“EQUALITY”

Without merit “equity” is “iniquity.”

“If you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. It’s a distortion of nature, it goes against God’s laws, for in all the world’s woods and forests He did not create a single leaf the same as another.”  [Paulo Coelho]

“…when we say that all pennies are equal, we do not mean that they all look exactly the same. We mean that they are absolutely equal in their one absolute character, in the most important thing about them. It may be put practically by saying that they are coins of a certain value, twelve of which go to a shilling. It may be put symbolically, and even mystically, by saying that they all bear the image of the King. And, though the most mystical, it is also the most practical summary of equality that all men bear the image of the King of Kings. Indeed, it is of course true that this idea had long underlain all Christianity, even in institutions less popular in form than were, for instance, the mob of mediæval republics in Italy.” [G K Chesterton]

The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.

The choice has been made clear by those thirsting to throw themselves into the cut throat commerce of “global finance” (which is the negation of national citizenship) …

“The sovereignty of the individual is sacred, and … that the fundamental linkage between the pathology of the state and the psychology of the individual is the individual’s propensity to self-deceive him or herself and adopt an in-authentic mode of being and action.” [Jordan Peterson]

or … “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie,” [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]

This message is critical for the individual in all the disciplines mentioned above – in all their personal “politics”, “religion”, “psychology and or philosophy” .

“The Christian is called, not to individualism but to membership in the mystical Body. A consideration of the differences between the secular collective and the mystical Body is therefore the first step to understanding how Christianity without being individualistic can yet counteract collectivism.” [C S Lewis]

Most sensible people would probably agree with me that minority groups are under
shameful tyranny by the impersonal systems of politics and finance. But I want to destroy the tyranny of the collectivism. The collectivists want to destroy the variety or difference.

No society can be open without also being unequal.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

“Liberty and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts. Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty – for how else could it be attained?” [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]

“As competition means always similarity, it is equally true that similarity always means inequality.” [G K Chesterton]

“It is obviously true that in any unequal society, life is easier for some people than for others, both as groups and as individuals. This is unfair, but as Thomas Sowell has long pointed out, the quest for cosmic justice is both totalitarian in implication and can lead only to continual sifting of the entrails of group and individual disparities, a sifting that itself promotes resentment in both individuals and groups, as well as conflict. … Open societies have this great disadvantage: that they force you to look at your own part in your situation. … you are forced to confront your own ineptitude, lack of talent, bad choices from an early age, etc., etc. It is much easier to deny that your society is an open one, and then sink back into a mixture of apathy, politicking, and continuation of immediately gratifying but ultimately self-destructive bad habits.” [T Dalrymple]

The puzzle, or mystery, of good and evil remains, – We each make ourselves, certainly—but from the earthern clay (body and soul), and with the inherent potential treasure (spirit) that we were born with.

“It is the fallacy of sup-positing that because an idea is greater in the sense of larger, therefore it is greater in the sense of more fundamental and fixed and certain. If a man lives alone in a straw hut in the middle of Tibet, he may be told that he is living in the Chinese Empire; and the Chinese Empire is certainly a splendid and spacious and impressive thing. Or alternatively he may be told that he is living in the British Empire, and be duly impressed. But the curious thing is that in certain mental states he can feel much more certain about the Chinese Empire that he can not see than about the straw hut that he can see.” [G K Chesterton]

“The more our culture steeps in the cross, even when it consciously rejects the Church, the more we feel that each person deserves dignity, no matter how small or weak. We begin to see that we perform a lie when we cage nonviolent people, the imprisonment falsely accusing them of the violence of which we are guilty in placing them there.” [David Gornoski]

One of the more discreetly defended pleasures of hypocrites, is the appearance of inclusiveness through the policing of exclusion.

“Now, the psychological discovery is merely this, that whereas it had been supposed that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our ego to infinity, the truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing our ego to zero.” [G K Chesterton]

“There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature. Inequality as much as equality implies a standard of value. To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it. Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals; the one saying that all men are valuable, the other saying that some men are more valuable. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have a doctrine about what things are superior.” [G K Chesterton] – It’s hard to see why minds that were shaped by unguided processes could “naturally select” without a pre-existing scale of measurement or pre-existing value to do any comparison for making , what must be, a “guided selection”.

“Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down.  A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light.  If Light be in itself good–” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down.  All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality.

But as things go on they do not work out so easily.  Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil.  Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.” [G K Chesterton]

“The State may do nothing but that which is expressly authorised by law, while the individual may do anything but that which is forbidden by law”[Entick –v- Carrington 1765]

“One think to rule them all

One think to mind them

One think to group them all

And in the “safe-space” bind them” [Benjamin A Boyce].

