Counter-Currents
Equality:
A Justification of Privilege, Oppression, & Inhumanity
Alex Kurtagić
The Equalizer
1,539 words
It is a cliché in our Left-leaning liberal society that we must all remain vigilant against any ideology that rejects equality as a morally desirable aim, because, should that ideology achieve political power, we would soon find ourselves back in the slippery slope that begins with a justification of racism and ends with the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Both liberals and their Marxist critics present themselves as forces of liberation and emancipation, and their historiography portrays the time before their advent as one of privilege, oppression, and inhumanity.
Yet, the history of the last one hundred years has shown that, contrary to the conceit of liberals and the Left, and contrary to the fine rhetoric that emanates from their camp, the moral logic of egalitarianism also justifies privilege, oppression, and inhumanity, exactly the same ills it claims to have opposed.
Privilege
A key assumption among egalitarians is that equality of opportunity must produce equality of outcome, and that, when outcomes are unequal, it is because an individual or group of individuals have enjoyed an unfair advantage. Egalitarians have a materialist worldview, so unfair advantage is always reducible to material conditions, which, in their view, and in the broadest possible sense, is the main determinant of outcomes. This unfair advantage is referred to as “privilege.” To combat privilege, the key strategy of egalitarianism is redistribution: those thought to have enjoyed unfair advantages are subjected to extraction, and the extracted “excess” is transferred over to those thought to have suffered unfair disadvantages.
It is, of course, true that individuals or groups of individuals sometimes enjoy unfair advantages, but unequal outcomes are not always the result of unequal opportunities resulting from “privilege.” Equal opportunities can and do result—all the time—in unequal outcomes. Egalitarians resist the cause (inherent human inequality) because they believe an unequal society is immoral. Inequality is for them always and necessarily an injustice.
The problem is that they effectively “correct” a perceived injustice with an actual one. Where there has been no unfair advantage, but unequal outcome, redistribution takes from the deserving in order to give to the undeserving. This, in effect, creates a privileged class of individuals who enjoy unearned, and hence unfair, advantages, at the expense of those who earned, fair and square, that which was taken from them. Egalitarianism, therefore, simply transfers privilege from one class to another—it does not eliminate it.
Oppression
Some critics on the Right have said that we must distinguish “good equality” from “bad equality,” citing equality before the law as an example of “good equality.”
Equality may make sense in certain contexts, provided it is treated as a practical matter. When it is treated as is a moral imperative, however, it becomes impossible to justify opposition to the multiracial societies we now have in the West, where the indigenous must not be regarded as special, and where levels of genetically distant immigrants are determined purely by economic considerations.
The resulting multicultural societies are inherently unstable, because they can no longer be governed under a shared set of assumptions, values, and customs, and because racial and ethnic identification among various groups pits them in mutual competition for power and resources. It goes without saying that competition between different groups also occurs in racially homogeneous societies, but multiracialism adds wholly unnecessary layers of complexity, necessitating whole new levels of state involvement. As the multicultural experiment has shown in the West, the growth of multiculturalism against a backdrop of egalitarian morality foments the growth of equality policies, regulation, legislation, policing, enforcement, bureaucracies, and social programs, designed to prevent the indigenous from developing exclusionary strategies against the ever-growing exogenous groups. The liberal guarantee of freedom of speech is progressively curtailed in order to avoid causing offence to some group or another. Freedom of association is progressively curtailed in order to ensure no group is excluded on the basis of their difference. Freedom of representation is progressively curtailed in order to prevent the indigenous from organizing a political opposition. Economic liberty is progressively curtailed—e.g., through the tax system—in order to equalise outcomes and fund the equality state apparatus. The latter, of course, continuously grows, becoming ever more intrusive, invasive, expensive, and oppressive. In the West we have reached the stage where expressing an opinion on Twitter, in less than 140 characters, can result in a conviction with a custodial sentence.
There are other effects too, which also contribute to an oppressive atmosphere. Multiracial societies have been proven to suffer higher levels of crime and lower levels of trust, both of which destroy the community spirit, lower quality of life, and encourage citizens to retreat into alarmed homes with barred windows, sometimes behind gated communities with armed security patrols. Even these offer no guarantee, so citizens live in constant fear: fear of offending someone; fear of expressing certain opinions; fear of public spaces; fear of certain fellow citizens; fear of being associated with certain political parties; and, in the case of the indigenous, also fear of opposing their own dispossession and disprivilegement, even though in the end there will be nowhere left to run. Once again, all of the above, save the last, exist in homogeneous societies, but under egalitarian multiculturalism the sources of fear multiply, because the variables have multiplied.
