Bruce Charlton's Notions

 Equality is only one of the strategic ideologies that the demonic powers have used to take-over world government and the major functional social institutions; but equality was one of the first and most influential of such principles. 

For example; socialism/ communism has been a vastly powerful force of increasingly net-evil since the 19th century; until now 'equality' (whatever it is supposed to mean) is regarded as platitudinously true, to the extent that anyone denying equality explicitly is officially treated as a moral monster. Suicidal altruism - often, but not always, in the name of 'equality' - had become the officially-sanctioned and -imposed religion of the masses. 

Now, of course - as with all leftism - the concept of equality is incoherent and implemented only as expedient; so that equality policy often creates deliberate inequality, supposedly in pursuit of a higher and ultimate equality. Yet through all this, equality is maintained as a metaphysical good-by-assumption. 

For some time now; William Wildblood has been probing-away at the concept of equality, and exposing the evil of its roots and application. 

He has recently reached what seems to me a very deep understanding of exactly why equality has proved so adept to the purposes of evil, so comprehensively hostile not just to all transcendental Values or Goods (i.e. virtue, beauty and truth), but more fundamentally to God and divine creation.

Wildblood's most recent post suddenly made this clear to me, in a few words (excerpt):  

Equality is the great dogma on which liberal Western democracies are built. It might have seemed like a step forward at a time when the gap between rich and poor, powerful and weak was as great as it was, and the movement towards less inequality surely did bring certain benefits in the short term. 

But the flaw that lies at its heart is now being revealed. If equality, and equality alone, is taken as the foundation of a culture then that culture will collapse into the lowest common denominator and it will eventually collapse altogether. 

Equality is totally contrary to human nature and to enforce it is to force human beings to live against both their natural and their spiritual instincts. It becomes a tool to push the higher down to the level of the lower. 

This does not mean that the higher should dominate the lower (except spiritually) but liberty and equality are not natural bedfellows despite what the ideals of the Enlightenment may pretend, and it is liberty that is the great spiritual quality as far as human beings are concerned. 

Equality is often said to be rooted in Christianity. If it were how strange it is that it is never mentioned in the Bible and was only discovered to be a Christian virtue 1800 years after the time of Christ. Oneness in Christ is a Christian virtue but that is not equality which is a materialistic distortion of it. 

Equality is actually a property of unformed matter, matter untouched by the creative breath of spirit, which is why you see it most at lower levels of evolution. The more life evolves, the more unequal it becomes because the freer it becomes and yet within that inequality there is also a spiritual oneness. 

To realise the truth of this apparent contradiction is one of the major goals of the spiritual path. It and it alone explains the mystery of love.

I have highlighted the key phrases. For them we can see what lies behind the drive for equality - a spitefully destructive hatred of creation itself; the desire to reduce creation to chaos. 

This is exactly the core motivation Tolkien attributed to Morgoth (Melkor) - the Satan of his universe.

Thus equality - which sounds to Modern Man as an obvious and major virtue; is actually an instance of ultimate evil. Characteristic of which, is exactly this kind of value-inversion - where an ultimate virtue is actually an ultimate evil.  

And a world where such value-inversion is ever-more mainstream, official and compulsory; is exactly what is meant by the End Times. 

I think it is pretty well understood by now that the mass media can and do manufacture a virtual reality (i.e. virtuality); and that as the media have increased in quantity and addictiveness (especially since the invention of 'smartphones' and social media) - this has de facto replaced reality for most people. 

In particular, the mass media virtuality effectively imposes a scale of priorities about life: what things are most important, that has absolutely Nothing to do with our actual individual lives of personal experience and common sense. 

Thus, here and now, the major global priority is a birdemic which would be invisible if it were not for the 'response' to it; warming climate change which would be imperceptible (if it even exists to a significant degree) if it were not drip-fed by propaganda, an antiracist agenda which is the inversion of reality, and a sexual revolution that claims 'equality' (in practice, superiority of esteem) for practices that everyone knows are not qualitatively 'the same as' biological sex and sexuality. 

But while the mass media role in creating a Matrix-world is fairly well appreciated; the role of the bureaucracy in doing the same is probably more important - and much less noticed and understood. Yet bureaucracy and the mass media, together, are the dominant (and growing) fact about modern life.

 

By The bureaucracy, singular, I refer to the fact that the bureaucracies of individual social-systems - government, law, the military and police, health, education, religion, science etc) are now all horizontally cross-linked to make a single bureaucracy - which indeed extends across the world. 

This is how it was possible to implement a global coup in early 2020. 

And the fact that the mass media is itself a part of this single bureaucracy is how the coup was concealed.

The way in which a bureaucracy creates a virtual reality was first made clear to me in 1994, when I was a lecturer in Epidemiology and Public Health, and worked in the Regional Health Authority as a research assistant to the man who went on to become the Chief Medical Officer for the UK. 

As part of my duties; I organised a conference on 'inequality' in health; and my public health boss gave a talk which stuck in my mind. The subject was how a subject like equality could (and should) be pursued through the bureaucracy. 

He described (as I remember it - I don't have notes) how the general conceptual area of 'equality' was first made into a strategic priority, by securing the necessary votes. But at that point approving of 'equality' was just a platitude without content. 

At first, he said - the subject of equality was made a recurring agenda item; which meant that every meeting would include some discussion of how 'equality' might be pursued - and this was a formal, mandatory discussion. I suppose this was the phase of raising 'awareness'.  

 

By this point, the strategic 'desirability' of 'increasing equality' has already been established as 'settled'. Yet at no point has there necessarily (or probably) been any broad, philosophical or moral discussion of 'Why' equality, what 'equality' means... whether the concept is even coherent?

Therefore 'equality' has already been made a strategic imperative before most people will even have noticed, and before the 'in practice' meaning of equality has been established

From this point onwards, all discussion is at the lower level of How? to increase equality; there is no longer any place for revisiting whether equality really is always a Good Thing, or 'how much?' equality is wanted, or how equality should be balanced against other strategic Goods*... 

From this point onwards the bureaucratic process is just a matter of defining operational measures and imposing them.

The next step in the bureaucratic process was therefore to operationalise the concept of equality - preferably in terms of specific, numerical measures that could be monitored, made the subject of 'targets'; and implemented in rules and laws. 

 

Thus is constructed the bureaucratic virtual reality - which we could formally consider a conjectural model of reality, created in terms of definitions and procedures that fit within bureaucratic imperatives; and we can see how exactly this has spread across the world over the past quarter century - but with a variety of strategic priorities. There is a virtuality of equality, others of human rights, climate change, QERTY sexual liberation (of various, often incompatible, kinds). 

There are many many such... 

And of course in 2020 we have seen the real-time development of a global bureaucratic birdemic virtual reality; which, like the others, has almost no relationship to real life; and where it does, this relationship has itself been manufactured by the virtuality. 

In other words, any apparent relationship between birdemic and experience (such as personally observable diseases and deaths) is mediated and constructed by the 'response' to the birdemic - by the definitions and classifications generated by the various bureaucracies; which in fact came-before, and and were only conjecturally related-to, any actual biological/ medical effects** of the birdemic.

 

What was never discussed in this lecture - and is outwith the scope of the bureaucratic perspective - is the Truth of bureaucratic reality. Because 'bureaucratic reality' is a selective, simplifed 'model' of reality, and all models (being selective and simplified) are necessarily incomplete, often biased, and may be almost-wholly false...

Hence, when bureaucratic-reality is enforced as real-reality - we have a 'virtuality' that is at least misleading, but in practice is manipulative. As can be seen all around us, now. 

And because the System controls production, validation and dissemination of information; we are not permitted to ask (in mainstream public discourse) whether what The System ends-up doing after all this bureaucratic development is good overall; or whether the operational definitions of 'equality' actually reflect the original common sense idea of equality. 

