Against Equality

Nietzsche was right to call the doctrine of equality the most poisonous poison.

Written by Bo Winegard.

That humans are born unequal is self-evident. Some are faster, smarter, taller, or more beautiful than others; others are slower, duller, shorter, and plainer. Therein lies the problem. Our inevitable inferiority wounds not only our egos but also our sense of cosmic justice. The reality of inequality is not merely unpleasant, it is morally disquieting.

Worse still, it undermines the alluring promises of progressivism. For the only equality attainable among individuals, sexes, or races is the equality of poverty and misery. In any society that is both functional and free, inequality will be as pervasive as the diversity of human talents.

Yet, like other unpalatable truths, human inequality has been denied consistently and often with remarkable ingenuity. Since variation in talent and character is too conspicuous to reject outright, this denial assumes subtler forms, rhetorical evasions and calculated conflations. The sophists of egalitarianism are masters of equivocation.

An egalitarian asserts that all humans are equal. A skeptic challenges the claim, citing Michael Jordan’s extraordinary athletic gifts, gifts that, clearly, are denied to most. The egalitarian concedes the point, but maintains that human equality is not a matter of empirical observation but of metaphysical principle. Equality like the truths of mathematics exists in a realm beyond the vagaries of empirical reality.

But the egalitarian is not content to leave this “metaphysical equality” undisturbed in some ethereal realm. Instead, he invokes it to justify sweeping political and moral conclusions, as if a largely vacuous slogan could bear the weight of an entire ideology. Thus, like a magician who claims he can vanish a house because he can hide an ace up his sleeve, the egalitarian insists that all humans are really equal simply because they are metaphysically equal—whatever that might mean.

This rhetorical chicanery demands bold response. We must not prevaricate, nor defer to metaphysical vacuities. Egalitarianism must be rejected in toto, its metaphysics, its morals, its evasions, its confusions, its subterfuges. Humans are not equal. They never have been. They never will be. And more than that: they should not be. Egalitarianism is not merely false. It is unjust.