory that some men, by birth, and belonging to an easily recognized bloodline, family, clan, tribe, or race, are born to rule, and all others born to serve.
Hence, the concept could not be attacked directly.
The only way to attack it indirectly is to obscure the meaning of the concept, to affix the concept to other and unrelated meanings, and to erect an abortive philosophy that makes equality sound like inequality, and inequality sound like equality.
The cunning of this indirect attack can be measured by its success: by any yardstick, the success is overwhelming. Socialism, the ultimate enemy of free and equal society, under Hitler conquered all of Europe and under Stalin suborned six of seven continents. It now rules in America as the default political philosophy, and is preached openly in academia, from the benches of activists judges, in the halls of power, supported in the popular entertainment, and preached endlessly by the news media.
Now obviously the word equality in a political discussion means, always has meant, and never has meant anything other than equality in rank.
Equality of rank mean this: No masters and no slaves. No royalty, no aristocracy, no squires, yeomen, burghers, and serfs. No Brahmin and no Kshatriya and no Untouchables. No Gnostics, No Psychics, Pneumatics, and Hylics. No Elect and no reprobate. No elites.
Equality means each men who commits a tort or crime faces punishment or exoneration precisely the same as any other who commits the same tort or crime with the same criminal elements.
Equality means that your social rank at birth does not grant you legal privileges or burdens imposed upon or denied to another man to deprive one of civil rights the other by right enjoys, such as the franchise to vote, the right to free speech and press and worship, and the right to bear arms.
Any loss of those civil rights is not due to birth, but to felony, which is the same as a consensual abdication of them.
(Civil rights properly so called should not include an alleged right to demand equal service and accommodation from a privately run shop of business. That is an abridgment of civil rights, namely, the shopowner’s right to free association. Likewise for a right to safe spaces, trigger warnings, or to the right to silence the speech of others. The right to abridge rights is an insolent contradiction in terms.)
The son of the richest man has no more votes than the son of the poorest. That is equality.
No man need doff his cap or fall to his knees before another man due solely to his birth. That is equality.
No man is born to rule, none born to serve.
That is equality.
Most readers have probably never heard this word used correctly in life. Those who denounce equality denounce a chimera, not the true meaning of the idea, which cannot, without paradox, be denounced.
The word in mathematics refers to identity. Twice two equals four because one side of the equation is nothing more nor less than the other side. The word in other contexts refers to homogeneity.
No doubt many a reader is already muttering to himself that equality of only birth-rank is not the true meaning of equality, because real equality is some other property, something that makes some men fit to rule and fit to vote which others lack.
Suppose this property is wealth. Many a reader will mutter that because the rich man’s son can buy more ads than the poor man’s, he can persuade more to his party, which is the same, practically speaking, as allowing him more votes.
Or suppose the property is race or sex or decency. Likewise for white men versus black, male versus female, decent versus pervert, or even handsome versus ugly: through no fault of his own, anyone born into an unpopular group has every man’s hand against him, and so his alleged equality is in name only. As a practical matter, the system is rigged against him: the rules are enforced unevenly, for the starting advantages of birth outweigh all other factors.
The argument concludes that therefore, practically speaking, real equality consists of imposing on some men extra burdens, such as favoritism in hiring or college admissions, based on birth.
This is egalitarianism: the belief that equality is unfair, hence ‘real equality’ must be imposed on society by taking from the fortunate the fruits of their good fortune and distributing those fruits unevenly to those most in need.
Of course, egalitarianism is simply the direct opposite of equality.
The identification of a thing and its direct opposite is, of course, a paradox which any honest man can penetrate in an instant.
It is to the credit of the propagandists in our public schools, popular entertainments, and news media that this false equivocation has been so successful that even ardent supporters of free and liberty-loving government are confused and confounded by it. I have had the distinct displeasure of debating scenery-chewing rhetoricians of great force and passion on the topic of equality, only to discover that nothing whatsoever will stir them to see the difference between two diametrically opposed and antithetical ideals.
Government based on the theory of equality is, by nature, a limited government and free, because each man, unhindered by laws limiting his opportunity by birth, rises or falls to whatever level of society his own hard work, mother wit, good fortune, and the kindness of circumstances affords to him.
