Everyone is not equal. In today’s age and especially in the liberal Western hemisphere, that’s a radical thought. I am not propagating some are better than others. I am saying we are not equal as individual humans.
Let me explain.
I’ll start by giving the foundation that the widespread belief that we are all equal lays upon. The United States of America’s Declaration of Independence begins with, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Politically speaking, this is a theory. A philosophy of political science that began with the ancient Greeks and truly came to fruition in 1776. The philosophy was that all of mankind is inherently good, that we seek social structure and can agree upon a social contract with a rational government given that it provides for us the means to personal freedom, and that it is with unarguable claim that all men are equal. At its formation, the United States of America was a social experiment of sorts. Nobody knew if this would actually work. Sure, people had theories about what would happen in a democratically republic nation. But nobody knew if it was wrong or right.
Thomas Hobbes wrote, “Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.” Although we have physical differences, Hobbes claims, there is a deeper equality that goes beyond those differences. And yet, I’m arguing that we aren’t all equal. Not truly.
We are not all born equal. I’ll state that again, because it will be hard for some readers to wrap their minds around. We are not all born equal. However, we are all born with the equal right to happiness, the equal right to opportunities to succeed, and the equal right to use our own advantages to prosper as human beings. We have equal rights and I cannot stress that enough. I am not arguing that one person or groups of people should have more rights than another, I am saying that humans are inherently unequal, and that’s OKAY — it’s the right that even us out in the end.
Take a place of business for example. There is a manager and there are employees. Clearly the manager has more skills and more experience than the employees or else s/he wouldn’t be in a higher position than others. Not everyone is fit to be a manager, because we are not all equal in abilities and skills and education. The lowest performing employee is fired when reviews come in, because he/she is not equal to his/her peers.
It’s logically impossible for us all to be at the same level of competency. Nor should we be. If we were all on the same mental wavelength, there’d be no differentiating thought. We can’t all have equal abilities. I will naturally excel at something over someone else and vice versa.
We are all unique. Special. Different. Some are smarter than others. Some are better looking than others (however, beauty is subjective so take that with a grain of scientific salt). We all have different experiences, different abilities, and different preferences in life. There is nothing wrong with differences. If we were all the same, what a bland and monotonous world we’d live in.
Still, we’re not all equal. But in this society, we love to claim everyone is equal. We are confusing equality with rights. We should all have the same rights, but we should not claim to all be the same. Our differences make this world beautiful. Stripping that away to make us all the same is a crime. So we should all stop trying to make ourselves equal to one another, leave that for the human rights sector, and focus on enjoying our differences and embracing all types of individuals.