Thursday, January 21, 2010

Equality

Oh, drawn into the stream
Of undefined illusion
Those diamond dreams
They can't disguise the truth
--Level 42

Drawn from Hayek, probably the most lucid elaboration of the competing notions of equality that I've seen:

"[Individualism] can see no reason for trying to make people equal as distinct from treating them equally. While individualism is profoundly opposed to all prescriptive privilege, to all protection, by law or force, of any rights not based on rules equally applicable to all persons, it also denies government the right to limit what the able or fortunate may achieve. It is equally opposed to any rigid limitation of the position individuals may achieve, whether this power is used to perpetuate inequality or to create equality. Its main principle is that no man or group of men should have the power to decide what another man's status ought to be, and it regards this as a condition of freedom so essential that it must not be sacrificed to the gratification of our sense of justice or of our envy.

"If all men were completely equal in their gifts and inclinations, we should have to treat them differently in order to achieve any sort of social organization. Fortunately, they are not equal; and it is only owing to this that the differentiation of functions need not be determined by the arbitrary decision of some organizing will but that, after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level...There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal."

How one views the notion of equality (equal treatment under the rules versus different rules in the name of trying to make people equal) profoundly shapes framework for sensemaking.

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