Government based on the theory of egalitarianism is, by nature, unlimited, that is, absolute government, hence arbitrary and tyrannous, because it awards to Caesar the power to take away the fruits of one man’s labor and give them to another, based on Caesar’s private and arbitrary judgment or political convenience.
Whatever different forms of the theory of egalitarianism takes, all propose some property passed along at birth which grants some men the right to special privileges and superior power, but no matter what the property, the proposal is all for one purpose: to undermine, without confronting, the self-evident proposition that all men are created equal.
It is self-evident because the mere statement of it is sufficient warrant for belief. The reason why it is self-evident that all men are created equal is that to say otherwise involves a logical self-contradiction in terms.
The only way to disbelieve the self-evident is to misunderstand or misconstrue the meaning of the term. In this case, the term Inequality, in the political realm, means condemning some man in the community to an inferior status, depriving him either of vote or property or freedom to speak or freedom to worship or freedom to bear arms, on the basis of an innate defect presumed to be present because of his membership in a group into which he is born but does not select.
Hence the property that deprives him of his due right is something over which he has no control, but for which no evidence is ever asked.
If evidence were asked, a test could be set up at the voting booth to exclude whoever lacked the quality of inferiority that disqualifies him. The argument that one group or another is more afflicted by stupidity or cruelty than the elite should be excluded from voting is defeated once the request for evidence is put. If all the voters were tested for stupidity or cruelty at the polling place, the wise and kind could vote, even if there were only one man who passed the test. But that would then not be due to his bloodline, but to his passing the test. Contrariwise, if there is no such test to prove an individual cruel or stupid, then there can be no such test for a group, because a group is nothing but a collection of individuals.
Whether stupidity or cruelty, or any other allegedly disqualifying characteristic exists or not, whether it can be tested or not, either way, asking for evidence that a given individual has it obliterates the argument that the bloodline as a whole should be disqualified.
Hence the egalitarian must presume, but can never prove, guilt. It is an assertion always made without evidence.
In other words, the theory of egalitarianism is the theory that it the just and right to treat men not according to their merit, that is, to wrong them, and treat them unjustly.
In other words, it is fair to be unfair. Justice is injustice. A is not-A.
Different postmodernists no doubt are muttering differing reasons for their belief in inequality.
Some mutter that genetic science has proven that the lesser races are unequal!
The scientific studies, upon examination, have all the authority and rigor of phrenology or astrology.
Some mutter that the Jews, using their special psychic powers, have hypnotized and victimized whole nations, in some way that never actually seems to do anyone any harm, but is nonetheless best met by bloodthirsty mass-exile, or, better yet, genocide!
Or they mutter that institutional racism proves that whites are uniquely equal!
Or that scientific socialism proves that the capitalist class exploits the proles!
Or that the patriarchy exploits women!
Or whatever.
It does not matter what the argument is nor how it is founded. The point is always the same: some cherished group of men have the right to rule, the right, mind you, unearned and instilled by nature or the will of the gods, and those outside the cherished group lack the right to govern themselves, and must be ruled by the masters.
The one thing all forms of the inequality theory have in common is that the Mandate of Heaven is never bestowed by merit, always by birth. There is never any evidence of inequality, merely an assertion.
In the case of genetic junk science, the Aryans (or whoever the favored group happens to be) are born with a Master Gene. This gene is variously described as giving the favored group greater reasoning power, or self-control, or better cultivated virtues, or deeper aesthetic insight, or fairer bodies than the mongrel races with inferior genes, who are either apes or devils. But the point is that one is born with one’s genes, and they do not change over one’s lifetime.
This of course is mere folly. If it were true, the test for self-control, or wisdom, or intelligence could be erected at the polling place, and only those who passed would be allowed to vote. But the egalitarians, not even the ones who base their theory on junk science, ever propose this.
Those who would have rulership based on intelligence would have Mandarins, or some other group of experts and well-educated toffs, rule over the rest of us lowly and unwashed commoners.
The first problem with this is that intelligence is an individual property, not a group property, and is based on education and upbringing and the task to which the intelligence is applied.
The second problem is that intelligence has nothing to do with fitness to rule. Hitler was a political genius, as was Napoleon. Both deserved to be stabbed to death before assuming power, and it is a condemnation of the modern age that we could produce no Brutus virtuous enough to do the deed.