Inhumanity
As I demonstrated in an earlier piece, belief in the moral goodness of equality strips life of meaning, because meaning comes from difference, or inequality. In the process, it takes away all that makes life good and worth living, for these are dependent on meaning and on various forms of difference.
Associated with egalitarian morality is the notion of human rights. In liberal ideology, humans are considered to be of equal worth in dignity and rights. Yet, this is not really the case, for it applies only to those who believe in the moral goodness of equality.
Humans are deemed to have rights simply by virtue of being human. At the same time, it is deemed an indication of one’s humanity to recognize human rights. Treatment of other humans that grossly disregards human rights is described as “inhuman,” beastly, of demonic. A milder description is “barbarous,” which connotes a lesser humanity.
But it does not take torture or gruesome murder or mass murder to become, at least from the liberal point of view, a beast or a demon, because simply rejecting the notion that equality is an absolute moral good has the same effect. Racism, for example, implies this rejection. Therefore, it only takes someone being deemed “racist” for that someone to be treated as endowed with a lesser humanity. The animalisation and demonization of the newly identified “racist” marks his change in status.
The reason is simple: if egalitarianism is moral, and if a capacity for morality is what makes us human, the inegalitarian is automatically inhuman, and thereby a beast or a demon.
Nevertheless, observation confirms that the rule is not applied uniformly: the charge of “racism” is much more dehumanizing for Whites than it is for others. A Black man in the West can engage in blatantly racist behavior without having his humanity questioned. On the other hand, a White man in the West is held to a much more rigorous standard: it takes much less for him to be labelled “racist” and the effects of the label are for him much more severe. This could potentially indicate a tacit assumption among liberals that Blacks are of a lesser humanity to begin with, and that Whites are of a higher humanity, for this would explain the indulgence towards the former and the severity towards the latter, but this is beyond the scope of this essay. The fact remains that, once deemed “racist,” the White beast or demon no longer enjoys the same rights and privileges as the “non-racist.” His freedom of speech and association can be perverted, restricted, or denied; his property and creative output can be vandalized, seized, or destroyed; and his liberty and means to survival can be taken away from him, sometimes without an explanation—all with complete impunity and universal approval. Worse still, in the eyes of friends and relatives, he who is labelled “racist” ceases to be a person, and any kind of abuse directed at him is fair game. It is, in fact, seen as righteous and fully justified.
This may be one of various reasons why communist societies, which lived under a system of radical egalitarianism, saw the worst treatment and the worst mass murders of human beings in history. This may also be why so many lost their heads under the banner of “liberté, egalité, fraternité.” As I argued elsewhere, the pursuit of equality implies the destruction of value, and renders all human life equivalent and replaceable. If, on top, we add a moral logic that dehumanises those who reject that logic, we end up in a situation that begins with calling someone “racist,” “reactionary,” or “bourgeois” and ends in the guillotine or the Siberian gulag.
Conclusion
Perhaps we should remain vigilant against any ideology that presents equality as a morally desirable aim, rather than a practical solution that may be expedient in some contexts, because we have seen what happens when a morally egalitarian ideology achieves political power.
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24 comments
I have an unfinished essay, somewhere on my computer, entitled “Justice without Equality.” The main point is simply that such notions as “equality of opportunity” are better expressed in terms of objectivity rather than equality, e.g., “equality of opportunity” should mean nothing more than people will be considered for positions based on objective merit rather than extraneous factors. “Equality before the law” should mean nothing more than cases will be decided based on their objective merit rather than extraneous factors (status, money, connections, etc.)
Spot on article. The depressing thing is what are we to do?
We keep chipping away at it, doing everything possible to destroy the notion equality is a moral good. Take these ideas, and spread the word. This is what I do. Let’s get people associating equality with its actual record, evil, gulags, mass slaughter, etc.
The “good” forms of equality will need to be given new labels.
Example:
Equality of opportunity=Just opportunity, fair opportunity, or merit-based opportunity.
Equality of opportunity comes through changing the usurious banking system, which can build upon tradition and cultural legacy rather than – as in socialism – tear those down. Overthrow usury and then let the chips fall where they may.
Jonestown was a perfect example of working for an egalitarian society of pure ‘communism’. That relied heavily on self-guilt as seen by the ‘letters to Dad’ that were found in the commune. The mania for equality is what Nietzsche called ‘resentiment’, a means of pulling down what one cannot achieve and consequently resents rather than admires.
