Is Equality the Enemy?

there's an old saying that ignorance is bliss when it comes down to it this is the lingering question of the Garden of Eden and it is the question of modernity we could frame it like this would you rather be happier or live in a better world would you rather the ignorant Bliss of Eden or would you like your eyes opened to the knowledge of Good and Evil though this knowledge breaks your heart are modern Faith assumes that these two go together but history and practical experience has taught us otherwise the fruit of the great modern

project of Liberty equality and democracy was not what we had expected like Adam and Eve we expected a sweet Improvement on our former State instead we have found the fruit bitter and now we must toil the hard Earth outside the Eden of our ignorance we expected our material technological and social progress to bring with it progress in happiness and well-being this has not been the case from the American war of of Independence in the French Revolution to the civil rights movement and the Arab Spring the doctrine of equality has brought us closer to the image

of paradise but paradoxically it has left us feeling more and more like hell the Terrible Beauty of modernity has made us more equal but also more hateful more depressed and more envious we keep telling ourselves that if only this were improved or that were improved the Utopia would ensue but few of us believe in this utopian Horizon anymore disoriented we have collapsed into a rudderless crisis where we wholeheartedly embrace the crisis of the day and just as readily move on to the next one tomorrow as our algorithm and feeds demand the cause of today drives

the cause of yesterday from our mind what remains is the feeling of outrage and anger at the state of the world in this episode we're going to look at this mixed Brew of equality and its connection to the previous episode subject resentment we look at the early days of America and how social media has turbocharged our productive discontent in the 21st century when the American War of Independence was concluded America's founding fathers established their new nation and the values of the Enlightenment from Hobs and lock to rouso and voler a new modern worldview emerged into

existence with the modern era the worldview transformed the medieval feudalistic ethic which saw rulers as chosen by God and replaced it with the idea of the social contract whereby these rulers were Servants of the people whose purpose was to ensure the protection and well-being of their subjects thus this attitude changed the way people looked at their leaders and it opened the path to Revolution When leaders failed to uphold their duties another key theme of Enlightenment thought was individualism the English philosopher John Lock emphasized a century before the American Revolution the rights of individuals which he

formed formulated as life liberty and property a phrase that Thomas Jefferson was to slightly adapt when writing the Declaration of Independence to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness the rights of the individual became sacred and the equality of all individuals was a foundational belief of this new Creed Liberty was the enlightenment's dream for her children so long as this Liberty didn't interfere with that of others your freedom to swing your fist as the old saying goes ends at my NOS these two themes converged in the rise of modernity's anointed form of governance democracy while

the founding fathers initially defended themselves against accusations from Europe that their nation was a democracy it's an idea Americans soon came to embrace and in more recent times it's become such an unquestioned good that it justifies the invasion of other nations who must also be liberated whether they like it or not democracy emphasizes the value of of the individual and styles itself as Government of the People by the people as modernity and democracy have matured the enlightenment Promises of Liberty and equality have become increasingly realized in the democratic nations across the world the vote was

extended from the land that Elite to all free men then women slavery was abolished and these freed individuals given more rights after their fair share of struggle to shake the system from its hypocritical slumber where status had been attached to more fixed traits in the hereditary aristocratic hierarchies of the medieval in the modern egalitarian societies one's value in society was no longer determined at Birth now one's achievements as an individual were supposed to determin their status a new era was born of unheard of freedom and possibility social Mobility was possible and the so-called American Dream

wrapped itself around the hearts of Americans and aspiring immigrants from across the world the doctrine of equality quickly took root in The American Nation in 1791 the geographer judia Morse whose son developed Morse code wrote of New England where every man thinks himself at least as good as his neighbors and believes that all mankind have or ought to possess equal rights but it was not long before the Dark Side of equality began to rear its head The Shining Beacon of Liberty and equality at a social level cast a deep and dark shadow at the level

of individual psychology this better world put a heavy burden on the heart of each individual in his 1835 work Democracy in America the French writer Alexis dakal writes about what he has discerned about American society from his travels in the new nation in a chapter titled why the Americans are often so Restless in the midst of their prosperity he writes when all the prerogatives of of birth and Fortune have been abolished when every profession is open to everyone an ambitious man may think it easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he's

