Egalitarianism

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Egalitarianism is the trunk root of today's dominant ideologies. It is the source of all modern totalitarianism, as well as the decadence of so-called liberal, democratic societies. Many contemporary political philosophers reject the so-called distributive paradigm of justice, and believe that it should be replaced with the view that, fundamentally, justice is about social relations.

Definition

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This central dogma of Western ideologies stems from French Revolutionary claims that all men are equal, atoms of moral, political, and social equivalence — and that equality needs to be realised as factual. Egalitarianism is based on a pathological refusal to accept the inegalitarian nature of human societies — that is, it’s a utopian revolt against life itself. Egalitarianism derives from Judaeo-Christian individualism — or, said more exactly, it’s a perversion and secularisation of this individualism. We shouldn’t forget, though, that the egalitarian virus is also found in non-Christian conceptions of the world and that Medieval Christianity knew how to protect itself from it.

Christianity also presupposes that men as individuals are equal before God, that this equality is superior to their differences, to objective inequalities and ethnic attachments. This purely theological and metaphysical view of the world was secularised by the Enlightenment — allegedly ‘anti-Christian’, but in actuality ‘post-Christian’.

In the course of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, egalitarianism evolved from demanding equality of opportunity to demanding equality of results, given the impossibility of actually establishing such a society. Refusing aristocratic principles, which it failed to eliminate, egalitarianism everywhere promotes false elites. It renders natural inequality insupportable, effectively favouring either the law of the jungle or a pervasive bureaucratic tyranny. In refusing an organic, hierarchical vision of society, egalitarianism gives rise to new inequities and does so in the name of justice. To affirm that men are unequal by nature is not an injustice, but a recognition of what is. As Aristotle put it, ‘Justice is based on the observation of things’.

Egalitarianism stems from the perverted spirit that seeks to transform Judaeo-Christian spiritual equality before God into a forced equality before the contingencies of daily life. Ancient Graeco-Roman conceptions of the world, like those of contemporary India, avoided the illusion that men are equivalent, because they rested on a realistic vision of a polycentric, differentiated, and naturally hierarchical universe. Egalitarianism, on the other hand, makes us believe that hierarchy is inherently unjust, though it can’t get rid of it, since it’s part of the nature of things; instead, it denies it, creating in its place even more savage forms of inequality. Egalitarianism is an institutionalised lie. It’s the most humble, paradoxically, who are hurt the most by its imposture, since everywhere the right of excellence is denied and everywhere mediocrities and scoundrels are favoured.

Egalitarianism fails to understand, indeed it despises, the human race, for it privileges a completely abstract conception of man. It leads thus to the astonishing idea that ‘everything is to be valued’, that the crook has as much right — if not more — than an honourable man, that minor art works are as important as the great works, that the most developed civilisations are no better than savage tribes (ethnopluralism), that the citizen has no more rights than the alien, etc. Its days, however, are numbered, for egalitarianism wars on human nature.

In denying differences, as well as individual and collective inequalities — and in treating Man as something almost metaphysical — the West’s dominant egalitarian ideology has produced a totally schizophrenic consciousness. On the one side, the dogma of natural equality, on the other, the blind reality of the natural inequalities of individuals and peoples. It’s perfectly logical, then, that egalitarianism, based on an anthropological lie, culminates in social injustice and totalitarianism.

Egalitarianism is the source of all the evils and the illusions of the modern world. Its perverse, metaphysical, anthropocentric core deifies man and separates him from the animal realm (anthropocentrism). As Spencer and Darwin have shown, the human race is bound like every other animal species to the central fact of existence: inequality. This doesn’t mean that religious issues or man’s spiritual, cosmic dimensions are out of the question, but, as Julius Evola stated, it does mean that men are unequal and lack an intrinsic metaphysical unity.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was a theorist of evolution who was a contemporary of Darwin. It was he who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in his 1864 book, Principles of Biology, to describe Darwin’s idea of natural selection. Darwin himself later adopted Spencer’s term. Spencer also applied Darwin’s theories to the social realm, something Darwin never did.

Equality of opportunity

Equality of opportunity is an egalitarian ideal, but it focuses on the means by which people acquire advantages, rather than on outcomes.

Equality of opportunity is a political ideal according to which participants in some cooperative systems should possess equal access to some advantages at some point in time. According to this ideal, distributive outcomes (e.g., of income, welfare, functionings) should not be fixed in advance, but should result from processes that treat all people equally. Equality of opportunity is an egalitarian ideal, but it focuses on the means by which people acquire advantages, rather than on outcomes. Diverse conceptions of equality of opportunity are distinguished by their different accounts of what it means to possess an equal opportunity, which sorts of advantages people ought to have an equal opportunity to acquire, and which kinds of cooperative activities ought to be regulated by this ideal. In particular, advocates of equality of opportunity disagree about whether equality of opportunity requires only a prohibition on discrimination (e.g., in employment), or whether it also requires efforts to mitigate the influences of some background conditions (e.g., family social status) on distributive outcomes. They also disagree about whether people ought to have an equal opportunity to acquire welfare, resources, functionings, or some combination of these kinds of goods. Finally, advocates of equality of opportunity disagree about whether this ideal should regulate individual choices or only institutional arrangements, and whether it applies only among members of the same society. The concept of equality of opportunity has widespread support across the political spectrum, and therefore most of the critical literature offers objections to particular conceptions of this ideal, rather than to the broader concept of equality of opportunity.

See also

• Individualism
• Identitarianism

Further reading

• William Luther Pierce: Capitalism and Equality, 2000 (Archive)
• Prof. Dr. Jacques de Mahieu: Natur und Kultur – Wider die egalitäre Naturrechtlerei, 2009