I am a bit unclear on how the social problems around extreme wealth inequality ought to be treated in the context of making a moral case against all forms of equality. In an economic context, I would argue pursuing equality is a good thing as long as it’s geared toward preventing gross injustice.
One point of “Third Position” and fascist economic systems is to curtail capitalist accumulation and ensure a rough equality of material condition across society. So how do we square this with the idea equality is always bad?
There is a tradition in the West of opposing economic injustice on moral grounds. It predates Marx and the modern egalitarians *** (ex: below from William Blake). It probably puts me in the minority here, but I’m inclined to believe many of those French aristocrats richly deserved the guillotine for being such greedy bastards and poor stewards for their people.
When I read stuff like this, it makes me quite sympathetic to the French Revolutionaries at the bottom of the economic hierarchy.
Our analysis finds that at the end of 2010 the Top 50 private banks alone collectively managed more than $12.1 trillion in cross-‐border invested assets for private clients, including their trusts and foundations.
The three private banks handling the most assets offshore on behalf of the global super-‐rich are UBS, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs.
The number of the global super-‐rich who have amassed a $21 trillion offshore fortune is fewer than 10 million people. Of these, less than 100,000 people worldwide own $9.8 trillion of wealth held offshore
http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/The_Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_Presser_120722.pdf
“The Chimney Sweeper,” a poem about child labor by William Blake published in 1789
====
***When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ” ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl’d llke a lamb’s back. was shav’d: so I said
“Hush. Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”
And so he was quiet & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned or Jack.
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black.
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open’d the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river. and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark.
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.
I was thinking of this very issue today. The question for a classical Republican is not creating equality, but reducing dangerous extemes of inequality. The standard here is not equality, but rather the preservation of the common good which is threatened by extremes of inequality, which can lead either to insurrection from the very poor or despotism of the very rich, or both together.
As a general rule, I do not think that equality has any real value. Again, equal opportunity and equal justice just boil down to objectivity. In terms of the distribution of awards, equal rewards for equal merit is just, but equal rewards for unequal people is unjust. Thus Aristotle offers the idea of proportionate equality: unequal people should be treated unequally, in proportion to their inequality.
But in terms of a society in which there is private property and private enterprise, wealth is not “distributed” by some central authority. But wealth flows around and accumulates in various pockets, and if there is too great a disproportion between the rich and the poor, then the common good of the society is threatened.
So it is legitimate for the state to regulate economic activity so that private property is broadly distributed and securely held. That is the main priority: making sure that there is a towering bell curve in terms of wealth.
As for the people on the extremes, there should be a decent minimum for those who cannot provide for themselves (and eugenic measures to insure that they do not become a permanent parasitic underclass), and for the wealthy, there should be some limits to how rich they can grow, not because wealth itself is evil, but because economic inequality is always cashed out in terms of political inequality which threatens the common good. One might implement confiscatory taxes over a certain amount, which can fund the safety net for the poor and disabled. Or, on an ad hoc basis, one might make use of the Greek method of ostracism and banishment for those who become so powerful they threaten society.
As to what to do with those who have grown rich in the present system once we set up a WN society: those who became wealthy by dismantling the American economy and by destroying the moral and cultural capital of the society as well should have their wealth expropriated. The rich will always be with us, so if we mow down a lot of the current crop, a new and better behaved one will grow up in their place.
Regulation of the market by the state is needed to make sure wealth doesn’t get too concentrated in too few hands, but there’s also another type of economic organization somewhere between the private and publics sectors that is worth considering as a way to provide a certain degree of equality of material conditions.
These kinds of organizations are employee-owned businesses and cooperatives. In this type of economic arrangement all employee-owners get a say in how the workplace is run (economic democracy) and then they get a share of the profits the business generates. The fruits of everyone’s labor gets spread around rather than concentrated in the pockets of just a handful of owners and shareholders, thus providing a solution to the problem of capitalism tending to result in the ever greater accumulation of more wealth into fewer and fewer hands with not much real benefit to the nation overall.
@Vick
Employees with 9-5 jobs generally don’t care about the businesses they work for, and are quite ignorant of it beyond the specific area in which they work. They only want the paycheque at the end of the month, which is the primary reason they get jobs in the first place. Any interest they affect is narrow and self-centered (e.g., fear of not having money and the consequences of it). I am sceptical of corporate democracy for this reason, which is analogous to the reasons why democracy has come in for criticism in the past. If we don’t trust ‘the people’ to make intelligent choices for their country, on what basis are we to suppose they will make intelligent decisions about the businesses they work for? Businesses need to be authoritarian, not democratic.