And 25 years later we know the answers - that there is no relationship between bureaucratic measures of equality, and real-life equality; and that bureaucratic equality is pursued without any regard at all for whether 'things overall', in real experience, are improved by it.  

 

The bureaucratic virtuality is indeed a demonic recipe for corruption and destruction; and when you add its synergy with the mass media - the process of evil is greatly accelerated. 

This is our world - now. 

* For example - research into 'health inequalities' was entirely focused upon (e.g.) health measures/ lifespan/ mortality differentials (i.e ratios) between social classes, sexes, races etc. The research took essentially zero account of (often) massive improvements in absolute levels of health/ lifespan/ mortality through time. This is important because many effective measures that improve health tend also to 'worsen' 'inequality' - as does mass immigration. As usual, leftism tends towards levelling down, on the one hand; and on the other, it perpetuates the same (supposed-) injustices upon which it then feeds as grounds for group resentment.

** In so far as there are any real effects - e.g. some places like Taiwan have been shut-down despite/ because-of zero detectable biological/ medical effects. Thus we see the single, global bureaucracy at work.  

The reason why the socio-political goal of Equality is and always was intrinsically wrong, evil, anti-Christian; has been described clearly and effectively by  William Wildblood (I have added emphasis):

Equality is only possible with complete oneness which means either the chaos of unformed matter or the Night of Brahma when the universe has returned to an unexpressed, unmanifested state which is basically non-being. 

Creation is a disruption of oneness which breaks the perfect equality of non-being. 

Inequality is the essence of manifested life, the very foundation of the world, and the current movement to erase qualitative distinction and differences is an attempt to destroy cosmic order and reduce light to darkness.

From this very fundamental, metaphysical-level, argument; we can see that the rooting of Leftism in a quest for Equality always-was an evil motivation - even in the early days of Leftism, when Leftism was mixed with many good motivations, and attracted many good people. 

Of course, as of 2021, the evil of Leftism ought-to-be obvious. Yet, by now Leftism (including the appeal to Equality) are so dominant, so permeated-through global governance, mass media, corporations and institutions; as to be universal and unchallengeable in public discourse (indeed, increasingly, unchallengeable even in private discourse - except illegally). 

Now, thanks to William W, I can better understand that Equality is working against Creation; that Equality is an agent of Chaos - that it tends always to destroy meaning, purpose, human relationship and the possibility of loving God... 

Equality tends to destroy All that is Good, and even the possibility of Good.

Small wonder that Satan and his Lieutenants are such zealous advocates of Egalitarianism! Egalitarian ideology gives the forces of darkness everything they most want! 

Note: I do not, of course, intend to imply that Equality is the master-key principle of Leftism (since Leftism has no principle, and is oppositional in nature); nor that Leftism has ever made any serious attempt to create a genuinely equal world (whatever that might mean). 

Leftism merely uses Equality expediently, whenever it might be effective, as one of its rhetorical weapons in the intended destruction of that which is Good, of God, and from divine creation. 

In practice Equality is made to mean almost opposite things, including the deliberate construction of inequalities, according to whatever is judged to be most effectively destructive in specific context. 

However, by constant use over many generations, the universal desirability of Equality has become a truism, an assumption - to oppose which is regarded as deeply offensive --- and more shocking than even the most horrific means that are deployed supposedly in pursuit of Equality (such as the forcible surgical mutilation and hormonal poisoning of children under the pretense that this 'changes their sex' and is somehow necessary to create 'gender' Equality... which is - of course - supposed to be an intrinsically-ethical imperative).  

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There are some words, quite a lot of them, that name absolutes - and they can drive us crazy.

We can, it seems, quite easily get to the point where the abstraction takes over from immediate reality, such that the absolute requires nothing short of absolute submission to... to what?

To the absolute truth of the absolute.

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An example:

Properly speaking, equal means the same - and 'the same' means no more than that things are in the same category - to say that humans are equal before God, or the Law, or whatever, means only that they are members of the same category.

Thus, there is a relationship with God which is characteristic of humans, and the category of humans includes (for Christians) men and women, children and adults.

The word equal is doing no necessary work here (or anywhere else), but instead - by its pseudo-mathematical and un-human precision, making our brains go into convulsions.

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But in politics, equality has become an absolute abstraction.

As an absolute 'equality' comes first, as an abstraction it can never be known whether any specific reality matches up to the absolute value of being wholly 'equal'.

Because we cannot measure the concordance between reality and an absolute abstraction, yet hold the absolute abstraction as primary - equality becomes a concept which requires absolute submission.

Even to discuss the reality, achievability or degree of equality is an appalling thing - because equality is absolute.

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Substitute for equality 'justice', we see the same.

There are many examples: freedom, democracy, human rights, poverty, oppression...

There can be, there is, often a gross dissociation between a person's adherence to what would seem to be the implications of equality, or justice and their actual lives (both outer and inner). But once the absolute abstraction holds-sway, then that doesn't matter - because of course there never can be any proportionality between an absolute and reality...

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To refuse to submit to a concept like equality is to insult equality.

To refuse to say the right things about equality, to put equality first, to swear by the concept of equality... such things are seen as a gross act of aggression against society.

What matters is submission to the concept: public, and preferably private, submission to the validity of the idea in all its abstract purity.

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In philosophy the 'omni' words when applied to God are similar absolute abstractions.

In terms of human understanding, to have 'total' power, knowledge, extent doesn't mean a thing.

We could imagine power, knowledge and extent which had no definable bounds, but our minds implode at the matter of absolute power, knowledge, extent...

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And in religion these unimaginable incomprehensible absolute abstractions operate in an analogous fashion to equality and justice in modern politics...

People are not required to understand the omni words, because they are un-understandable; they are not required to live-by the omni words, because their implications are abstract and disconnected from life.

People are required to submit to the omni words; because to do otherwise is seen as insulting God (to whom these absolute abstractions have been linked).

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So these omni words, and the absolute abstractions which lie behind them, come to rule religions; despite that nobody knows what they mean, and nobody even knows what it would mean to live by them.

It should be possible to make a one-sided rejection of omni attributes; to say, that don't make sense... and leave it it that.

But anybody who challenges an omni attribution is assumed to be stating the opposite as an alternative in philosophical terms.

And the opposite to an absolute abstraction is a terrifying thing, not least because it is necessarily perceived as incomprehensible and as craziness-inducing as the abstraction to which it is put in opposition...

So to oppose an approved absolute abstraction is to be perceived as proposing something so vast and total as to be mind-numbing in its horribleness.

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So we recurrently get the situation in which submission to the official absolute belief system, in all its abstract perfection, becomes the hallmark of orthodoxy, and indeed in practice the one and only absolutely (!) required mark of orthodoxy.

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For some religions that is appropriate, but not for Christianity.

For Christians, the essence is the personal relationship with God: that is the essence, not the whole thing, but we must work outwards from that.

And we cannot work outwards from a personal relationship to meet an absolute abstraction - if we try to do this, if we insist on doing that - at some point we will leave behind the personal relationship.

For all matters of doctrine, the  Christian hopes and aims to achieve a conviction in his heart; to understand is to have that conviction - and that conviction is of the form of a personal relationship.

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The Christian must strive above all to love God; but we cannot love an absolute abstraction, only a person.

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Despite the blatherings of Church leaders to the contrary, equality is not a Christian virtue - indeed equality is not any kind of virtue, but on the contrary a sin, evil in aim and effect.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/lets-be-clear-equality-is-not-good.html

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-desire-for-equality-is-natural-to.html

Specifically, Leftists are very fond of quoting as-if-axiomatic a phrase along the lines that "all men are equal in the sight of God" - and this is quoted as if it was a Biblical text.

