Conservatives: equality would remove life’s goals

 

There’s this contradiction. Our nation’s founding axioms set up certain equalities, justice for all and democratic process. That is our grand political container. You may get none of those if you spend your waking hours in an American corporation, often petty tyrannies. Maltreatment is common: bullying, threats, no due process, and where nobody wants your democratic opinion. The justification for these work pits is your freedom to quit.

Shabby conditions in this, the most advanced of nations.

An exaggeration? Studs Terkel studied a hundred Americans on the job, then began his report Working by writing, “This book, being about work, is by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body” (1), and Ehrenreich more recently has described the toxic pressures used to produce profit in American workeries (2).

Inequality is the tap-root of all that. Maltreatment and coercive misery is unlikely if we are all equal. Would anybody prefer inequality?

Chaotic

The short paradoxical answer is, yes. When Robert Lane (3) interviewed 15 American men, asking them how they would react to real social equality, he got a faceful: Some of the men said equality would be chaotic; the world would collapse. All 15 said equality would deprived them of their goals and incentives in life. What’s the point to life if you can’t rise? – And to rise, there must be inequality.

That is the conservative view. So the first contradiction is that our enlightened nation runs on dark practices.

Fear

And it is not just a grubby fetish. It is a national fascination with differences and rank. A Darwinian theme which propels business: to make life worth living you need somebody to look down on. A stony basis for life – and good deal of fear mixed in, part of the conservative fascination with strength over goodness.

Lane goes further. He says this opposition to equality is a fear. The fear is rationalized. Rawls (3) shows how this is rationalized out: in the capitalist’s view, inequality is useful – it keeps the variety of jobs in our economy staffed. That’s the economic point of view. On a personal level: if  the pain doesn’t actually kill you it will make you stronger.

Toxic

Then if you follow the Friedman school of economics (4) that a free business economy is a precondition for freedom, then this toxic structure is a condition of our freedom.

Contradiction number two. This is an ancient union organizer’s problem, that the most ruinously exploited workers are the ones who resist most the installing of an egalitarian collective that will bring benefits. Because it would break a ‘law of nature.’ Let’s see where this law of nature takes us.

Top-down

We are not playing board games here. The struggle for somebody to look down on means real life consequences, and that spawns distrust, life stress, sometimes unrest which provokes more top-down control – an unbreakable cycle which breeds suspiciousness. The business of this nation is business, so a national character of competitive distrust. And that is not freedom.

To paint in a couple of steps, here’s a universal principle that holds between individuals, between groups, and between nations:  Trust and control are inversely related to each other. They are connected, but like water in opposite sides of a U-shaped tube: the less you trust someone, the more the impulse to control them. Or, the more you trust someone (or group), the less you need to control them.

Debt

There’s a primeval conservative fear, that you can’t trust anyone. – Of course not, if they are battling you for your place on the hierarchy. Yes, that person standing next to you, hard-eyed and debt-indentured. The crushed’s prime motivation in life is to join the crushers. And if you extend that to a whole nation?

But by ensuring inequality, and someone to look down on, you strengthen mutual distrust. This carnal desire to win has painted this nation in deep shadow.

Wild West

And we are lost. This is jailhouse mentality. No natural unity, if we follow that: a Wild West existence with short life expectancies for all. Or for people who seek safety, there is always a life working for somebody else, but rather than leading to the proud American dream, it mainly leads to the injustice of nothing but debt.

What’s the alternative?

The pursuit of justice first. More equality. Equality is the glue of friendship and trust. Will this break a law of nature?

Axiom

No. Since our first human impulses are toward mutual support. Everyone begins that way, in every family. That is nature.

Our founding axioms, that all men are created equal, guide the sun in its path over this nation. It is the vision of social justice that fires our community workers, civil rights, unionizers and anti-poverty workers.

It is not equality that threatens this nation. Indeed, this business-based war of everybody against everybody is efficiently dropping this nation into chaos. 

Unity

Any way you hold their logic to the light and shake it, it doesn’t look right. Because having both national unity and insist on someone to look down is a contradiction in spirit.

 But it is a strange and difficult task to create amity and equity out of the conservative mind. To try to salvage trust from a gladiator mentality.

Not a freedom

And this is a unilateral challenge to any social philosopher, or economist. No matter how spine-stirring, something cannot be a law of nature if it destroys community: So inequality is not a freedom. First principles endure: you cannot build, nor keep, a civil society based on competition, fear, and distrust.

These conservatives’ contradictions do not advance the nation; they bind and hobble us. And an economy based on Darwin’s laws leave us no time for manufacture and productiveness. No fraternité . They leave us fighting for breath.

Liberal values

The reverse: We in this vastly unequal society have everything to gain from equality of conditions.

These are liberal values: Resurrect justice first. Tear down the paradoxes that make life goals at the expense of others. Tear down this vile institution of man-against-man, we are pursuing human happiness, we are not animals. Mend our national spirit.

Touch the future.

 

 

Notes 1. Terkel, S. (1972) Working NY: New Press  2. Ehrenreich, B. (2005) Bait and switch NY: Metropolitan Books  3. Lane, R. (2004) The fear of equality, in Political psychology Eds. J. Jost, N. Sidanius. NY: Psychology Press, p. 217.  4. Friedman, M. (1962) Capitalism and freedom Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

 

 

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