The third problem is that there are two kinds of problems in this world: technical problems, which require expertise to solve, and personal problems, which require each man to solve for himself. It is well and wise to go to a practiced plumber or mechanic to solve a problem with your water-heater or motorcar. But a man must blow his own nose and chose his own wife even if an alleged Mandarin expert, with veins pulsing from his overlarge bald head, says he can make a better choice based on the principles of hygiene or eugenics.
Giving one’s loyalty to a leader is more like choosing a wife than it is like having a motor engine fixed. Even though the outcome is public, the choice must be personal.
Having a political expert cast your vote for you for your own good is an idea so warped and comical that neither Kafka nor Orwell could do it justice. We all know from personal experience, I hope, that no one knows less about politics than political experts.
The fourth problem is that by definition half the people in a given sample are below average intelligence. The sad, bloody reality of history is that the rulers rule by the consent of the people, even tyrants. That consent is expressed by their willingness to obey rather than rebel. If the constitution of the government allows them no way to remove an unpopular leader via the ballot box, then only other way open is mutiny and the collapse of the state. The collapse of the Soviet Union was as peaceful as the demolition of the building that falls straight down without disturbing its neighbors, but this is an unique example in history, or, at least, none other spring to mind.
In any case, the proposal of limiting the franchise by the average IQ test scores of various racial groups is akin to locking up anyone with squinty, narrow eyes on the theory that narrow-eyed men are more likely to commit crimes. It is so grave and obvious an injustice that it merits no further debate. If you cannot see what is wrong with denying a man a vote because his father or cousins have low intelligence quotients, I can only suggest your own intelligence, dear reader, is insufficient for the franchise.
Other theories of egalitarianism select other alleged innate properties as the magic mandate that grants the right to trample the faces one’s brothers.
In the case of Marx, the intellectual superstructure of a given economic class is determined, not by the free will of men, for they have none, but by the material means of the factors of production, which in turn are determined by non-human and non-rational forces of history. Hence, for Marx, Adam Smith did not deduce the rules of economics, according to Marx, he merely uttered what the class interests of the means of production imprinted without his knowledge or consent into his braincase, and the words just came out automatically as a type of psychological defense mechanism, special pleading, or false justification. Here is it not genes, but the economic class assigned to one by nonhuman historical forces that decides whether you are fit to rule or fit to die.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, Marxism fathered a plethora of Cultural Marxists, which is the general name for all who promote ideologies based on identity politics: race-baiters, feminist, pervertarians. In these systems, one skin color or sex determines class interests and hence determines one’s due rank in society.
For reasons that collapse under close examination, the indulgence in sexual perversion is assumed in Cultural Marxist thought (I use the word loosely) to be genetic, hence irresistible, hence not only excused, but indeed worthy of celebration and pride. The sexual perversion involved does not matter, just so long as it is disgusting and unchaste: homosexuality was famed, then peaked, and now self-mutilated eunuchs in drag is peaking, and pederasty is waiting in the wings being prepped for its turn on stage. In each case, the persons who surrender to unnatural sexual temptation are regarded as a separate race from human beings, a race that has its own norms and sexual customs, to whom human moral codes and rules of decency ought not to apply.
The argument of Cultural Marxism is assumed rather than given, because it is absurd on its face when given outright: it is assumed that the institutions of civilization (marriage, organized religion, academia, laws and customs, private property, popular entertainment, or whatever) exist solely to conserve and expand the power of a sinister elite, whose grotesque but invisibly subtle methods of witchcraft exploit, humiliate, suppress and cheat the innocent victim-group.
The Cultural Marxists do not use the word ‘witchcraft’, of course, but no mechanism is ever given for how the victim group is convinced to obey and support the rules and customs of the sinister elite.
For example, the feminists claim there is a wage gap between themselves and men as a group: that, on average, a woman gets 80 cents on the dollar (or some other make believe figure) for the same work.
Now, this assertion is nonsense on its face. If it were true, any owner of any commercial concern whatsoever would immediately fire all his male employees and higher women equally skilled and able but pay them 90 cents on the dollar. That owner could pocket ten cents per worker per hour for every employee in his workforce versus his competitors, and at the same time offer each woman a yearly wage equal to $200 dollars more than her current.
She wins, and he wins, and if the work performed is of equal quality, why would he not do this? Even if ninety-nine out of a hundred men were motivated to place their misogyny above their personal financial gain, where is the hundredth man? And why do no woman employers pursue this strategy?