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But it isn't from the Bible, and indeed contradicts the Bible in about as wholesale a fashion as possible. Neither in its general tenor, nor in any of its specific teachings, does the Bible ever at any point advocate equality.

Is that clear enough?

Attempts to extract equality from the Bible are transparently prejudiced; no unprejudiced person (that is, no person who did not already, for other reasons, 'believe in' equality) could ever come away from studying the Bible having learned there that Men are equal in any significant way, shape or form.

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Presumably this 'equal in the eyes of God' phrase comes from a mutilated memory of the US Declaration of Independence, with its meaningless/ false phrase 'created equal', but the DoI is not a Christian document.

And indeed it seems that an explicit advocacy of the evil principle of equality entered human discourse only at about that time - only in the past few hundred years have humans pursued equality as a goal, evaluated human affairs in terms of equality.

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Yet, equality is typically given first place in the public pronouncements of many or most of the mainstream Western 'Christian' church leaders.

In other words, many or most major Christian leaders take as axiomatic and argue from, a principle (equality) which is very obviously not merely un-Christian but anti-Christian in its origin, history and current tendency. 

Of course, they blend and surround equality-talk with genuine Christian stuff; thus evil is made superficially plausible and desirable.

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This is a precise example of the Antichrist phenomenon as I understand it from the writings of Fr Seraphim Rose and other Russian Orthodox Fathers.

The Antichrist can mean a specific Man who will rule the world in the times leading up to the second coming - who will rule the world in Christ's name but under Satan's direction; but the term also includes a class of phenomena and a range of people and institutions that use Christianity as a cover for anti-Christian efforts.

Therefore, explicitly atheist and secular individuals and those of aggressively non-Christian religions are not (by this account) Antichrists - but the Antichrist term really applies to those pseudo-Christian leaders and institutions who associate their teachings positively with Christianity, who use pro-Christian motivations of people and aspects of Christian life; but are actually engaged in the destruction of Christianity.

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Of course this is sometimes difficult to discern, and sincere Christians may be duped, and the most devoted servants of Satan (cunning master of lies) may imagine they are serving Christ.

Yet, for those who are not inside the web of lies, Antichrist phenomena may be very clear and obvious; as is currently the situation with respect to a large majority of the leadership of the Church of England.

That the majority of Church of England Bishops, especially the most senior, most clergy, and half or more of the laity are currently working as agents and allies of the Antichrist is not one of those 'difficult to discern' phenomena - indeed, what is difficult, is to deny their very obvious, in-your-face, search-and-destroy, anti-Christian zeal.

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So the only legitimate question is whether the anti-Christian activities of the Church of England (and the other mainstream Western churches) is too obviously and explicitly evil for them to count as an Antichrist phenomenon.

After all, the Antichrist is supposed to be subtle in his anti-Christianity - and modern Liberal 'Christians' fail to qualify on that count.

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Equality is supposed to be 'a Good Thing', but isn't; as William Wildblood demonstrates in a forthcoming book - which I have had the privilege to read in manuscript.

As well as equality being a Bad Thing to aim-at; indeed, equality is not even a real thing. 

The word and concept of equality is, of course, very vague in terms of its actual (i.e. rhetorical) usage, which resembles an hypothetical black box, more than a useful category; but 'equality' can usually validly be reduced to an assertion of sameness... 

Either an assertion that some-particular-things are, or ought to be, The Same. 

But are things ever the same? 

Well, in some sciences, especially the physical science, science there has been an assumption of sameness among things like particular chemicals or atomic particles. Yet even here, the progress of science has usually been towards finding differences among things that were originally assumed to be the same: for instance all atoms were originally assumed to be identical - even between different elements and substances. And in biology, an assumption of sameness is much less frequent, and soon breaks-down, the closer we look. 

Perhaps the only genuine sameness is in mathematics (and formal logic), where the sameness is axiomatic and wholly abstract: a matter of definition. 

But mathematics is not the real world. 

What about in religion? Well, so far as I know, there has never been any actual, viable religion where all people are judged to be the same. 

In the past, human differences were often simplified (for practical purposes) into categories, or classes of Men - but even there, there was always provision for making distinctions. 

e.g. Priests may have been in a different category than non-priests; but priests were internally differentiated in many way - even down to the individual level.  

But what of a divine level? Again, it seems there has never been equality of divine regard of Men - but sometimes this has been simplified into categorical levels of classes of divine esteem; which often reflected social organization.  

So where does the idea of equality come into religion? Well, sometimes there is an equality of 'destination' in terms of post-mortal, afterlife fate. In some religions it seems that all Men will (sooner or later) end-up in the same situation. 

For instance, the Ancient Greeks and Hebrews seem to have regarded the afterlife of all Men as a an underworld of demented ghosts: Hades/ Sheol. 

Or the Eastern Religions Hinduism and Buddhism have sometimes envisaged all Men as sharing the same fate of eventually (after varying numbers of incarnations) being re-absorbed back into the divine, from which they came - at least, that goal was the same for all Men. 

Christianity has always divided the destinations between at least two (not-equal) possibilities: Heaven and Hell; and this has sometimes been elaborated by additional possibilities such as Limbo and Purgatory; and by differentiation of fates and roles within both Heaven and Hell (e.g. the circles of Hell, or the layered Mormon 'Heavens') - sometimes differentiation by categories of people, sometimes at the individual level. 

The main assertion of, and emphasis upon, 'equality' in Christianity is almost-wholly modern (coming after the emergence of political leftism, with is promiscuous talk of actual or aspirational 'equality'), and is related to God's supposed attitude of Love to all Men being absolutely 'equal'. 

But God's 'equal' love can only be entertained as a possibility either if Love is regarded in an extremely abstract way (because in real life, including in the Bible itself, love is always differentiated and selective) -- and/or if equality is redefined into a very vague notion that because God Loves all His children, this 'must' (or should) mean that God (somehow, for some reason) loves all his children in exactly the same way and to exactly the same degree...

This supposed 'equality' has been spun into highly abstract assertions of God's absolute and unconditional - therefore equal - Love; rather as if God's love was an evenly-distributed gas, or a radiation of completely equal intensity that bathed all Men without distinction. 

To my mind, this (frequent) attempt to express God's Love as equal and unconditional is probably an alien import to Christianity; either derived from politics; or apparently derived by back-projection from the (not Christian - but nonetheless held by some self-identified Christians) idea of post-mortal Men all returning to be assimilated-into the divine...

Maybe the argument hinges on the idea that if all Men end-up equally, then this happens because God regards all Men as the same. 

At any rate, these two ideas of the supposedly unconditional and universally-equal Love of God, and a Nirvana-like life after death destination of all Men - seem to go-together. 

For a Fourth Gospel derived and focused Christianity; I would regard it as obviously wrong to regard equality in Christianity as a Good Thing. 

Christians ought instead to be trying to understand God's plans for men in the most differentiated and individualistic way possible; much as the ideal attitude of earthly human parents to their children is one that recognizes each child as individual, unique; and needing (ideally) to be regarded as such in terms of their destined and best path through mortal life and beyond. 

Ideal earthly parents would not love all their children 'equally'. Neither would they love their children in a rank-order. Instead they would 1.) love all their children, and 2.) love and value each child in a particular and unique way to correspond with his or her individuality.  

In other words, it is high time Christians set-aside 'equality-talk'; and began to recognize that the traditional categories and classes of past-Christianity were an imperfect representation of what is actually - from God's point of view - an individual-level scheme of Man's salvation and theosis.  

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The desire for 'equality' is natural to humans but that don't make it good.

Natural in the sense that children (for instance) will spontaneously plead for 'equality' and will (loudly, repeatedly) assert the injustice of inequality.