been called to no common Destiny but this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects when equality is the general rule in society the greatest inequalities attract no attention but when everything is more or less level the slightest variation is noticed that is the reason for the strange mly often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance and of that disgust with life sometimes gripping them even in calm and easy circumstances the egalitarian democracies of modern times cultivate an attitude of equality in us from the president or prime minister to the men or women on

the street we are all equal this leveling of society unleashes all the tant of envy and inherently unequal Society keeps in check we are drowning in comparison as aland de batan puts it in his book status anxiety the more people we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to the more people there will be to Envy when we were all peasants whose biggest shift in circumstances was a move to another Lord's land this was a non problem but when our siblings and our former classmates or our Facebook friends can become millionaire entrepreneurs or celebrities

or sports stars this ceases to be a trivial problem this is the great Pandora's Box that was opened by the egalitarian Liberty of modern democratic Society in Democracy in America the toille talks about how this shift affected the psychology of servants at first the unlimited possibility brought a cheerfulness but when those delusions of grandeur crashed against the Cliffs of experience for the majority of individuals the mood shifted these servants could no longer be happy simply as servants since the Press and public opinion imprinted on them their ability to become businessmen judges scientists or presidents and

so as the tavil noted As Time passed and the majority failed to pull off this Rise by the bootstraps their mood darkened that bitterness to cold and choked their spirits and their hatred of themselves and their masters grew Fierce this trend towards discontent did not disappear with the generations this may serve to illuminate a quote that we meditated upon in the past and the channel it's what I call the Seligman diagnosis from Martin Seligman who as head of the American Psychological Association founded the positive psychology movement in his 2002 book authentic happiness mounting over the

last 40 years in every wealthy country on the globe there has been a startling increase in depression depression is now 10 times as prevalent as it was in 1960 and it strikes at a much younger age the mean age of a person's first episode of depression 40 years ago was 29.5 while today it is 14.5 years this is a paradox since every objective indicator of well-being purchasing power amount of Education availability of music and nutrition has been going north while every indicator of subjective well-being has been going south how is this epidemic to be explained

in the social dilemma Jonathan height shows how the intervening decades in saligman work has only served to send this pattern into overdrive the sense of comparison which our modern egalitarian worldview birthed and Which democracy universally mandated created a crushing level of comparison in the citizens of this new era social media is not the demon that created the Mental Health crisis it is the technology which took the underlying pattern and Amplified it democratizing the misery of comparison so what are we to do the Middle Ages were no picnic the vast majority of the population of medieval

Europe were peasants they were as Alanda batan put it poor undernourished cold fearful and dead usually following some Agony before their 40th birthdays after a lifetime of work their most expensive possession might have been a cow a goat or a pot famine had never been far away and diseases had been Rife among the most common were rickets ulcers tuberculosis leprosy abscesses gang grein tumors and caners in short medieval life was far from ideal viewed from the outside it was a miserable existence the Surfs they weren't entirely free the most common type of surf the vain

would have to pay their lord for loss of income just to move away to another holding if for example they were unfortunate enough to fall in love with someone outside their Lord's domain the national government or rather the Kingdom's government was know better and all this without mentioning the rather frequent horrors of War despite all this the medieval wasn't entirely worse than the modern era that has followed so says dille who had seen the world from both sides he writes when royal power supported by aristocracies governed Nations Society despite all its wretchedness enjoyed several types

of Happiness which are difficult to appreciate today have you never conceived the possibility of a social state or than the one that they knew and never expecting to become equal to their leaders the people did not question their rights they felt neither repugnance nor degradation in submitting to severities which seemed to them like inevitable ills sent by God the surf considered his inferiority as an effect of the immutable order of nature consequently a sort of Goodwill was established between classes so differently favored by Fortune One found inequality in society but men's Souls were not degraded

thereby with the opening of the Pandora's box of equality two psychological coping strategies have emerged one reaction is to take the Paradigm for granted and to strive to realize the promise of the world of equality this usually entails working as hard as we can at jobs we don't particularly like and filling the void of our falling short of our ideal with all the nice things that signal to others that we've reached it houses cars holidays handbags or saunas we plunge ourselves into debt so we can at least create an illusion of running a good race