“It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden— that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong those moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc. are simply a waste of time.” [C S Lewis]

The semantic dimension of this dilemma was identified by the Franco-Swiss political philosopher Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) who, like Lewis, was deeply troubled by collective notions of freedom. In “The Liberty of Ancients Compared to That of Moderns” (1816), Constant warned, [W]e can no longer enjoy the liberty of the ancients, which consisted in an active and constant participation in collective power. Our freedom must consist of peaceful enjoyment and private independence.… Individual liberty … is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable. But to ask the peoples of our day to sacrifice, like those of the past, the whole of their individual liberty to political liberty, is the surest means of detaching them from the former and, once this result has been achieved, it would be only too easy to deprive them of the latter. [Steven Gillen]

Premise – “But the function of equality is purely protective (the only defense against one another’s cruelty). It is medicine, not food. By treating human persons (in judicious defiance of the observed facts) as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils. But it is not on this that we were made to live. It is idle to say that all men are of equal value. If value is taken in a worldly sense – if we mean that all men are equally useful or beautiful or good or entertaining – then it is nonsense. If it means that all are of equal value as immortal souls then I think it conceals a dangerous error. The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value He perceived in him. The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is zero. As St Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would have been not divine but merely heroic; but God died for sinners. He loves us not because we were loveable but because He is Love. It may be that He loves all equally – He certainly loved all to the death – and I am not certain what the expression means.” [C S Lewis -Membership p20-21]

Conclusion – “Equality” is a quantitative term and therefore our knowledge of Love often knows nothing of it. If there such a thing as “equality” it exists only in God’s love for each of us, not in us.” [C S Lewis -Membership p20-21]

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” I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.“

” You were mistaken; that is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes- that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.”[C S Lewis – That Hideous Strength]

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“In resisting this horrible theory of the Soul of the Hive, we of Christendom stand not for ourselves, but for all humanity; for the essential and distinctive human idea that one good and happy man is an end in himself, that a soul is worth saving. … It is more to the point, however, to urge that this mere glorification of society as it is in the social insects is a transformation and a dissolution in one of the outlines which have been specially the symbols of man. In the cloud and confusion of the flies and bees is growing fainter and fainter, as is finally disappearing, the idea of the human family.”

GKC explains, from the point of view of “the individual”, not from the “collectivist” perspective which, like the French Revolutionaries, does not see “that abstract” form of “justice” as the Christian God but an impersonal abstract force, “There has risen high in recent history an important cultus which bids fair to be the religion of the future–which means the religion of those few weak-minded people who live in the future.  It is typical of our time that it has to look for its god through a microscope;” and it encourages an admiration, one might also say an envy, of the “collective spirituality”; of the fact that we should live only for something which we would call “the Soul of the Hive” if we saw it for what it is. 

“The Revolution appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all local custom or convenience.

If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion; he did not attack the Robespierre doctrine with the old mediaeval doctrine of jus divinum (which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic), he attacked it with the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short, the argument of evolution.  He suggested that humanity was everywhere moulded by or fitted to its environment and institutions; in fact, that each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the tyrant it ought to have. “I know nothing of the rights of men,” he said, “but I know something of the rights of Englishmen.”  There you have the essential atheist. His argument is that we have got some protection by natural accident and growth; and why should we profess to think beyond it, for all the world as if we were the images of God!”

Historically, GKC is pointing out that, a “theological, as well as, an intellectual,” attack against Christian religion had been mounted before Darwinism presumptuously and arrogantly placed  an intellectual seal of approval on, what was actually a “theological” attack that it had no intellectual or theological reasonable support for.

“Thus, long before Darwin struck his great blow at democracy, the essential of the Darwinian argument had been already urged against the French Revolution.  Man, said Burke in effect, must adapt himself to everything, like an animal; he must not try to alter everything, like an angel. The last weak cry of the pious, pretty, half-artificial optimism and deism of the eighteenth century came in the voice of Sterne, saying, “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.” And Burke, the iron evolutionist, essentially answered, “No; God tempers the shorn lamb to the wind.”  It is the lamb that has to adapt himself.  That is, he either dies or becomes a particular kind of lamb who likes standing in a draught.”

“The real instinct was much deeper and much more valuable. It was this:  that when once one begins to think of man as a shifting and alterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to twist him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes.

When at long intervals of the centuries Christendom grows weak, … when the hive has become larger than the house, and the bees are destroying their captors; when, what the locust hath left, the caterpillar hath eaten;and the little house and garden of our friend Jones is in a bad way … and morbid or sceptical, and mysterious Asia begins to move against us her dim populations and to pour them westward like a dark movement of matter,

And when, as it is said in the Far East, it is said in the West, that, “Patriotism is its only religion”; or, in other words, that we live only for the Soul of the Hive, then that busy destructiveness, in the black nihilism of personal outlook, in its hateful indifference to individual life and love, in the base belief in mere numbers, in the pessimistic courage and atheistic patriotism, we, like those riders and raiders of the East, also, now for the first time, will be worshipping as well as fear; we will also be worshipping and tracing with adoration that enormous form advancing vast and vague out of Asia, faintly discernible amid the mystic clouds of winged creatures hung over the wasted lands, thronging the skies like thunder and discolouring the skies like rain; Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies.