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A five year old boy claims it is not fair that he must go to bed at seven when his nine year old brother goes to bed at eight.

The five-year-old claims equality with the nine-year-old on this particular matter, insofar as it gets him (more of) what he wants.

The context makes clear that the demand for equality is evil - because dishonest (at least: it misrepresents reality and subverts good order).

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But why does the demand for equality have any rhetorical force?

That too must be natural.

Well, equality reduces to 'same'; and a genuine claim of equality is a claim of sameness.

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But sameness is indivisible.

Sameness is sameness.

What is irrational, incoherent, evil - Leftist - is to divide identity and demand sameness in specified areas (where more is wanted) and not in others.

And to claim sameness where there is difference is an evil; just as it is to claim difference where there is sameness.

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Thus all claims of equality which stop short of sameness are evil (including such sacred cows as 'equality before the law' - which has not ever been and cannot ever be and should not ever be true).

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NOTE: I am, of course, talking about human beings. In physics things are different - in physics sameness is divisible. I wonder to what extent the error of dividing sameness/ equality into specific domains came from a false application of what works in physics?

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Developed from a comment I posted at:

http://www.amerika.org/politics/what-comes-after-liberalism/#comments

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Political correctness is (obviously!) about equality - in some way and at some level: equality of outcomes and not equality of opportunity.

And PC is about equality of status above all else.

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It is this focus on status which makes PC different from Communism (tho’ clearly from the same roots) – Marxists viewed the economic as primary and assumed that if income and wealth were equalized then all else would follow; but PC views equality of esteem as primary and assumes all else will follow.

It is the vast totalitarian ambition of enforcing this impossibility which makes PC so pervasive and so dangerous.

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And obviously it is incoherent to enforce equality of status including those individuals and groups who explicitly, foundationally, assert inequality of status (i.e. their own superiority) – such as many/ all of the approved groups on-whose-behalf PC acts.

It is the vast incoherence of tolerating the intolerant which renders PC self-contradictory and self-destroying.

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Political correctness attempts or intends (implicitly) to solve this incoherence by aiming/ intending (at some point) to enforce equality of status in all discourse (public and personal - as in the slogan 'the personal is political') - therefore PC is intrinsically totalitarian.

This totalitarianism is justified on a utilitarian basis: that of promoting happiness and preventing suffering; and on the pragmatic basis that anything less than total control of discourse will be subverted and ineffective.

(Of course, PC does not argue for total control of discourse; but each step towards total control of discourse is seen as necessary.)

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Political correctness (implicitly) believes that it can solve any apparent contradictions because it is built on the nihilist assumption that there is no real-reality.

For PC there is no reality but many realities, reality is not given but created by human society and individual choice - and individual choice is constrained by socially-created discourse (which is in principle amenable to control).

For PC, society creates its own reality: the only limits are the limits of human imagination (and the limits of human power to enforce that imagination).

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This world view is foundational to political correctness - it is the bottom line.

Reality is merely perception: that which is perceived is the only real, and the way we perceive is changeable.

To control reality, therefore, we need to control the perceptual biases.

If everyone without exception wears rose-tinted spectacles, then reality is pink.

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For PC, control of discourse will control bias will control perceptions will control reality.

When perceived reality contains no basis for perceiving or mentioning or acting-upon unequal status, then equality is reality.

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1. Patriarchy: Men lead. In all situations in private and public life, it is right and necessary that men take leadership. The male sex is primary; therefore, in an ultimate sense, society and reality should be, and will be, organized around the needs of men.

2. Feminism: Women should be privileged. In all situations and circumstances in private and public life, it is right and necessary that women are privileged. The female sex is primary; therefore, in an ultimate sense, society and reality should be, and will be, organized around the needs of women.

3. Complementarianism: Men and women have distinct roles and responsibilities. In some situations it is right and proper that men lead and are privileged, in some situations that women lead and are privileged.

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Due to its unfamiliarity, complementarianism requires further explanation:

The sexes are complementary, two different parts of a single whole. But not two 'halves' whatever that might mean - rather, two different but necessary elements.

Complementarianism entails that each sex alone (and therefore, each individual person) - while it can survive (for a while), is in some ultimate (metaphysical) spiritual sense incomplete; and the fullness of spiritual development therefore requires both sexes (and therefore at least two persons - one man and one woman) in a dyadic fashion.

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Note that I utterly reject the meaningfulness and possibility of Equality of the sexes - because Equality just-does mean Sameness - and the sexes just-are Different (or else we would not be having this discussion).

(In fact, not just sexes but people are different. And people who are different deserve and require different treatment. 'Sameness' is never more than expedient, contextual and approximate.)

I know that sameness is not what Equality is 'supposed to' mean; but I am saying that this sameness is, in fact, what Equality does mean - or else sometimes Equality is just an alternative word for Feminism.

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Other (more subtle, more nuanced) meanings of Equality cannot be held - the other-meanings will be too slippery, they will inevitably slide-into the meaning 'sameness'.

Equality is a falsehood, a fake abstraction, and to impose Equality is impossible - therefore Equality is evil in practice, because it is false, and to impose falsehood is impossible, and to try and impose an impossibility is necessarily to do evil.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=equality

*

Both Patriarchy and Feminism are ultimately accepting that one or other sex will dominate overall; and the disagreement is over which sex will dominate; and which will be (therefore) subordinate.

History tells us that (like it or not) Patriarchy is socially-sustainable, for many dozens of generations, for many thousands of years.

Feminism is, by contrast, very recent, with only a few generations track record. But objective social analysis over the past century or two shows us that Feminism is parasitic, uncreative, self-destroying as a general policy - hence it is unsustainable over the long term.

*

Therefore,  Patriarchy, Feminism and Complementarianism are, I think, the only actually possible relationships between the sexes - and, of these, only Patriarchy and Complementarianism are viable.

The question then is, of Patriarchy and Complementarianism , which is true and which is best?

*

If the relationship between the sexes is to be anything more than mere social expediency (something that can be wrangled-over and experimented-with indefinitely) then we need to look deeper into the justification for social arrangements - to ask 'why?' - and this leads back as far as the mind can reach. 

My argument here is that Complementarianism is true and right; and I can argue that this is backed up by historical evidence (but this depends on how it is interpreted) and also that it feels right (but others may feel differently). The only decisive kind of argument is one based on reality: are men and women really complementary, or not?

*

Until Mormonism, Complementarianism lacked an explicit metaphysics, theology and philosophy. Mormonism has thrived for eight generations and seems to be well set, but complementarianism does not have the long track record of sustainability which is seen for Patriarchy.

However, I suggest that Complementarianism does seem to be an unarticulated 'norm' towards which Patriarchy tends in actual practice.

I mean by this that the religion, the ideology, the law, may be Patriarchal - asserting male domination in every situation - but under stable conditions and with social development, tacitly but effectively women come to dominate some areas of life; and this can be seen as validating the reality of Complementarianism.

*

The most important question about Patriarchy and Complementarianism is: which is true? Is it that men are naturally leaders and naturally dominant in all situations; or are there domains in which women are naturally leaders and naturally dominant?

And - given that various social arrangements are possible - what is the Good, right, and proper form of social arrangement? Specifically, what is the best social arrangement from a Christian perspective?

*

Ultimately, this refers back to the ultimate purpose of human life, both to salvation and also to the possibility of what is variously termed spiritual progression, theosis, sanctification - which is the divinization of Humankind, to become Sons and Daughters of God.

For mainstream Christians, from this ultimate perspective, Men and Women are interchangeable; either a man or a woman considered in isolation can be saved, and either a man or woman can in isolation go through the fullest process of divinization.

