Stefan Stackhouse
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

The reality is that we are not really “equal” in the way that bolts in a bin at the hardware store are equal. Instead, we are all unique individuals, each with different personalities, talents, skills, interests, values, and so on. Rather than denying the reality of our differences, wouldn’t it make more sense to celebrate, preserve, and nurture these? This is one of the basic flaws in the whole socialist ideology. A healthy and optimally productive society is going to be rich in diversity, just as is a healthy and optimally productive ecosystem.

What we want is not so much “equality,” but rather kindness. Every human being, no matter how different from ourselves, really should be treated with a certain basic level of kindness of all. There are abundant justifications for this premise, regardless of whether one looks at Jesus’s Golden Rule (or similar statements by Hillel, Confucius, etc.), Kant’s Categorical Imperative, or even Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation. It really is not kind to deny and suppress the natural and inevitable differences that exist between us. Ultimately, it is just plain stupid, for it not only prevents each individual from living their own lives to their fullest potential, but also deprives the wider society of that potential contribution to its own economic and cultural enrichment.

Kindness, of course, does require the recognition that among our differences there exist those who are not so richly blessed, and must struggle through life with various disabilities, both physical and mental. Again, there is abundant justification for treating such people with compassion, and finding some way to help them to the extent that help is required to enable them to live their lives under the conditions that most of us would consider to be at least minimally acceptable. There are multiple possible solutions to this problem, ranging from those that largely rely upon voluntary compassion to those that involve centralized welfare bureaucracies. I doubt that any society has yet come up with a perfect formula, but enough different experiments have been tried at this point to begin to discern what the best practices are. These tend to cluster in the middle, and feature both a primary reliance upon organized — and, crucially, officially encouraged and facilitated — voluntary compassion combined with a comprehensive governmental safety net that is designed with care to be humane (rather than a faceless and careless deadening bureaucracy), to preserve people’s dignity (especially by encouraging and facilitating those who need help to help themselves to the extent that they can), and to balance these with the need to keep the financial burden upon the rest of society as light as possible. This is very hard to do, but societies can come close if they really make it a priority and put their very best minds to work on it. That, unfortunately, in no way describes the U.S. at the present time.

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    Stefan Stackhouse

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