Having said that, the tendency towards a corrupt, cleptomaniacal plutocracy and a mass of wage-slaves, who exist only for purposes of extraction, and who live amidst mountains of cheap mass-produced junk with zero aesthetic value, is something quite nefarious that our present system has allowed to develop, and that I think should not be deemed acceptable in a post-liberal society.
I think there is a difference between employee ownership and employee democracy. One could have a stake in a company and still delegate decision-making to experts.
@ Alex Kurtagic
With respect, in today’s capitalist economy, of course the typical wage or salary earning drone of a typical business which couldn’t give a crap about him isn’t going to care about the business he works at or have a worthwhile opinion about how it should be run. No surprise there.
Anyway, for those interested in potential “third way” economic models, I suggest examples like distributism:
http://distributistreview.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Via Tom Metzger, I also find the Stasserist tendency of National Socialism fascinating, if underdeveloped.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasserism
I doubt it’s possible to have an advanced economy using only employee-owned businesses or cooperatives. You need limited liability corporations. A cooperative might work for a business on the scale of a local grocery store chain, but it’s not feasible for a Boeing or General Motors. This is why I favor fascist control of the economy over other approaches like distributism. Under fascism, large industrial enterprises are fine as long as they don’t undermine the public good.
@ Lew
The Mondragon cooperative is over 50 years old, has 80,000+ employees, is one of the largest businesses in Spain and has been a full on industrial manufacturer since its inception. While indeed it’s true that most existing cooperatives today are smaller, Mondragon is an example of a healthy, old cooperative as big as Boeing or GM.
At any rate, personally, I imagine the white republic having a mixed economy with both robust private and public sectors. While I would like to see economically democratic practices become more widespread in the private sector, I think there will always be a place for very competitive and innovative businesses owned by individuals or small groups motivated by creative vision or simply the desire to get rich. To try to tamp down this kind of economic activity completely almost always results in driving it underground with undesirable consequences.
Last, I just want to add that as someone who’s been a member of two co-ops over the years, I recommend people look around and see if there are any in their local area. As you’d expect, they’re usually implicitly white affairs. And it’s hard to pay full price for food again after you’ve had access to food at co-op prices.
I am averse to confiscatory taxes above a certain threshhold. There is certainly a breed of shrewdly acquisitive types who are contemptible and a waste of space. On the other hand, there are those who use their excess wealth to support causes for which there would otherwise be no funding, because they make no business sense.
I think it should not be an issue of how much money a person has, but who he uses it.
Perhaps we should think about how, through ethics, we generate an atmosphere in which people are constantly subjected to internal moral pressure to use any vastly excessive wealth in a constructive manner. To some degree this already exists today, only philanthropic efforts are often misguided (e.g. Bill Gates) and the public detestation for the kind of cunning cleptomania apparent in certain areas of finance is not sufficiently strong.
There is something to be learnt from the Quakers of Victorian England, who grew very wealthy through their business ventures. They were sought after because of their extreme honesty and because they treated their workers much better than the other capitalists. They were frugal and scrupulously averse to debt too. The Quakers were, unfortunately, radically egalitarian, but honesty, fairness, frugality, and aversion to debt are not dependent on that error.
The key is banking reform and the abolition of usury and then one can let the chips fall where they may. A decent plot of land and a home would be within easy reach of all those who want this.
The French Revolution inaugurated the rule of the merchant and free market economics. Like such revolutions in general the masses were utilised by those who sought to use them for ulterior motives that had nothign to do with social justice. One major bunch was were the Orleanists. Napoleon reversed this crap, like Stalin did with Bolsehvism, and introduced an embryonic corporatism and a controlled banking system. Prior to that the Old Regime was debt ridden and the French Republic was inept at issuing money. Nontheless, the French aristocracy has had a bad PR, like Czarism. The French Revolution was, like the Reformation, both undertaken in the name of liberty, just paved the way for plutocracy.
Speaking of French Revolution, may I suggest you read Nesta Helen Webster’s book: “The French Revolution – a study in democracy”? One could read the reviewer words here:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3738TC5GL1CCY/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B005HEEZNC&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=
Excellent solutions can be found along the lines here:
http://immigration-globalization.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-is-fascism.html
I see fascist control of the economy as preferable to distributism. Distributism probably isn’t compatible with advanced technological societies.