More exactly, for (most) mainstream Christians, there is no pre-mortal life, so sexuality is only an attribute of mortal life - people are born either a man or a woman; but in eternal life sexuality is stripped away and people are neither men nor women.

*

So, for mainstream Christians, sexuality is a temporary expediency, not fundamental, not structural to our divine natures - indeed sexuality and sexual difference is a rather negative, earthly hence not-Heavenly thing. This ultimately accounts for the chronic negativity Christianity has displayed towards the body, sexuality, marriage and family - so powerfully documented for me in the works of Charles Williams - and the tendency to give highest status to the solitary celibate ascetic.

For mainstream Christians, social sexual arrangments are merely a matter of expediency - and considerations of expediency lead to Patriarchy.

It is NOT that the social structures of Patriarchy are actually based-upon and built-upon the ultimate structure of the mainstream understanding of the Christian religion - but rather it is that Patriarchy is socially expedient compared with Feminism, and mainstream Christianity does not conflict with this.

*

But for Mormons the situation is different. Men and women can be saved individually to eternal life and can undergo very considerable spiritual progression; but to attain the very highest level of divinization requires the dyad of a man and woman together in a celestial marriage.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/on-reality-of-complementarity-of-sexes.html

Thus, for Mormonism, sex is is not so much biological as metaphysical: part of the very structure of reality. Sex goes back to pre-mortal life, to pre-existence. Indeed, it (probably) goes back to before we were made spiritual children of God. So the eternal seeds or potentialities which were 'pre-spirit-human' were either male or female.

The implication is that Mormonism does conflict with Patriarchy, and does imply by contrast a system which treats the sexes as complementary.

Mormonism fundamentally contradicts the kind of Patriarchy which has been seen in human history (and including sometimes in Christian history) and which is argued-for by some modern Christians where all men dominate all women, and all women are submissive to all men, in all circumstances.

*

The situation envisaged by Mormonism is complex and contextual - but the basic complementarity is between (male) Priesthood and (female) Motherhood.

In practice, on earth and during mortal life - not all men are priesthood holders, not all women are mothers; and it is conceivable that men might be called mothers or be made to function biologically as mothers, and women might be called priests and enact priestly roles; but in reality and in principle and ultimately and over eternity - these are the proper and sexually differentiated roles of men and women.

Social organization ought-to reflect the difference; and men ought-to dominate those aspects of life pertaining to priesthood functions, while women ought-to dominate those areas of life pertaining to motherhood.

The precise definitions and details of what this complementarity of Priesthood and Motherhood means in practice and how it may be implemented are not important, and indeed are not prescribed - what I want to clarify now is that this is an example - it is the primary example - of complementarity.

No doubt there are others.

*

*

'Equality' is a notion that is:

1. Recently invented (the past few hundred years). It is a made-up virtue. A fake virtue - ungrounded in common sense, natural law, spontaneous human behaviour.

2. In one sense equality is conceptually im-precise, since there is no agreement on what should be equal and what should not...

3. Yet in another sense equality is mathematically precise, objectively measurable, and non-quantitative - all-or-nothing; since equality is operationalized as sameness and either things are exactly the same (so far as we can tell), or else things are not exactly the same; so that if justice is equality and equality is just, then any degree of inequality counts as total injustice.

4. Thus we have a made-up, invented, fake virtue which is both incoherent and yet mathematically psuedo-precise - and this utterly nonsensical entity has been inserted into human affairs by top-down propaganda from the anti-traditional Left; where it has - due to these peculiar and paradoxical qualities - utterly confused traditional morality and thereby equality has usurped all other virtues.

5. And at the same time in-equality has usurped all other sins as being regarded the primary evil of the world (nothing is ever allowed to justify inequality).

*

We conclude that equality is a concept utterly demonic and repugnant, and to be shunned by all virtuous people.

*  

*

Very few things in nature are equal - perhaps no two things are truly equal: certainly no two people are equal - because no two people are the same (not even identical twins).

Equality always collapses its meaning into 'the same' - whatever sophisticated and nuanced distinctions may be drawn between equality and sameness, always equality is in fact, in the real world, interpreted as 'the same'.

So to ask for equality is to ask for the impossible - which is why its pursuit is *totally* destructive.

Equality can never be attained because sameness can never be attained - and because it can never be attained then the process of trying to establish equality will never stop until everything is destroyed (or the attempt to impose equality is abandoned - which ever comes first).

It is trivially easy to show that two people, or groups of people, are not treated equally, because they never-ever-ever are treated equally: because it is impossible.

If the detection of inequality is taken as an imperative to start imposing equality - then anything can be destroyed, on the grounds that it is not (yet) equal; and everything will in the end be destroyed, as the attempt to impose impossible equality moves from one target to the next.

Yet despite the above, somehow we find ourselves in a position in which equality is regarded as not just something achievable, but as the single most important thing in the world - and the attempt to abolish inequality as the primary political imperative: the primary moral imperative.

So important, that any amount of destruction is justified - e.g. the saying "you can't make an omelet" - that is to say, an equal society - "without breaking eggs".

When the omelet can never, and will never, be made; the result is a world in which people break eggs, heads, organizations and institutions - without compunction, without end.

*

*

That's it, really: equality is not good.

*

Equality is not some kind of noble ideal which sometimes/ often/ always goes-wrong in practice - it is not a noble ideal at all not even in theory; but it is unreal (nature is all difference and hierarchy), thus nonsensical and (therefore) evil.

*

But where did it come from?

Where on earth did so may people get this notion that equality is an ideal.

Even in the only (approximately) egalitarian human societies ever known, that is equal sharing by age and sex among among simple hunter gatherers with low technology and no food storage, equality is not a noble ideal so much as an equilibrium state of the desire that nobody-should-have-more-than-me!

In other words actually-existing-equality was driven by envy and resentment and fear and expediency: not at all a noble ideal.

( http://hedweb.com/bgcharlton/evolpsych.html )

*

One big mistake was to suppose (as did the early communists, socialists and egalitarians) that poverty was a consequence of inequality and therefore equality was the solution to poverty.

But, this was an error (or dishonesty) since poverty never-was a consequence of inequality; but of low per capita wealth.

And socialism emerged just as per capita wealth began to increase; and egalitarianism only slowed the increased in per capita wealth and delayed the abolition of poverty: honest and knowledgeable people can see this clearly now, it is just an objective fact.

*

So all of these are bad, not good: equality, egalitarianism, socialism, communism - bad in theory as well as in practice.

Equality is bad, bad, bad...

*

Bad...

*

Bad.

*

*

Political correctness is, in its purest form, an extreme type of idealism: since a life in which all human 'goods' are allocated by impersonal mechanisms and without any individual influence is either utopian (for the PC elite) or dystopian (for normal human beings).

But PC does not operate at this level of clarity and abstraction - rather it operates in a pragmatic way.

Policies are chosen on the basis of 'moving things in the right direction' and without taking account of exactly where these policies are going: what is the state being aimed-at.

And therein lies the danger.

Since the state being aimed-at is never articulated, it is never evaluated, which means that things may end-up some place nobody wanted them to go.

*

As a teenager I began with a very pure form of egalitarianism - economic equality.

I got this from the great writer George Bernard Shaw (who was also an early socialist and a founder of the Fabian Society). Shaw envisaged absolute equality of income - more exactly, income equality to the point that differences made no practical difference of status.

But after a while I realized that nobody else seemed to want this, indeed the most powerful British 'socialists' of that era - the Trades Unions - seemed to be obsessed by maintaining wage 'differentials' (or inequalities).

So I fairly rapidly gravitated to the idea that we needed to move in the direction of equality.