in short keeping up with the Joneses the other option is resentment the problem isn't equality assumes the mind of resentment the problem is that equality hasn't been fully realized the problem is that the world is still unjustly in equal for things to be justly arranged according to equality and Liberty then things would be better people would be happy and so filled with with hatred for the injustices for the hypocritical machine we try to change it we protest we sing songs about better worlds and of rich men north of Richmond and content ourselves with the knowledge

that maybe we are good enough but the world isn't those with more money more connections the right gender skin color nationality or Creed succeed because this world is built for them if only the world were truly equal then we could all be content but if the argument of this video is sound in both of these approaches the American dreamer and the resentment full activist are working off false premises they are blinded by the value of Liberty and equality they think that a little more salt water will quench their thirst but what if they are wrong

what if equality is the obstacle not the way the dream of Thomas Jefferson was to create an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent to replace the old aristocracy of privilege seen from the vantage point of General happiness this dream embodies the worst of Both Worlds the end result is a world of inequality where the majority are miserable in the Jeffersonian Utopia those with the highest IQ have the competitive Advantage the aristocratic order is still fixed at Birth but one must wait to see how the chips will land of course it's not so simple

as that an individual with higher trait industriousness I.E more temperamentally inclined to hard work will outperform their similarly intelligent peers and so in this aristocracy of virtue and talent we are incentivized to sacrifice more and more for this talent and virtue one status in such a meritocracy is never guaranteed it is always precarious and so we are incentivized to sacrifice that which doesn't Advance us the moments of small talk and silence and gossip that once bound our communities together have been optimized out victims of the modern fetish against friction victims of the scrambling for the

peak that the status anxiety of equality drives us to as any soldier of resentment will tell you we do not live in a world where the aristocracy of privilege has been dissolved inherited wealth connections and pigmentation still account for much of our upper ulence but we live in enough of an approximation to Jefferson's Utopia to realize its costs in a world of Instagram and Linkedin we are as Yates put it sick with desire and fascin to a dying animal we're playing a game in which there must be losers and we're playing at a scale where

the winners are warped by their success into something more like a machine than a human technology has turbocharged the egalitarian dystopia of the Enlightenment of value system and so here we stand behind us a medieval world of inequality disease and deprivation around us a world of sci-fi abundance which amounts to nothing more than the old water water everywhere but not a drop to drink our modern value system tells us that what we need is more equality more Liberty we live in a better world but we've never been more miserable and so we've returned to our

open question the value of Eden's fruit from the outside there is no comparison Modern Life has overabundant food air conditioning and Automobiles we have smartphones refrigerators and low infant mortality rates the medieval by comparison had none of these things seen from the inside however a different story emerges while the material externalities might fool us it's not obvious that modern humans are any happier than medieval humans we live in a better world of this there is no doubt we have all the material benefits of progress and we have all the social benefits of progress the liberty

and equality we've been harping on a bit but we live in a world where suicide is the second biggest killer of men which we live in a world where depression and self harm are affecting more people and at younger ages we live in a world of abundance but like the Buddhist realm of hungry ghosts we are unable to gain an ounce of satisfaction from this and even if we could change the State of Affairs it is unclear that we ought to if we value our survival This Modern capitalist Society by its very dedication to growth

at the cost of the individual can has and does outcompete every other social Arrangement at least over the short to midterm this evolutionary Force pushes us even Beyond this planet we are it seems victims of a nature that as Tennison put it is r in tooth and Claw our contentment is a sacrifice at the altar of evolutionary competition it seems that we are the victims of a fian impact we have truth and power and a Freer world but inside our souls have become deserts we know that the economy must grow but it's no longer clear

why if it's not making a happier world then why other than survival what is the purpose of it all what are we doing here that's everything for this episode of the living philosophy I'd like to thank David Pelosi andopa and all the other Patron for their support of the channel you like to get access to bonus content monthly q&as and get your name in the credits Like These Fine people then you can head over to patreon as ever if you have any thoughts insights or feedback I'd love to hear from you down in the comments

otherwise I should see you next time thank you for watching