The real reason, of course, that no one fires all his male workers and replaces them with women at lower pay, is that the statistic is a pure lie. To get that result, one must factor out the difference in physically brutal and dangerous work like lumberjacks, miners, oil rig jockeys, as well as ignoring the fact that women are more likely than men work shorter hours, to take sick leave or maternity leave or to drop out of the workforce altogether to raise children. Once the real differences between male and female work behavior is factored in, the wage gap vanishes.
Obviously if there were a real wage gap, it would have to be enforced by a law, something like the Democrat Party’s Jim Crow Laws, or the many laws surrounding Democrat Party chattel slavery in the antebellum South, which were needed to protect the inequality from the leveling invisible hand of the market place. Without Jim Crow laws, some shops and lunch counters would have let black and white sit together, and let the customers seeking segregated accommodations find them elsewhere.
Since, in the case of the alleged wage gap between the sexes, there is no such law, the Cultural Marxist have to assume that there is an invisible and occult force, a secret power only the Cultural Marxists can divine at work, which the sinister elite use to compel a uniform obedience to their evil will.
But if the lie is so easy to penetrate, why is it so popular? That answer is instructive, and will betray the presence of a general principle:
Saying that an invisible conspiracy is responsible for any real or imaginary injustice in life washes away all feelings of personal guilt or responsibility. It has all the allure of an immediate gratification and all the promise of an easy and obvious answer to a difficult problem. Since the witchcraft is invisible, no evidence can be demanded for its proof, nor any counterevidence heeded. Since the witchcraft cannot be seen and deflect, the only solution is to burn the witch. Since all the blame is thrown onto the witch, burning her promises to solve the complex problem in all its aspects and ramifications. No complex strategy is needed, no engineering skills are required, no careful weighing and measuring of the risks and rewards of alternative strategies. Burn the witch, and the witchcraft vanishes.
So it is with all forms of the egalitarian doctrine. The steps of the rigmarole are as follows:
First, identify one group as the scapegoats who are causing whatever the crisis of the day might be.
Second, shut down any rational or scientific debate on the topic by ruling all opposing opinion to be out of bounds by definition. Anyone who disagrees with you is a ‘cuckservative’ or a ‘racist’ or a devil. Name-calling replaces logic.
Throwing logic overboard in the name of efficiency of the delivering the message (or whatever the reason given) frees up one’s time to launch more attacks without ever needing to think, write, or say a single word in defense. No complex thought is required, no strategy, and, on that level, no tactics. Debate is simply evaded, eluded, forestalled, and fled. It saves time and effort. Anyone honest and interested in truth and logic is merely identified as an enemy and name-called.
Third: promise that the expulsion of the scapegoat group from the franchise, from the public square, from public institutions, will result in a cure of the now-simple problem. It does not matter what the problem is nor whom the scapegoat is. High crime? Expel the thieving gypsies. High interest rates? Expel the greedy Jews. Overweight, bad teeth, body odor, feel bad about yourself? Expel the straight white Christian.
Fourth: in order to make these expulsions and genocides work, one must at the same time admit into the franchise and into the public square more and more of whatever people are actually causing the problem, such as getting more Leftists to vote in more soft-on-crime regulations in order to raise the crime rate, or such as getting more Leftists to vote in crony capitalist leaders owned by Wall Street and Oil Sheiks to drive up interests rates, or such as getting more Leftists to vote in ten thousand minor regulations and major taxes to discourage business, create poverty, erode the moral fiber, undermine the nuclear family, and create all the problems of self-indulgence and mal-educated brain-zombies who can be led to hate whatever form of Goldstein it is this decade that Big Brother wants you to hate.
This fourth step is to make the problem permanent, so that your solution, egalitarianism, is permanent. Look at the way the welfare state, allegedly the solution to the problem of poverty and crime rates among inner city blacks, actually established those problems as a permanent way of life, via eroding the nuclear family among them and therefore nurturing helpless dependency. The fact that blacks in American overwhelmingly vote Democrat is not an error or an oversight. It is the expected outcome and the reason for the policy: see LBJ’s famous remarks about having the N**gers voting Democrat for a century.
The Fifth step is merely to accuse free and equal societies of some form of unfreedom and inequality, and to claim that the only solution is to abolish these things. It is convenient here merely to call everything by the opposite of its real name.