It’s amazing how Hitler and the National Socialists get vindicated over and over again. We have to re-learn everything (or I do anyway). I love Gottfried Feder and the Strasser faction’s distinction between parasite capitalism and productive capitalism.
Something has to be done about this collusion between big government and big business.
A good example: Obamacare. Another scheme to funnel white wealth to corporate shareholders and non-whites. This is wrong.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/02/03/obamacare-a-primer/
Very well said.
The little-known American conservative philosopher John Kekes has also taken on egalitarianism in his books and articles. Good intros: Dangerous Egalitarian Dreams (http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_urbanities-dangerous.html), Why Robespierre Chose Terror (http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_urbanities-robespierre.html) and What Is Conservatism (http://www.deepleafproductions.com/utopialibrary/text/kekes-conservatism.html) and some of his books, Against Liberalism and The Illusions of Egalitarianism.
Because egalitarianism is so unnatural, its accomplishment must necessarily lead to a police state, be it the overt Marxist kind or the therapeutic-managerial-regulatory and redistributive Obaman kind.
This debate about the desirability of inequality is too theoretical. Today, the egalitarian propaganda is mainly about interracial equality. Of course we don’t want inter-racial equality. We want racial separation. Once we get that, the equality question among White people becomes completely different. Also, if that “philosophical” debate is simply about money, it should be said so.
White Nationalists are described as right-wing by the Jewish media. From a practical and non-philosophical point of view, a priority of White Nationalists should be to attract both “right-wing” idealists who want to preserve the White race, and “left-wing” low-wage White people who would simply like to defend their individual self-interests. I don’t think that praising inequality is a good way to go about it. Some people think that the White race and the common good are more important than individual lives. I would expect such people to be inclined to egalitarianism. Besides, most White Nationalists are not very wealthy. There is no reason most of them should support plutocracy.
About third-way economics, I agree that we need something like that, but we don’t really need to invent a new economic theory. We simply need some economic protectionism to protect White society. Over the last fifty years, the economy has become much more productive, and the anti-White power has simply kept taking in more and more tax money for redistribution to the non-Whites. They didn’t have a particular economic theory. They just kept raising taxes and redistributing it. In the ideal White society, we would subsidize some jobs and activities. We would set limits to the concentration of industry. It would cost a lot but would serve to protect White society instead of destroying it. Anyway, in a modern all-White society, money wouldn’t matter so much as today. For example, the absence of non-White competition within our White society means that fewer low-skill people would be unemployed.
Greg Johnson: “there should be a decent minimum for those who cannot provide for themselves (and eugenic measures to insure that they do not become a permanent parasitic underclass)”
Before we think of eugenics, the priority is to separate from the non-Whites. Once this is done, I wonder if the worst problem is that people who live on subsidies have too many children, or that the smartest people have too few. The main part of a eugenic policy would probably consist of determining who gets subsidies, how much, assorted to what conditions. But when people hear of eugenics, they probably think of sterilization. It isn’t a good way to attract them to the WN agenda.
What we have to remember is the diminishing returns associated with material consumption. The problem for whites is (1) the inconveniences and dangers associated with unnecessary multiracial conditions that being imposed on us, and (2) a culture of ostentatious consumption that is being deliberately created by the Jewish media.
If you remove those, even rather large wealth disparities need not be a matter of great concern. The problem is multiracialism and consumerism, not inequality.
The title of this essay is misleading for the essay did not provide the promised justification or defense of “privilege, oppression and inhumanity” — as leftists actually understand them to have once existed, rather than as the spurious accusations leveled today.
It says something that one of the most outspoken inegalitarians on the white right cannot bring himself to defend hereditary rule, conquest, slavery and (physical) genocide. I guess “leftist” morality is here to stay. (And thank God for that!)
This could potentially indicate a tacit assumption among liberals that Blacks are of a lesser humanity to begin with, and that Whites are of a higher humanity, for this would explain the indulgence towards the former and the severity towards the latter,
Gee, ya think? It’s transparently obvious than that white liberals are really just liberal white supremacists. Rather than feeling empowered by their presumed superiority, however, they’re embarrassed by it. In the long run such attitudes can only doom their race to oblivion, but in the meantime there’s little they find as rewarding as the moral glow of racial rectitude.
Another one on this theme (about 5 minute vid).
http://www.dailyfinance.com/on/Wealth-Inequality-in-America-viral-video-Politizane/?icid=maing-grid7%7Chp-desktop%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk2&pLid=278339
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