Unveiling Egality
How would the world change if our fundamental orientation towards one another is about mutual flourishing and helping all life on this planet thrive?
Unveiling Egality
So long as people believe that some deserve to have more than others, there will be suffering. – Author Unknown
These words have haunted me for a decade, and to this day, I cannot locate the author of the quote. While this quote seems to be simple, in time I came understand just how profound it really is. Have you ever thought about how you use the word deserve? That there appears to be three basic parts? Who is deserving, what is deserved and for what reason they are deserving. But really much more is happening under the surface of what deserve does. For instance, when we say someone deserves to get paid 10 times as much as someone else. What is happening? We have asserted that a person or group of people are more deserving of money than others are. We have created two groups or a hierarchy in some cases of who is deserving of more pay and who is undeserving. Not only that, but there is an ethical standard that everyone should get a fair and equal pay as the normal ethical rule. But when we invoke deservedness, we will say that the general rule of fairness can be suspended so that an individual or group can get special treatment and exemption from the general rule. This is not incidental. It is essential to a deservedness claim.
Think about punishment. We say that someone deserves to be punished for a crime. For simplicity, let’s just say the punishment is a lashing. The general ethical rule is to do no harm to others, but we will make an exception to the general ethical rule in order to allow a punishment to take place. We have determined who is deserving of this exception and that there is some quality that this person has that determines that they are deserving.
To formalize this process consider the following:
Desert claims:
Subject: The social construct that has a desert claim: man, race, position (CEO), credential, etc.
Implied: Other groups are undeserving
Claim: The socially constructed object that is being claimed as deserved: money, prestige, punishment, reward, resources
Implied: moral worth that allows a desert claim can often imply the desert claim crosses domains of what is claimed. By having a desert claim to money, prestige can also be claimed.
Ethical rule to be suspended: what rules of morality or ethics is being suspended to make the claim be deserved by the subject.
Implied: Other non deserving groups must still follow the ethical or moral rules
Justification: the socially constructed quality the subject either has inherently or has acquired that gives them the justification for the desert claiming
Implied: other qualities do not rise to meet the necessary condition to make the desert claim.
Enforcement: What institution exists to enforce the desert claim: police, army, banks, government, law
Implied: If you do not have the backing of enforcement, you can make a desert claim, but it will not be allowed to have validity.
What I am asserting is that there are 10 basic parts of a desert claim that are important to understand what is happening. There is who or what group is deserving, which categorically implies that those not in the group are not deserving within the specific deservedness claim. One might make the point that more than one person or group can be deserving of the specified claim (which we will get to in a moment), but that does not mean that others are not undeserving. So multiple groups being deserving simply makes a set of groups being deserving and there can be a set of undeserving groups. To say that everyone and everything is deserving of some valuable thing is to not be invoking a desert claim as the word should or ought works just as effectively.
The Claim is what it is that is deserved. This can be anything that can be taken from others or the natural world or from the recipient of the desert claim. From services to goods, from conceptual ideas like respect or dignity to freedom and liberty. The implied part of this part of a desert claim is not so easily established and sometimes is not invoked. But often desert claims for one valued commodity are transferable to other valued commodities. For instance claiming that one deserves to have more money often comes with the implied status and respect that accompanies wealth.
The ethical rule suspended is not a step that can be skipped, but one that can often be difficult to ascertain. Often the easiest way to identify the ethical principle is to ask what do the undeserving have to continue to do in while the party that is deserving no longer is held to the same ethical rule. Usually it is about equal or fair treatment.
The justification is the reason given why the individual or group is deserving of the suspension of the normal ethical rule so that they claim privilege, special treatment or other exception to the general ethical rule. Implied is that other individuals or groups do not have enough of the special quality to make the claim. It is important to understand here that what ever the justification is, it is always a socially constructed quality that is assigned to the subject to be worthy of the exception to the general ethical rule to get the desired good.
Last is that there must be an enforcement mechanism. To illustrate this imagine going into a restaurant and saying “I deserve to have a sandwich with fries and a drink.” The clerk would look at you like you are crazy and say, “that will be $10.” If you have no enforcement of your desert claim it is little more than a rude request. More on this in a future article.
Yes. It took this long just to describe one aspect. But bear with me for one last part about deservedness before we can get to egality. When you think about what is happening with the word deserve, you will realize that it is a much larger part of your life than you think. It is the reason you get paid whatever salary you get paid. It is the reason the country you live in is rich or poor. It is the reason that the occupation you have is given the value it has by the culture at large. It is what is assigned as the fine you get for an overdraft at your bank or what your deserved punishment is for speeding. It is in every part of your life. It takes place in your mind before you perceive everything and informs you as how you should assign value to everything. While it does not have to happen this way, for most of us it does.