This negative doctrine seemed to encapsulate the behaviour of socialists, who did not seem to want actual equality, not even to have any clear idea of how much inequality was acceptable - but instead had essentially three ideas, with which I (at that time) agreed:

1. Inequality is important

2. There is, now, too much inequality.

3. We should move towards having less inequality.

*

I think that this negative way of framing politics is, in fact, dominant - especially with political correctness.

The basis for policy is indignation at a current state of affairs. Something which is happening is pointed at, and it is proclaimed to be intolerable.

The current state of affairs need not be referenced to any actual state of affairs (past or present, real or imaginary) - but the point is that the state of affairs is obviously unjust, obviously intolerable, therefore obviously something must be done to ameliorate it.

*

(To disagree with the above analysis is taken to be approval of the injustice.

(To advocate tolerating the intolerable is - obviously - evil.

(Of course the intolerable may prove ineradicable - in principle, or merely in practice [e.g. prejudice - pre-judging] - but it must still be pronounced intolerable.)

*

For example, thousands of papers have been written about 'inequalities in health', demonstrating and measuring differentials in health on the basis of social status, education, income, wealth, race, ethnicity and so on.

The measured inequalities are implicitly (or explicitly) regarded as intolerable. 

But without any author of these papers ever troubling themselves in any way about what degree of inequality would be tolerable.

Indeed, a frequent tactic of such papers is to do international comparisons which show that - say - health inequalities are smallest in Japan and Sweden, largest in the USA, and middling in the UK. Then the recommendation that the UK and the USA should move in the direction of Japan or Sweden.

But it is never ever stated that Swedish and Japanese inequalities are acceptable, just, and fair; and therefore that the Japanese/ Swedish degree of health inequality is what we in the UK/ US are aiming-for; and that therefore (assuming policies are successful) when we have reached Japanese/ Swedish levels of inequality then the inequalities-in-health pressure-group will disband themselves as now obsolete...

*

So, what superficially appears to be a reasonable, non-fanatical pragmatism - instead of insisting upon absolute equality, we merely ask that things be moved 'in the right direction' - actually makes the demand for 'more equality' insatiable.

As long as any degree of inequality can be found in any situation, then the demand to move things in the direction of 'more equality' can be sustained.

As long as the measurable situation is not absolutely perfect with respect to ideal hopes, then there is an absolute necessity for external intervention to change that situation.

And all this without ever having to define aims, defend demands, compare rival courses of action, or make tough compromises about the best attainable results. 

*

Political correctness therefore uses pragmatic methods to generate utopian demands - ensuring that it will never succeed, and that success will never threaten its own survival.

*

*

The relationship of political correctness to the egalitarian impulse, the desire for equality, is interesting. So much of PC rhetoric concerns equality that it superficially seems as if equality of distribution of goods is the goal of political correctness.

Yet this cannot be correct, since in practice PC is indifferent to group preferences and to reverse inequality.

So that in many high status educational institutions and professions (such as medicine), the majority of personnel used to be men, but are now women; and yet formal and aspirational preferences for women remain in place.

In other words, even when what were stated to be the primary goals of policy have been achieved and indeed overshot, the egalitarian rhetoric continues - and any continuing inequalities of outcome of a secondary nature (proportions of women in specific high status sub-specialities - such as surgery) are used as rationalizations for further or continued group preferences.

And in terms of ethnic minority 'representation' in the media, this has reached a level way beyond 'proportionality' and even beyond equality - approaching monopoly - without causing any apparent distress or discomfort among supposed egalitarians. Quite the opposite, indeed.

*

It seems that even a situation of monopoly representation, or monopoly allocation of 'goods' of any kind, by favoured groups (sexual, ethnic or whatever they might be) is perfectly compatible with a system of PC.

All the doctors might be women, all the leading politicians might be (or identify with) ethnic minorities, yet this is still perfectly compatible with a system of continued PC allocations.

Equality is not, therefore, the deepest impulse. What is deepest in political correctness is moral opposition to - and the desire therefore to subvert and invert - the existing state of affairs brought about by individual agency: by human desires, choices, beliefs.

Whatever state of affairs existed in the past or currently exists in the absence of an abstract system of allocation is intrinsically unjust, intrinsically wrong - on principle, and without need for evidence of wrongness (although it is easy to generate such evidence). 

*   

My impression is that actual, real world equality of outcome is a matter of near indifference to political correctness.

Inequalities of one kind operate to stoke-up indignation and as rhetorical devices to persuade acceptance of policies which are favoured anyway; but inequalities of an opposite kind are uninteresting - or perhaps used as a test of PC-sincerity among the elite.

What, then, is the principle behind this?

*

I believe that PC uses egalitarianism instrumentally as a way of generating policies.

But egalitarianism is not really necessary - because policies are primarily oppositional, or inversional, rather than egalitarian.

In other words, PC looks at the human social world as it is and has been, that is to say a world of multiple causal processes, and regards it as intrinsically - necessarily - unjust.

The natural world is unjust because of intrinsic human selfishness.

Egalitarianism is just one device used to demonstrate the injustice. And inequality has the advantage of being amenable to definitions, measurement, monitoring - and being made the basis of bureaucratic procedure.

But indeed any argument is suitable for PC to attack any existing state of affairs which relies on individual choice, individual freedom.

The dissatisfaction (actual, inferred or imputed) of just a single symbolic person is enough to trigger wholesale change - so long as this dissatisfaction can be linked to the introduction of a system of abstract altruistic allocation.

*

PC is - at root, at its deepest impulse - based on a conviction of the intrinsic sinfulness of humans.

Political correctness therefore embodies the impulse to replace individual choice with abstract principle - but with what goal?

Often the stated goal of PC is utilitarian: happiness - the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Or the alleviation of misery and suffering. But, again, this cannot be taken at face value, because PC displays a near-total indifference as to whether its interventions actually do have the effect of increasing happiness or reducing misery.

Indeed, there are many situations when it seems that PC policies reduce happiness and increase misery - but PC is indifferent to whether of not this is so. There is a clear tendency to implement certain kinds of policies regardless of the consequences to human happiness.

*

For political correctness, happiness is not an achieved real world consequence of PC policies. Rather happiness is the moral duty of individuals living under PC; happiness is the state of humans when PC allocative policies are operating.

At an individual level, in particular, the goal is not just to try to be happy about a PC situation, but actually to be happy.

The pure elite PC intellectual ruler really is happy under PC. Whatever happens to him.

This is what I mean by the idea that PC requires submission of the individual to the abstract principles of allocation.

*

In sum, many of the contradictions of PC derive from the attempt to impose abstract systems of altruistic allocation on existing states of affairs which involve human agency.

Political correctness is, in ideal form, therefore completely opposed to human agency in all its forms.

The tendency of PC is therefore to identify and overcome all possible human freedoms and choices in relation to the allocation of 'goods'. 

That is, to replace the intrinsically selfish choices of individual autonomous humans with abstract systems of altruism.

This may sound an extreme formulation, but it is literally true.

Political correctness instrumentally uses human impulses (such as aspirations for justice, or equality, or happiness) to attack any and every social situation which currently lacks a system of abstract altruistic allocation.

*

The big problem for PC - in a system where human agency is intrinsically wicked - is what distribution counts as altruistic? 

Clearly this question has no ultimate answer, since PC denies the possibility of divine revelation; instead there are a series of pragmatic answers to what counts as altruistic - but all of these answers bear the mark of human choice so none of these answers are truly eternal abstractions.

The principle of subversion and inversion of whatever is individual, spontaneous and natural therefore serves as a rule-of-thumb to identify problems and to generate aims for the solutions. However these aims are inexplicit.

*

If men naturally tend to become leaders, then in a system of allocating goods according to sexual identity women should replace men; if humans are naturally heterosexual, then anything except heterosexuality should be favoured by altruistic principles.