Nay, for those who like such biological fancies it might well be said that we stand as chiefs and champions of a whole section of nature, princes of the house whose cognizance is the backbone, standing for the milk of the individual mother and the courage of the wandering cub, representing the pathetic chivalry of the dog, the humour and perversity of cats, the affection of the tranquil horse, the loneliness of the lion.  It is more to the point, however, to urge that this mere glorification of society as it is in the social insects is a transformation and a dissolution in one of the outlines which have been specially the symbols of man. In the cloud and confusion of the flies and bees is growing fainter and fainter, as is finally disappearing, the idea of the human family.”

” [G K Chesterton – Whats Wrong with the World with my additions]

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“Shigalov is a man of genius! Do you know he is a genius like Fourier, but bolder than Fourier; stronger. I’ll look after him. He’s discovered ‘equality ‘!”

“He’s written a good thing in that manuscript,” Verhovensky went on. “He suggests a system of spying. Every member of the society spies on the others, and it’s his duty to inform against them. Every one belongs to all and all to every one. All are slaves and equal in their slavery. In extreme cases he advocates slander and murder, but the great thing about it is equality. To begin with, the level of education, science, and talents is lowered. A high level of education and science is only possible for great intellects, and they are not wanted. The great intellects have always seized the power and been despots. Great intellects cannot help being despots and they’ve always done more harm than good. They will be banished or put to death. Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned—that’s Shigalovism. Slaves are bound to be equal. There has never been either freedom or equality without despotism, but in the herd there is bound to be equality, …”

“Down with culture. We’ve had enough science! Without science we have material enough to go on for a thousand years, but one must have discipline. The one thing wanting in the world is discipline. The thirst for culture is an aristocratic thirst. The moment you have family ties or love you get the desire for property. We will destroy that desire; we’ll make use of drunkenness, slander, spying; we’ll make use of incredible corruption; we’ll stifle every genius in its infancy. We’ll reduce all to a common denominator! Complete equality!”

[Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Devils]

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The first sign of “collective” or “marxist” (SJW) influence in any institution is that the “managers” … “constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” [T S Eliot]

“Truth is the way we do life, not what we think or believe. Our life situation and our way or relating to  others is the “truth” [Richard Rohr]

“The target that Truth is aiming at is Reality.”[Prof. Dallas Willard]

An End to Isms: Adam J MacLeod teaches law at Faulkner University in Alabama and he has noticed that his students know very little, are incapable of critical thinking, appear to think their “feelings” are of interest to others, and regard labels such as “racist” and “classist” as dispositive. So he put them on notice that he would be undoing their dis-education:

Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how to rid yourself of unreason…

Reasoning requires you to understand truth claims, even truth claims that you think are false or bad or just icky. Most of you have been taught to label things with various “isms” which prevent you from understanding claims you find uncomfortable or difficult.

Reasoning requires correct judgment. Judgment involves making distinctions, discriminating. Most of you have been taught how to avoid critical, evaluative judgments by appealing to simplistic terms such as “diversity” and “equality…”

One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”

Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above all others, diversity and equality. These are important values if properly understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much diversity as possible and that equality means that everyone must be made equal. But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when you say that we should have diversity and equality you are saying we should have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot be different and the same at the same time in the same way…

Third, you should not bother to tell us how you feel about a topic. Tell us what you think about it. If you can’t think yet, that’s O.K.. Tell us what Aristotle thinks, or Hammurabi thinks, or H.L.A. Hart thinks. Borrow opinions from those whose opinions are worth considering. As Aristotle teaches us in the reading for today, men and women who are enslaved to the passions, who never rise above their animal natures by practicing the virtues, do not have worthwhile opinions.

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“Gender ideology is the ‘height of absurdity’ –  “The idea that in the last five years we’ve discovered what gender really is, is the height of absurdity.” [Jordan Peterson]

Logically, if you were an atheist socialist multi-billionaire worried about the earth becoming overpopulated, and you had sufficient power and influence to introduce “population control” and you wanted to do it in such a way that the population being controlled do not realize that it is actually population control being introduced, how would you do it?

Wouldn’t you forcefully introduce concepts that would encourage, reward and confirm to that population that they should re-define the reality involved in all aspects of procreation in such a way that it makes them think that actually male is not really male, female is not really female and you can change your gender whenever you feel like it?

No…, surely you would be contradicting thousands of years of settled biology, science and factually proven reality, that would never work, ….wait a minute !!!!