A note on the terminology: The word “egality” is my re-coining of an older English word that was derived from the French word égalité which has connections to the French revolution and ideals of social and political equality. The word has some very limited use presently and it seems others have also begun to use it defined as “an extreme leveling of society”. Throughout this article, future posts and the book project, it should be understood that egality has a specific theoretical meaning as the antithesis of deservedness ideology.
The transformation of society is what egality aims to bring about. Yet to do so, requires we look deeply at deservedness ideology and understand the terrain. But to fully understand egality requires that we fully understand deservedness and deservedness ideology which is why we took a look at it from the start of this article. To give a quick concise definition of egality is like taking a blank sheet of paper and drawing the outline of a country and handing it to someone and saying egality is here. It must be understood in context of its opposite. To understand egality is similar to what Naomi Shihab Nye says in her famous poem Kindness when she says:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Egality is the dialectical antithesis to the belief that some deserve to have more than others. When the definition of something depends on it’s antithesis it creates a relationship dependence on what it aims to negate. A striking parallel comes from Taoism when it makes the point that justice has no meaning until one also understands injustice; thus only when injustice prevails does justice become a meaningful concept. Only when goodness is no longer present do we notice the space it leaves empty. This is an important understanding for egality. It only makes sense to discover egality when deservedness ideology has taken root in a culture.
Establishing egality as the antithesis of deservedness creates a negative dialectic.* Egality does not go halfway and say that everyone deserves to have the same amount because of some quality. It lays bare that the deservedness claim itself is a suspension of normal ethical rules and is thus itself invalid. That when we see how normal rules of fairness, equal treatment and other ethical and moral standards get overridden it then opens the space to look for alternative ways to create new systems of thinking about how we live when the absence of desert claims is a lived reality. We can then look at need from a new perspective. We look at what motivates us from perspectives other than greed.
When we look at deservedness ideology we discover it creates hierarchy by differentiating just how deserving groups and individuals are or how undeserving they are. Egality looks to make this a conscious process that we pay attention to. That when we say “I deserve a break.” we begin to recognize that this way of saying things implies others do not deserve a break. Through the lens of egality we ask “Why do I deserve a break? What qualities do I have that make me deserving of a break? Just how deserving of a break am I compared to someone else?” That it is categorically different from saying “I need a break.” or “I should take a break.”
Buddhism offers some tools to do this internal questioning from within the individual, but they are not enough to fully articulate ideology and are woefully incomplete for this task of changing a culture. Taoism also offers many insights for understanding what is happening, but again the tools are insufficient and not just lost in translation. There are models in critical theories to look at what is happening when we make a deservedness (desert) claim and what the cultural consequences are for it being an ideology.
To fully grasp deservedness ideology, one must understand what ideologies are and how they operate pre-reflectively. We make desert claims on autopilot. In Sally Haslanger’s work, she describes schemas and the pre-reflective nature of how ideologies operate nearly simultaneously as they(being per-reflective and schemas) mutually support one another in operation. It is a bit like describing an axle and a wheel. Neither operate independently. Schemas are shared patterns of perceptions and interpretations that operate below the threshold of awareness. They organize what we notice and think before we can deliberate on the subject. They operate as the implicit structure in the thinking and organization of institutions. They largely go unexamined.
What happens when ideology operates pre-reflectively? Ideologies determine what we see, how we see it and how we interpret what is happening. They make some things entirely invisible and other things stand out. We begin to naturalize some contingent social arrangements to make them appear inevitable and requiring of no justification or consideration. They just are. This is what is happening when deservedness claims seem so self-evident rather than the social constructions that they are.
Deservedness ideology underlies many of the ways we justify why we may take what it is that we want. It justifies a salary 300 times that of the average worker. It justifies the claim that I deserve a vacation. It justifies imprisonment of some because they deserve to be punished for their crimes, and turns a blind eye to other crimes because those that have taken more than their share deserve their wealth. It justifies my imbibing another drink of whiskey when I have worked a hard day as I deserve this drink, to justifying yelling at my kids because I deserve a break. It also does the inverse, that I may deny someone something because they are undeserving. She does not deserve my respect because of how she treated that other woman. He is undeserving of good pay because he does not work hard enough. Care givers are undeserving of high salaries because their work does not return a profit for the shareholders. Women’s work can go unpaid as it is undeserving of consideration within the patriarchy.
What happens in deservedness ideology is that it suspends normal ethics. When you think about it, most ethical frameworks begin with some version of equal moral worth. Consider our Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” First it establishes the ethical rule that we all have equal consideration as a right of birth. Except that it excludes women, not just in its language, but in its execution of the ideals expressed, women were intentionally excluded, along with most men, but most explicitly black men, Indians and un-propertied men. Why were these exclusions allowed? Because these groups were deemed undeserving. The specific justifications were not so important because deservedness ideology was so firmly entrenched in society that even the flimsy justifications sufficed to deem these groups undeserving. All it would take was assertion by those men who owned property and held the guns to make the statement of who is deserving of the moral consideration stated in the Declaration of Independence. This is what I mean by desert claims suspend normal ethics.
