The Equality Illusion

We’ve got this thing in our modern day world, where we propose to all believe that all of us are equal. It’s one of the tenets on which a large chunk of the world’s political systems are based. Everybody is equal and therefore deserves an equal say in who rules them; everybody is also, according to western beliefs, equal before the law and, strangest of all, people say that everybody has an equal opportunity to make it big, if they work hard enough.

Yet, if we’re really honest with each other, we all know that we’re not. Men are different from women, Asians are different Africans, those born in developed nations are different from those born in developing and those born to rich parents are different from those born to poor. (for the record, some of these differences are genetic, while some are completely cultural and circumstantial)

Now some of these differences are only superficial, but some of these reasons are quite substantial. Men and women, for example, work in considerably different ways. Though it might not be PC to suggest it, their physiologies are substantially different. Where one gets a shot of testosterone, the other gets a shot of oestrogen, where one has been programmed to ‘go forth and procreate’, the other has been programmed to nurture. Of course, undoubtedly, many of these changes can be de or re programmed, but they are nonetheless there at the beginning.

To act as if these differences aren’t there would be to ignore the rather large elephant in the middle of the room.

Warning bells are probably now ringing in a great many minds. Across mental maps from America to Amsterdam and from Sydney to Singapore the words ‘Here there be dragons’ appear. I realise the perceived danger in what I suggest. If we start accepting some of the smaller differences then how long will it be before prejudice and discrimination rule our world?

The fear is that we A) won’t know where to stop (which is a slippery slope argument) and, for many people far more important, that B) it’s unethical to suggest that some people are just intrinsically ‘better’ than others. Because, of course, when you suggest people are not equal, then for most the automatic next step would be that one must then be better than the other.

The truth is, of course, that ‘better’ and ‘worse’ are concepts that only come about once you’ve first created a scale to measure with. Creating these scales seems, till now, to be a completely human past time, with no necessary grounding in reality.

So what does that mean? Only that that second step need not necessarily be taken and that there might be an alternate route that allows us to accept our differences, without embracing prejudice and discrimination.

I admit freely, that it might be a dangerous route, but I can’t help but think that the route we’ve tried so far hasn’t done a great job of eliminating the ‘isms’, to date. Why not try something new? Because, paradoxical though it seems to us, we’re all different - just like everybody else.