[sergefaguet]

All this discussion automatically assumes that inequality is bad and equality is good. This is a subjective opinion. One that does not get nearly enough questioning nowadays.

I would argue that what is good is the presence of happiness and absence of suffering for conscious minds. Less famine, less disease, less war. And that it is not at all certain that equality helps these objectives.

Inequality can be described as one of the major drivers and consequences of progress that has in fact lifted all boats.

And if the best way for society to progress is to be extremely unequal and dictatorial (e.g. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore in modern time; an AI-driven superdictatorship in the future; the Medici family launching the Renaissance in Florence in the distant past) then equality, democracy etc. should go away.

The best thinking on this subject recently came from Yuval Harari. Humans are biochemical machines that process information according to the laws of physics. So – what possible reason is there for us to value these biochemical machines all earning the same number of points on some abstract metric? And what happens when we build better machines? Or clone one person a trillion times?

The idea that equality to another human matters as much (or more) than technological progress, biological immortality, understanding the universe etc. is a fucking stupid remnant of our monkey ego. That cannot bear the idea that another monkey has more bananas or female monkeys.

fuck equality.

[notacoward]

When you ignore degrees of in/equality, you're basically setting up a false dichotomy. Exact equality might be unhealthy, but so is the drastic inequality of the old aristocracy or (more arguably) the new one. As with many things, the extremes are stagnant end states, but they have their own sort of gravity (think "attractors" in chaos theory). Life is found in between.

> The idea that equality to another human matters as much ... is a fucking stupid remnant of our monkey ego.

Well, sorry, but it's not going away. Study after study has shown that relative affluence, not absolute affluence or any other factor, is one of the strongest predictors of happiness. In other words, relative privation is a predictor of unhappiness. It might not be suffering but, nonetheless, if you want to offer a superficial and unacknowledged restatement of utilitarianism ("the greatest good for the greatest number") then you have to consider what actually makes people who are not you happy or unhappy.

[roel_v]

Re your last paragraph, well yeah, it sucks, but it's what we have to live/work with. So while it would be nice to live in a parallel universe where it doesn't matter ('it' = inequality), the current reality is that it does.

[heroyang]

Egalitarianism is the great unexamined principle of our age. Attack egalitarianism and much of progressive ideology falls apart.