Example: If a man says that blacks shooting white cops solely because they are white is racist, the Left calls that man racist in return, and exclaims (in what is perhaps the least convincing assertion imaginable) that racism does not mean race-hatred, but means oppression by the elite, ergo whites as members of an imaginary elite-by-birth of whiteness, are all racist by definition, even ones who have no trace of racist sentiment in them; whereas blacks never are racist, even ones who demand racial set-asides, racial segregation, racial genocide. Hmm. So racism is unracism and unracism is racism.
This kind of argument by bogus definition is like saying that all bankers are pumpkins, therefore stabbing them with carving knives on Halloween to make Jack-o’-Lanterns is lawful and good.
Another example: when overwhelming numbers of Mohammedans throughout the West, both recently arrived and second or third generation immigrants, cleave to the ancient and literal teaching of their so-called holy book, the Alcoran of Mohamet, and slay infidels without mercy or warning, by ambuscade, selecting only innocent targets, the overwhelming reaction of the Left is to call Racist whoever would take up arms against these foes. The fact that Cat Stephens and Cassius Clay are not members of the same race does not slow or silence the absurd accusation.
Hence the question of whether a political-religious teaching, namely, adherence to Shariah Law, which promotes intolerance of infidels, inequality for women and death for homosexuals, is compatible with Western civilization is never reached, and can never be discussed. It is merely shouted down by Dems, that is, by racists calling other men racists, and any honest onlooker, as expected, recoils in disgust, and hears neither side. The idea that we who love religious liberty cannot survive if we admit into our ranks those who by ancient and unalterable religious precept hate religious liberty is dismissed, not very convincingly, by the Left as requiring a religious test, or being alien to the spirit of the First Amendment.
Arguments very similar, differing only in terms and emphasis, were used to explain the Leftist infatuation with Communism, and to justify the irrational hatred of Senator McCarthy.
One would think the contradiction between the actions of the egalitarians and the ideals of equality would be obvious, and would render the theory odious in the mind of any honest onlooker. If the idea that all men are created equal (which means, equal in rank given at birth) is self-evident, as evidently it is, why can so many people be so easily swayed to the opposite belief so firmly, and in such large numbers?
Such success is not the product of nature or accident. It is deliberate and calculated. The arguments surrounding the attack on equality are part of a larger attack on reason itself, which characterizes the modern age.
Like all such attacks, they are sent to the earth in opposite pairs, so that any one fleeing blindly from one error blindly falls into the opposite. A man despising the national socialism of Nazi Germany, if he rejects it blindly and flees it, will find the equal and opposite error of International Socialism of the Left awaiting him with open arms, claiming to be the only real alternative. A free republic based on limited government and equality of rights is never mentioned as a possibility.
(I remember one peppery socialist scoffing that I would dare argue that the political spectrum did not, in any real sense, run from Communist Socialists on the Left to the National Socialists on the Right. He demanded to know whether I was foolish enough as to claim that there was no such thing as rightwing dictators? I told him the real, non-Leftwing and non-lying political spectrum runs from totalitarians on the Left to advocates of limited government on the Right, that is, Constitutional government defending man’s innate, God-given right to freedom of speech and press and worship and the right to bear arms. I said that there was indeed no such thing as dictatorship of a limited government. He changed the subject and attacked me, which what Leftists do when questioned or contradicted. Logic is not their strong suit.)
Like all such attacks, they succeed best in the men and nations most easily tempted by their vices not to inquire too closely or think too clearly about the logic of what is being said. Such seductions operate by darkening the intellect, lulling the conscience, evoking the anger, shouting down the cool, soft voice of reason.
In all these cases, egalitarianism flatters the pride, by making the supporter deem himself one of the enlightened intelligentsia, not for his intelligence, but because he parrots the ideas the intellectuals are spreading like manure.
Like all such attacks, the attacker merely and shamelessly claims to be the opposite of what he is. The wolf always dresses in sheep’s garb. Enemies of liberty call themselves Liberal. Lovers of regress seeking a return of barbarism call themselves Progressives. Enemies of all things feminine and female call themselves feminists. Benighted fools call themselves Bright. Sad and craven sufferers of a severe and unnatural sexual malfunction call themselves Gay. Conformists who voluntarily submit to the most rigid self-imposed thought-policing call themselves Freethinkers. Enemies of the Catholic teachings on social justice called themselves Social Justice Warriors.