It is extremely hard to picture what a society of egality would be like when our imaginations have been so thoroughly colonized. When an ideology has so strong a hold on our imaginations, we recreate the same structures of deservedness when we try to imagine a society based in egality. Consider what Klejton Cikaj writes about Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism, in his article in the online publication The Collector on Feb 1, 2023:
Capitalism is preserved even in our wildest futuristic dreams. It has infected our collective imagination to such a degree that we literally cannot imagine a world without it even 300 or 1000 years from now. We're on Mars, we're traveling through a black hole, we're teleporting through space but we're still imagining that all of this happens under a capitalist economy.
(Cikaj, K. (2023, February 1). "Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism." The Collector.)
It is insidious how deeply deservedness ideology has damaged our imaginations. Careers in academia can be ruined if one was to take the stand that capitalism isn’t the end of history. That it must be argued that it is the pinnacle of economic systems. That we need not conceive of any other economic system. This is what Fisher argues in his book. That consciousness itself has been colonized by capitalism and any resistance to its own logic is neutralized by arguments that nothing else is desirable and all else fails to be realizable, no matter how well intentioned alternatives may be.
This is the delicate territory where I will attempt to describe egality not just as an antithesis to deservedness ideology. To illustrate why this will be so hard, imagine a caterpillar instinctively attaching itself to a twig. It does not imagine being a butterfly (at least for this analogy, I will claim that it doesn’t) that causes the caterpillar to build a cocoon. It is instinct. We are approaching a stage in human civilization that nearly everyone has the intuition that a dramatic change is about to happen. And it may be that most cannot imagine what new institutions will emerge when we go through what will likely feel like total collapse. It may be that only when the collapse happens can we begin to fully imagine new structures for society.
But like the caterpillar, it is already in our collective history and memory what life was like before our world was colonized by institutions of inequality and the justifications for those with power to take whatever they wanted and later offer the reasons. When human civilization enters metamorphosis, what will come out the other side? Can we learn anything from past civilizations? Is egality part of our inheritance? Can egality emerge from the liminal space of change when we enter the coming transformation?
Real examples in history exist of sophisticated political organizations that rejected concentrations of wealth and power. The Wendat nation that existed before the French colonists in North America is described in the book The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow as organizing around principles of freedom that were very difficult for the French colonists and the Europeans in general to understand. Kandiaronk, a Wendat philosopher, made the following observation of Europeans, "I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can't think of a single way they act that's not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of 'mine' and 'thine'." From the book The Dawn of Everything.
Kandiaronk was also quoted as saying about the Europeans:
...I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one's soul is like imagining one could preserve one's life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity,-- of all the world's worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?
(Graeber & Wengrow, 2021, The Dawn of Everything, pp. 54-55)
There are those who want to attribute the critiques of Kandiaronk to European philosophers that had radical views so they invented intelligent Indians as a fictional account to lend credence to the radical view. It seems reasonable for white scholars to make this claim. After all, they claim that the first nation peoples were savages deserving of having their land taken from them and reeducated to European cultures as their native cultures were undeserving of continuing to exist. Why not claim their ideas as well. Don’t white people deserve to take credit for all the good ideas? There is also the debated idea that the U.S. constitution and the separation of powers was influenced by the Iroquois Confederacy. But I digress.
If this isn’t enough, then consider what Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Peter Collinson in 1753:
... When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger Brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness
Jefferson, T. (1753). Letter to Peter Collinson. Teaching American History. Retrieved from https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter-collinson/
There is a much longer history of critical evaluation of cultures of extraordinary inequality, that I will go deeper into in later articles and in the book Egality. I just offer these as opening the possibility for us to imagine differently, no matter how difficult.
One last quote to illustrate the colonization of imagination is in Orwell’s book 1984:
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
(Orwell, G. (1949). 1984.)
Egality is not a blueprint created by one person for how we can create a perfect society. It must be emergent from creating new systems that evolve together within larger systems we all create together. It must be experimental. It will take liberating our minds from the colonization of our imaginations. It will take employing critical theories from feminist critique to critical race theory among many others. It will take bringing the working class together with academics in a non-hierarchical process of re-engaging imagination to think outside the current paradigms. It will take resisting the current power structures in every way. It will take understanding that no one deserves anything and that deservedness itself is not legitamate. That we should instead look at what is needed for people, animals, the environment and non-human consciousnesses to thrive.
*I take a negative dialectic approach to egality as described by Adorno rather than a Hegelian dialectic. I aim to keep a critical engagement between deservedness ideology and egality that keeps a conceptual tension between the two.
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Tysm for sharing your thoughts!