The positive policies of political correctness are therefore somewhat arbitrary, changeable over time.

The evaluation of PC policies in terms of human happiness, suffering, income or any other principle is again variable - and often PC policies will seem to make things worse from any practical and measurable perspective.

But the politically correct solution is always intrinsically superior at an abstract level in so far as it removes the scope or possibility of individual selfishness.

Always PC aims at the removal of individual freedom and choice, since individual selfishness is intrinsic and will shape all free choices - selfishness is the ultimate evil.

*

Selfish human individuals must be subjected to impersonal principles of altruism - they must submit to these rules, and the virtuous humans are those which submit willingly, happily and regardless of the consequences

But the actual specific nature of these altruistic principles to which humans must submit is much less certain than that they should submit, since to be purely virtuous the rules ought not to come from human individuals.

Much of modern bureaucracy - voting, committees, the use of social statistics - can be seen as steps in the direction of developing algorithmic, machine-like mechanisms for generating altruistic principles without the participation of (corrupt) human agency.

(Because whatever individuals do will be, or tend to become, selfish and cruel).

*

The perfect, ultra-pure and idealistic politically correct intellectual aspires (as his highest goal in life) to create a perfect and autonomous mechanism for devising altruistic principles and 'implementing' them on humans.

Having created this mechanism for the imposition of abstract altruism, his own fate is a matter of indifference - he might step-back and watch, be rewarded, or be destroyed - but the machine, once built, will just keep running: just keep-on compelling wicked individual humans to do that which is abstractly just.

*

This nightmare of living-death - in which human wickedness is impossible because every single human decision related to the allocation of the goods of life has been subordinated to a system of abstract altruism - is the covert Utopian dream of the politically correct.

*

Where did people get the idea that voting was an acceptable - let alone the best and only, way to make decisions?

One person one vote is supposed to be the gold standard of decision making, and intrinsically the fairest - but why?

Naturally, in stable and human-sized groups decisions are made by leaders, taking into account power. A numerical majority is irrelevant - a powerful minority is more important, the consent of those ruled is more important - indeed just about anything is more important than a numerical majority.

And when sheer numbers is an important factor in the balance of power, a 51 percent majority is neither significant nor crucial - the crucial number would be more like 66 percent versus 33 percent - in which one party outnumbers the other two to one. But numbers are not the essence.

***

Voting maybe comes from the false ideology of intrinsic equality among humans (i.e. equality of human beings in actuality - asserted equality of wisdom and legitimate authority) - a perversion of the true ideal of intrinsic equality among humans (i.e. equality of human souls in potentiality).

Maybe it comes from the insane perspective of bureaucracy - which requires an abstract system, any system will do, for de facto decision-making - this decision-making being valided by diktat, by propaganda, by coercion.

Maybe voting comes from the jury trial aspect of the legal system - although where the ridiculous idea of determining guilt by a vote of random individuals itself originally came from, I have no idea. But like majority voting in general - trial by jury is sacred: don't ask why.

***

Dissent is defused by getting agreement on process (voting) rather than outcome (a specific decision) - and such is the feebleness of human's apprehension of abstraction that they will buy this pig in a poke.

We hoodwink human psychology by forcing pre-commitment to the unknown outcome of majority voting as intrinsically correct, and this is assented to because the future result of a present system is sufficiently remote and unreal that humans do not spontaneously organize against it, and imagine they can indirectly control it to give the outcomes they want.

***

There is no magic about majority voting, no 'wisdom of crowds', no place for the operation of divine or individual inspiration - neither the safety-first gut-feeling veto of requiring unanimous and full community assent to change, nor for the inspirational decisiveness of the gifted individual to lead the consenting (or acquiescing)  group on the basis of superior wisdom, insight, foresight.


An artificial hiatus, a mathematical gap is inserted between the human interaction and the human action: the deadening vote, to which all defer...

***

The staus of majority voting has even survived its manipulation. At a small scale, majority voting is rigged by small organized groups who manipulate meetings by well known and simple methods; and at a large scale by politicians in democracies who buy votes, take bribes, deliberately create voter dependency, change electoral boundaries, and now import millions of supporters.

People know this, know exactly what is being done to them and how it works - yet somehow this does not invalidate the outcome of majority voting!

Yet people still state, still believe that democracy is the best, the only safe, the only *good* system of government.

Brainwashed, or what?

***

I believe that majority vote decision making is one of the most damaging aspects of modernity. As a system, it is quite simply insane - knowing what we know, knowing from experience its unpredictability, randomness, unwisdom, distorting effects on human psychology...

Like its specific application in democracy by majority vote, the visceral rationale of majority voting seems to be egalitarian in the sense of trying to prevent individual power, rather than in trying to ensure good decisions.

It is abstract in the sense of being procedural rather than outcome oriented. It is to elevate simple mathematical neatness above direct contact with the world. 

To rely on majority voting is fundamentally unserious; it is to regard life as essentially soft and sustaining, to regard life as unreal and something not requiring of us correct decisions and right behavior.

It is to regard decisions in a detached, playful, abstract fashion; to subordinate our souls to sums.

Voting is a gamble, worse than a gamble - it is to have faith in gambling as the best mode of life.

Indeed it even worse than this - it is is to have faith in a corrupt casino where you know for sure that the fruit machines are rigged - to put money in the slot anyway, to pull the lever and just hope for a win; rather than to try and do the right thing. 

“Like and equal are not the same thing at all.” ― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1961).

I've just finished reading (i.e. listening-to-the-audiobook-of) A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle; which is a US classic of children's fantasy, but which I never really heard of until fairly recently.

It is certainly a worthwhile book, with several very effective and enjoyable parts - although I found that, overall; it lost narrative pull as the book went on (it seemed to have too much explanatory exposition), it did not end fully-satisfyingly; and therefore I would not (at first reading) regard it as first-rate (not - for me - in the same class as The Hobbit, Narnia, Wind in the Willows etc.).

But an aspect that I much liked was the explicitly Christian and mystical element to the book; its presentation of Life as a spiritual conflict, its making of a loving (esoteric and eccentric) family into the main agent for Good.


However, the title phase “Like and equal are not the same thing at all.” jumped-out at me as a false statement, and representative of a belief that has (over the past fifty-plus years) been very wholly destructive of The West.

Perhaps naturally, this became one of the best known, most quoted, phrases from the novel.

For totalitarians, communists, socialists and nowadays the politically correct and Social justice Warriors; for things to be Equal' they must be The Same; so - since we (supposedly) favour Equality - then society must become homogeneous, which means totalitarian (since sameness requires an all powerful authority to enforce it).

'Eqaulity has been, for serious Christians, a Trojan Horse; a smuggled-in deception, later deployed to attack (and substantially destroy) the citadel of the faith - indeed equality has replaced Christianity in the mainstream churches. 


Wrinkle in Time (in characteristically modern, particularly American, fashion) tries to oppose this by drawing a distinction between 'eqality' which is good (e.g. because the US declaration of independence, quoted prominently and approvingly in the novel, says "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."); and on the other hand likeness, alikeness, sameness - which are bad.

But we should recognise that all attempts to distinguish an ethic of equality from sameness will fail; do fail, have failed. 

So, the result is that all attempts systematically to promote equality, as an over-arching ethic, end-up by promoting sameness, and justifying totalitarianism - which is intriniscally evil.

If enforced sameness is an evil, then so is equality. 

*

The key to understanding the modern Left is that it is 95% destructive, and its positive 5% is continually rotating between (for example) the primacy of equality, anti-sexism, anti-racism, promotion of sexual inversion, liberty, the environment... and others.

Which means that, in practice, the Left is 100% destructive - because its positive agendas conflict and destroy one another, as they rotate.

The modern Left is thus, over the long term, a means of wholesale destruction.