And in this case, the enemies of equality claim to be seeking to rectify the injustices of inequality by imposing inequalities known as affirmative action.
This confusion of names and this Orwellian doublethink silences all opposition, because the wolf merely accuses the sheepdog who scents and growls at him of hating sheep. The sheep, trained since birth by modern educational techniques and conditioned by modern pop culture to avoid rational and investigative rigor whenever possible, looks over, dull eyed, and sees what looks like another sheep, and leaps to the defense of the wolf lusting to destroy and devour him. The Eloi take up arms to defend the Morlock.
One example among many is minimum wage law. A moment’s thought shows that if a man does a task worth five dollars an hour for a shop, and the minimum wage is ten, then the shopowner loses five dollars in hour each hour he employs the man. He either fires that man or someone else, or passes the loss ono the customers. Since the law effects all shops equally, the man is also a customer of other shops, and now must pay higher prices for goods than the natural market price. The result is the exact opposite of the proposed purpose of the law as announced by the proponents. When confronted with this simple argument, the proponents change the subject.
The idea that their idea is counterproductive to the goals they themselves state to be their own is never addressed, never answered, never admitted.
However, admit the clamor, distraction, and ignorance spread by modern education and modern entertainment, the cry from the poor to have more and ever more regulations create more and ever more unemployment among them never ceases.
In reality, no one giving it a moment’s thought would believe such nonsense. It is not compassion that motivates the push for minimum wages, because no one is so stupid as to wish for a counterproductive result to the result he wants.
The motive is greed. Trade Unions, that most successful of socialist wounds sunk into our once-free economic system, have their negotiated wages tied to the minimum wage. Trade Unions love unemployment. Indeed, it is how, and the only way how, they keep their wages above the market rate, that is, by making it illegal for any competition with their protected jobs to drive the wage down to the natural rate. The Trade Union bosses eventually destroy the company on which they prey, just as a parasite eventually destroys its host. See Detroit as a stark example.
Now, in this and every other case where the sheep are gathered to protect the wolf-in-sheep-garb from the sheepdog, the sheepdog is in a simple and impossible situation. Until and unless the sheep can smell the real wolf under the false clothing, the sheepdog cannot drive the disguised enemy away.
Like all such attacks, the true motive and the true goal is disguised. Compassion and love of equality are said to be the motive. Hatred of the capitalism, of the United States, and of Western Civilization in general are the real motive. The goal is darkness and barbarism.
Look at the Soviet Union under Stalin. Look at Nazi Germany under Hitler; look at China under Mao. The reader can rest assured that if peace, freedom, and equality had been the goals of totalitarian governments with superpower levels of power had been the goals then, such would have been achieved.
Looking at what is achieved with the egalitarian ideal is untrammeled tells you their goals. The goals were mass graves. The goal was mass slaughter. The goal was hell on earth.
A sea of blood drenched the world red, while Satan smiled his ghastly and mirthless smile. And Leftist newspapers and professors still refer to the Red Scare and McCarthy Witch-hunts as if the Communists were simply misguided and overzealous children innocent of wrongdoing. The Left pretends the Twentieth Century never happened.
Like all such attacks, the attackers never defend themselves, except by one single and solitary tactic, which seems never to fail: they accuse any accuser of their own flaws.
This has two immense advantages.
First, the accuser need never do any research, think any original thought, or use his imagination. He merely looks at the blood on his own hands and wipes it in the gloves of foe before screaming and wailing. It is efficient.
Second, any honest onlooker overhearing the exchange of accusations, once he hears they are exactly the same, is likely to forgive both equally or to condemn both equally. The idea that one side is innocent and the other is not only guilty but diabolical is too fantastic to contemplate. He is likely to assume that at least some of the accusations must be prompted by some sort of factual basis, and a sense of fairmindedness will not allow him to assume automatically that one party is always in the wrong and another is always in the right.
So whether the onlooker is disgusted by the loathsome nature of the mutual accusation, and ignores them both, or persuaded to heed them both, the damage is done. The innocent and the guilty are now morally equal, and anything the innocent avers by way of accusation, is dismissed by the onlooker as partisan.
But, what of proof? Surely if a drug dealer accuses of policeman of selling drugs, one need only see who is carrying kilos of contraband in the trunk of his motorcar?
