If you want to see a dog chasing its own tail, just wait until a society has solved its basic not-dying type problems and decides that the biggest issue is inequality. For all the social crusaders who are too spiritually lifeless to, I don’t know, go get high or make sure their kids aren’t turning into daycare-raised psychos, I guess it holds out the comforting prospect of a cause that always somehow seems important but will never be solved. Actually, I’m not quite sure what equality even means. I think for some, maybe for many, it just means everyone having certain minimum rights and having everyone’s actions judged by the same basic principles, which they like to call legal equality.

That’s all fine and good, though I don’t think it’s a very accurate descriptor. But for others it seems to mean that everyone does or should have the same amount of something, especially money, which they call economic equality. But for one thing, it’s never going to happen: some people are always going to have more money than others, for example, partly because they’re better at making it and partly because beyond a certain point some people give a shit about continuing to pile up more and some don’t. And trying to erase that fact means either depriving some people in equal measure as you’re helping others or trying to lift both sides of a see-saw.

For another thing, I really don’t quite get what notion of human homogeneity lies beneath the idea that everyone have or should have the same amount of anything important. Is it like some sort of severe myopia, where you take off your glasses and everyone looks pretty much indistinguishable? Of course, they’re all just blank colors at that level. And that’s what I feel this idea of equality is at its root: an idea for those that don’t know anything more about people than the fuzzy blobs they make out from the corner of their eyes as they hurtle by through life. Why should I humor the sycophantic delusion that the lives of swindlers and frauds are equal in any important sense to the true life-givers and redeemers, or that those that love me should be repayed by being no more privileged than those who hate or injure me unjustly? It seems to me that this comes down in the end to a swinish specist bigotry that subverts the distinction of good and evil in favor of the brute, meritless fact of existence. Whereas really we should do honor to those that make an effort to a bit of good in life, rather than considering the most important fact about them to be that they were born.