On equality
Read time: 15 minutes
Equality is a touchy subject.
After all, people have been slaves for hundreds of years.
The world, since birth, has witnessed the human animal be more ferocious with his own species than with any other.
We’ve seen the “3 tiers “of humans.
#1 The peasant – Those who are neither too rich, nor too poor.
They have their freedom (both legally and financially), yet they have no real power in the world.
#2 The slave – Those who are poor financially and the exact opposite of free.
It’s not their choice at all whether to be a slave or not.
Those people, over the years have been sold like a bag of grains.
#3 The lord – The buyer and the seller of slaves.
The landowner.
That human trying to play God with other people’s lives.
Most of us probably aspire towards a world where we have “real” equality.
That, my dear friends, is simply not as easy as we would like it to be.
Sure, we’re all human.
Sure, we’re all equal in our potential, but we are definitely not equal in our opportunities and what kind of life we have access to during this lifetime.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” - George Orwell by Animal Farm
Why We Don’t Have Equality Now
To understand this huge subject, we need to understand a few important things first.
First up, we got to acknowledge a few things about the world we live in.
Not judge, just acknowledge.
1. Nature is not designed based on equality.
We all know about natural selection.
Humans have evolved over much more time than we have had the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Again, no need to judge, but what we should do is acknowledge that humanity has always tried to “one up” one another.
This is not necessarily an inherently bad thing.
It obviously has brought us hundreds of wars, but it has also brought us electricity, technology and cheap smartphones.
2. Where you are dictates what opportunities, you have access to
Someone living in a village with less than 500 people will by no means have as much access to resources as people living in huge cities with over 15.000.000 citizens.
That’s just how it is at the moment.
The mere location of where you are highly dictates what you are able to get to know, where you get to go, what you to get to see and what kind of opportunities lie in your short-term future.
We can’t point fingers to say it’s someone’s parents’ fault for not wishing to move out of the countryside, or it’s the people’s fault for wanting a better life for their children and investing in the development of the resource hub called “a city”.
The mere access to transportation, to get to a place where you at least have the CHANCE to have access to resources such as healthcare, education and internet is the bare minimum we could do.
3. Equality is a human construct
" Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal? Are all humans equal to one another biologically? Let us try to translate the most famous line of the American Declaration of Independence into biological terms:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
According to the science of biology, people were not created’. They have evolved.
And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’. The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian
myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a
somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that
carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently’.
Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals.
‘Endowed by their creator’ should be translated simply into ‘born.
Equally, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings. And it’s not true that these organs, abilities and characteristics are ‘unalienable’. Many of them undergo constant mutations, and
may well be completely lost over time.
The ostrich is a bird that lost its ability to fly. So ‘unalienable rights’ should be translated into ‘mutable characteristics.
And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? ‘Life’, certainly. But ‘liberty’? There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that
humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree.
And what about ‘happiness’? So far biological research has failed to come
up with a clear definition of happiness or a way to measure it objectively.
Most biological studies acknowledge only the existence of pleasure, which is more easily defend and measured. So ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ should be translated into ‘life and the pursuit of pleasure’. " – “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari
Why Equality Is Really Hard to Achieve
Do you want to pay for the smartphone you have, but spend twice as much as you did?
Are you willing to get the clothes you bought, but pay 10 times more?
Do you want your vegetables to cost twice your salary every week?
I’m pretty sure the answer is simply not.
We must understand that paying for cheap things means someone in the production chain of a particular good is really not getting paid that much and chances are they may even be a minor, or a bellow minimum wage worker.
Is it your fault that they have to work for such a shitty pay?
Not quite, but it is your fault if you fail to stay informed and do an educated purchase.
I love my cheap stuff as much as the next person, but we have to remember what the actual price of cheap goods really is.
“The International Labor Organization estimated in 2012 that worldwide there were 168 million children laborers.
It also estimated that of all the people in modern slavery around the world around 25 per cent were children.
Thus, ILO estimates that around 5.5 million children at this moment live their lives as slaves.” – Dexter Dias “Ten Types of human”
You are reading this blog post, but there’s people that not only don’t even have access to the internet, but they don’t even know about electricity, heating or running water.
That’s a real problem.
Our mere setbacks are nothing compared to the lives some of us have to endure.
Sure, you could just give them more money, more opportunities, more education, but not really.
You see, the people who are secluded from the lifestyles of the XXI century are definitely not in plain sight, on the side of the road of a very busy street of a huge mega-city.
They are the usual people in the poor countries with very low literacy rates.[1]
In order to bring opportunities to them, you first need to be able to send resources, which the infrastructure doesn’t allow.
Even if they sacrificed everything and left their whole existence behind, it would still be at the border of impossible for an average citizen of those countries to get a proper education, leave the country, or even get to read a blog post on the internet.
As much as we would like to blame the failure of brining equality to all of humanity, we are as much to blame as “the people with money”.
We dictate the markets; we are the ones who choose where are money goes.
We are the ones with power, even if you’d rather not take the responsibility.
Creating the Future of Equality
We simply can’t, as a species stay put in such problems.
Humanity has already lived through the most stupid quarrels started from ridiculous issues such as skin color, sex difference, difference in what side of a border we occupy and so forth.
Existence (outside of our little planet) has a lot of bigger problems for us.
We simply can not operate like this for the long term.
Humanity MUST adapt towards a more unified species, an equal species, a planet wide tribe that is ready to cooperate fully, adapt and work together to solve the real issues that we are about to face.
I hope that YOU are also able to see the benefits that will come from the world of equality, that you can also envision what kind of problems we could seriously battle.
I hope you share my enthusiasm for a world where every one of the 7+ billion people on earth is ready and able to help battling cancer, aging, pollution, traveling into the depths of the sea, finding a new place to call home outside of earth, advancing science by travelling outside of our galaxy and oh so much more.
BUT.
BUT that world is not here NOW.
We must work and cooperate between ourselves to CREATE that future.
The stone of responsibility is upon you now, my friend.
You are part of the leading community of this village called humanity.
The only thing you have to be willing to do is tackle the problem… and you’re not alone in this.
We are an army of global citizen already working to bring that future in the now.
I will ask you, then to help.
In whichever way you choose to be fit.
Whatever you feel is appropriate for you, whatever your best investment of time, money, connections, or other resources is appropriate for your life, just help.
If you don’t know where to start, I’ll advise you to start here.
Donate to at least once, or even better, make a recurring donation to one of the following 2 things:
1. Donate for a charity helping children
2. Donate for a charity that spreads education
If we don’t invest in our children and their knowledge in the future, we really are a hopeless species.
I really don’t care what you donate for, but if you need some help, I’ll leave a link or two after this videos that I hope will convince you if you’re not yet convinced.
For whoever has read so far and seriously is still on the fence about this, I just want you to know that it’s fine.
It’s completely understandable, but I have only one question for you:
If it was your child’s future and education on the line, what would YOU want others to do?