This matter is handled by the news for the Left, who merely report all accusations against the Right, true or not, in excruciating detail, and omit as much as they can of facts as possible. Accusations against the Left they report minimally, in the light most favorable to their side, or not at all. The Left then accuses the Rightwing media outlets of their own Leftist partisan dishonesty, and mocks those who heed the facts as being partisan liars or gullible fools. Which is, in fact, the exact composition of their own audience and markets.
So the proof and the sources of proof are subject to the selfsame type of accusation, merely projection of one’s own flaws on another. If the victims of such transparent deceptions as minimum wage laws or gender wage gaps cannot see through a simple and unambiguous falsehood, the odd that they will track down and pore through original source materials, interviews witnesses, compare alternative testimonies, or think about the matter is practically nil. Modern education discourages seeking out and pondering both sides of any argument just as much as the medieval education encouraged and required it.
Finally, if there is one lesson that the Twentieth Century drove like a nail into the heart of history, it is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is inconceivable to me that so many otherwise intelligent people can so blithely forget that lesson. Is not the death count of totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century sufficient? One hundred million ghosts stand over their graves to testify against egalitarianism in all its forms.
Those who yearn for a return of monarchy (and, yes, there are some such oddities re-emerging in the world) or those who wish retroactively to pretend that American was created as a sanctuary for Whites, not as sanctuary for Christians suffering religious persecution at the hands of the Protestant English, are merely the equal and opposite form of egalitarianism, which is aristocracy. The belief here is that some men are born of greater moral worth than others, therefore should have exclusive control and dominion over the lives of those God or nature has made their natural inferiors.
The simplest answer to all such pro-Aristocrats is to ask on what basis the pure bloodline will be elevated above the impure? By having every subject carry an Ahnenpass, as the Germans did during Nazism? By laws dividing men into thoroughbreds, mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons, as the Democrats did in the antebellum South? By tests offered by highly educated Mandarins?
Whatever the secret qualifying factor is, one need next ask what becomes of the questioner if another man has more pure blood than he? Will you bow the knee?
If so, what can you do in the case as the present, where the purest and oldest blood in America, the direct descendants of the Mayflower and the Revolution, all reject with scorn any talk of an aristocracy of blood, or superiority of race? Particularly in a case where the advocates of aristocracy are of mixed blood themselves, or are children of defeated Confederates? If the Aristocracy is elevated by conquest in America, as it was in England, then anyone descended from a Southern soldier or landowner in the Civil War is, by this logic, a member of the disenfranchised class.
That applies to Mexicans, Red Indians, Germans, Italians, Japanese, Muslims, French, Irish and anyone else ever defeated in combat either by the Union, the Colonials, or the British. If your claim to aristocracy is by the power of the sword, I need only mention that we who celebrate a republican form of government have that power, and you who bow the knee to kings do not, not in this generation.
The advocate of aristocracy is left with two alternatives: if he claims to be inferior to the American bloodline, then he, by his own logic, has neither franchise nor right to voice opinions about matters if the public weal. He has no right to rule here, and ergo no right to attempt by an overly familiar freedom of speech to his superiors, any right to try to influence us. In which case he must shut up.
If he claims to be superior, the only proper answer is defiance, a glove in the face, or spittle, and words written on the flag of the Commonwealth of Virginia: sic semper tyrranis. In which case he must put up or shut up.
Now, to all those, including me, who are sick to our very bones of being accused of racism, and hearing everyone we know likewise accused, and every form of book and film and song likewise be accused, and who likewise are sick to our very bones of hearing every evil nature visits on mankind be called in inequality of some sort which it is somehow Caesar’s sacred task to amend, you are very like to claim that you favor racism and favor inequality merely to see blood pour out of the nose and ears of the nearest overwrought Leftist know-nothing due to brain hemorrhage.
I sympathize. I do. Nonetheless, there is neither strength nor wit nor wisdom in such tactics, fun as it may be in the short term. Such jokes bring real totalitarians and real racists and real fascists out of the pits and dens were they cower, thinking wrongly that we honest men agree with them.
This is an example of the errors being sent to earth in pairs, in order to snare in the second error whoever flees the first without watching his footing. The answer to anti-White racism is not pro-White racism, it is virtue: the hard and simple laws of justice, prudence, self-command and fortitude. Fairness and boldness is what defeats unfairness and cowardice, not unfairness and cowardice on our side.
Because the program of inequality in the name of equality, and totalitarianism in the name of liberty, is both stupid and obviously self-contradictory, the first thing any neo-monarchist, neo-Nazi, eugenicist crackpot, Leftist, socialist, feminist or crackpot of any other breed must do is make men afraid to ask and answer any questions about political philosophy or simple justice.
The easiest way (albeit not the sole way) to silence questions is to proclaim that the current emergency, whatever the emergency is, requires an immediate betrayal of the ideals of limit government and the Rights of Man, because the danger is so dire, and the emergency too far advanced. The science is settled and the debate is over! Any questioning now is treasonous, and is a sign of mental feebleness and moral decay! The ends justify the means!
But, no matter how bad the emergency, a counterproductive policy will have the exact opposite effect of the purpose, whatever it may be, alleged by its advocates.
Injustice is cured by a return to justice, not by unleashing ever more irrational and erratic injustices on innocent bystanders.
If the cause of the problem is Muslims, not Jews, disarming or killing the Jews to stop the Muslim attacks is counterproductive, and indeed does their work for them.
The solution to Communism is not Nazism, which is the twin brother of Communism, but Republicanism. The solution to racist violent groups like Black Lives Matter is not to form a racist violent group like the Aryan Brotherhood, but to arrest, try and hang the news corps and the Democrats who support, create and fund these grotesque black terrorists.
The solution to a failure of the melting pot to assimilate the immigrants is not to declare America an Anglo-only sanctuary and drive the Irish, French and Italians into the sea, but to hang the Dems who have made it their business, thanks to the welfare state and multiculturalism, to prevent the melting pot from working.
The Dems have a religion. It is antichristianity. They admit illegal aliens based on one and only one characteristic: what will harm American the most, create the most poverty, crime, disorder, and terrorism. Notice the few or no Christians are allowed into the country as refugees, even from nations were they are being hunted down like quail and shot in the street like mad dogs. But young military-age Jihadists are being let in.
All the evils done by enemies of equality and liberty in the name of equality and liberty have not made equality and liberty somehow evil. It merely means the liars are blasphemers as well as liars, desecrating the sacred ideals on which this nation, the only truly morally upright nation in the history of the world, was founded.
The real reason for equality is not idealism but practicality.
All men are brothers in that they are sons of Adam. This does not mean we are equal in intelligence, wisdom, wit, virtue, strength of mind or body, nor even equal in good fortune or good genes. It means two things. First, we are all equal in sin, in that all have fallen short, and none is righteous by his own merit. Second, we are all made in the image and likeness of God, and to mar that image by the fetters and whips of the slavers is the same as trampling a cross or burning a flag. It is a sign of contempt for the invisible reality that visible image represents, and an offense against the legitimate sovereign power.
No son of Adam can be trusted with unanswerable power over this fellows.
Even the relatively mild and benign aristocracy in England, where the differences in rank by birth were the least and least visible in history, could not check the temptations that follow inequalities of power. The American Revolution and the disastrous failure of the British Empire after World War Two are evidences of that. Natives should have been clamoring to remain under the benevolent rule of the English, had the rule indeed been as benevolent as it should have been.
The examples of the Twentieth Century of the deadly madness that follows unchecked power are clear and trenchant. If the Germans had been indeed the master race, they would have had the superior morals a superior race should have. Instead, even the tiniest and fewest years of being told they were a master race with absolute power over the lesser races created a mass slaughter so cruel and so vile that only vilest of persons these days dares excuse, elude, or mock the suffering. Likewise, if the proletarians had been the master class, the Soviets for fifty years would not have run a nightmarish slave state, nor the Red Chinese a continent-sized slaughterhouse.
I am the master of my children in my house: I do not shove them into ovens after telling them it is but a shower, and douse them with deadly gas, deny them a burial, and yank out gold from their filings or render their body fat into tallow.
A true master race or master class or aristocracy would be as this: a stern but kind father, willing to lay down his life for his servants. Those who say the Whites are the natural master race are cruel and delight in cruelty. Heed them: they will boast of it to you.
If you would have your race or nation be master, practice responsibility first, and authority will be granted you. If you merely claim authority without responsibility, this is tyranny.
Master first your own wild, evil spirit.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