*

The Old Left (Marxists, Communists, Socialists) was essentially about promoting economic equality - and this took priority over everything else - including the abolition of poverty, which was done much better by 'Capitalism'.

But economic equality was (at first, anyway) sincerely-pursued by the Old Left - even when it led to economic collapse, famine, racism, sexism, and wholesale environmental destruction.

*

Post the mid-1960s the Left transformed into an ever-expanding 'rainbow coalition' of interest groups - feminists, assorted economically-unsuccessful minority races and ethnicities, environmentalists, Human Rights activists, promoters of first sexual liberation then inversion of traditional sexual values, criminals, illegal immigrants, the permanently-economically-dependent, and so on.

Thus the Left become democratically-overwhelming; while at the same time it became ideologically-incoherent - indeed utterly self-contradictory.

The actually-existing New Left is a loose grouping of asset-stripping interest groups, whose alliance is merely a tactical agreement to gang-up-on and exploit (or simply destroy) the diminishing minority of non-Left.

*

So the modern Left has no overall, cohesive, explicit strategy because all its claimed positive strategies cancel-out - its true underlying strategy is therefore implicit and denied.

Anyone who really cares about any one of the Left's supposed priorities - whether that be economic inequality, the sociopolitical situation of women, or of a particular race - can see that the New Left damages all of these groups in real terms.

*

The New Left actually, really, overall and significantly promotes inequality, damages the interests of women and racial minorities, damages the environment - over a timescale of decades, the Left damages everything for everybody.

All winners are temporary - today's winners (e.g. the Proletariat - the native male working class labourers) are tomorrow's demonized losers - in rotation.

Why is this not more obvious? Two words: the Mass Media - to which the population is ever-increasingly addicted, and which defines reality as whatever is expedient for Mass Media purposes. 

*

The Left is misunderstood.

The New Left, the modern Left of Political Correctness, is not a conspiracy of Men, it is NOT about promoting the interests of any particular group - overall and in the long term.

The Politically Correct Left is NOT about pursuing equality, fighting sexism or racism, saving the environment or anything else positive - these are merely tactical excuses.

*

The long-term reality is that the Left is negative, destructive; wholesale, all-round, and strategically.

And this is impossible to human agency: strategic universal destructiveness is only attributable to non-human, purposive evil.

*

This is why there is a fundamental and ineradicable conflict - indeed there is a war - between Christianity and the Left.

Good people, even real Christians, may for various reasons find themselves fighting on the wrong side in this war; but that does not affect the fact that they are objectively fighting on the wrong side.

At this point in history, where we are now; a Christian Leftist or a Leftist Christian is an oxymoron.

In war, everyone necessarily fights on one side, or the other: God or Satan.    

*

*

I used to be a keen socialist, from age about 13-18 - and as a teen I read fairly widely in the British tradition: William Morris (very much liked him), The Fabians (GB Shaw, Wells etc), Tawney (Christian socialism) and modern people like Schumacher, Anthony Crosland, modern Fabian Essays, the New Statesman every week...

(I was never a Marxist, however.)

*

Socialism is of course egalitarian, that is it is focused on equality - and most of the early socialists wanted equality of opportunity - an essentially equal chance for everybody, but naturally leading to unequal economic outcomes.

(The recognized the obvious truth that strictly equal opportunites lead to unequal outcomes.)

They focused on levelling-up of economic conditions, and on education: compulsory education for all, more schools and colleges, more scholarships for the poor, better schools all round etc.

George Bernard Shaw regarded this as insufficient, and argued for economic equality - specifically equal salaries for all - he regarded this as sufficient to address the problems of inequality - but of course he allowed for many other differences.

Essentially Shaw wanted to settle the economic problem (and socialism was based on an economic analysis) - and allow people to get-on with more important matters.

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But none of these early socialists argued that people were equal.

None argued that that individuals and groups were the same.

They did not argue same-ness because it obviously was not true - to argue to would have been simply insane, nobody would have taken them seriously at all.

And because people were not the same, therefore their outcomes in a system of equality would naturally be different. Therefore if (like GB Shaw) you wanted equal outcomes you had to impose them coercively - precisely because people were not the same, and if you did not coercively-impose equal outcomes you would not get them.

They realized that as soon as you stopped actively-imposing equal outcomes, then outcomes would again become unequal.

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Yet nowadays same-ness of all people and groups is precisely the default of Leftism - and the assertion that because all people and groups are the same, then and difference in outcomes must have been coercively imposed.

Now, this modern doctrine of the same-ness of people and groups is not just a stupid and indefensible error - because it is not the kind of thing that somebody can be wrong about, it is not the kind of thing that could possibly be the result of a mistake.

None of the early socialists believed it, perhaps nobody believed it until the mid-twentieth century - and it was not believed then as the result of any kind of discovery!

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So, the modern near-universal belief in the same-ness of people is not, therefore, any kind of stupidity, nor is it due to any kind of un-informedness.

And, although this belief is obviously insane - it is not plausible to imagine that belief in the same-ness of people was caused by actual clinical mental illness affecting the intellectual elite en masse...

No, no - what a belief in the same-ness of people is, is evil; pure evil.

(Evil is the destruction of Good - and Good is truth, beauty and virtue - in unity.)

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Belief in the same-ness of people is an ideology which allows un-bounded destruction of human society - at every level - and without limit or restraint - and continuing until there is nothing left that can continue the process of destruction.

This is not the kind of thing that happens by accident, or as a consequence of well-meaning people blundering in their analysis and actions - it is done by people in service to pure evil.

The people themselves may or may not be evil or nasty people - just as Maoist Commisars, Gulag guards and Gestapo may or may not have been evil or nasty people.

But those who believe in the same-enss of humans serve evil - they are on the side of evil - and this is a straightforward objective fact: anyone who believes-in, argues for, or enforces policy based-on the same-ness of people and groups is serving evil.

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When I used to write about IQ (general intelligence) differences between groups, I found that there were two basic assumptions towards the topic.

Either someone accepts the spontaneous impression - supported by what-appears-to-be vast amounts of consistent evidence - that general intelligence differs between groups;

or else they assume that all groups are of equal intelligence.

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If someone accepts that groups differ in intelligence then this can be used as a basis to explore the concept of intelligence, measure it, discover what influences it - and so on.

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But if someone assume that all groups are of equal intelligence then they need to explain-away what they regard as misleading data - what indeed (given their assumption that in reality all groups are of equal intelligence) must be misleading evidence.

And the explaining-away process operates by suggesting one after another alternative explanation, until attention is exhausted or time runs-out.

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So... IQ differences between groups are explained-away by attacking the concept of intelligence. Or suggesting that it is not completely free from problems.

But if the concept is convincingly defended, and no superior alternative hypothesis can be devised, then often the alternative explanation of personality differences is proposed.

So IQ differences are explained-away as being really down to personality differences.

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But when it tuns out that personality differences are much the same as IQ differences (being similarly stable throughout life, and heritable) then personality differences must be explained-away - for instance in terms of childhood upbringing.

But how to explain differences in childhood upbringing?

Well differences in upbringing turn-out to have rather similar distributions and (from the point of view of defending an assumption of equality) the same kind of problems as both IQ and personality - so differences in childhood upbringing must be explained-away - say, in terms of, say, economic differences.

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But how to account for economic differences, if you are not allowed to explain them in terms of intelligence, personality or prior upbringing?

Well... perhaps in terms of evil.

Economic inequality is a product of selfishness, let's say.

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But how to account for the unequal distribution of selfishness - why are the economic-haves so much more selfish than the economic have-nots?

(Recalling that differences in selfishness cannot be explained in terms of IQ, personality, upbringing or economics? - all of which have been explained-away.)

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Well, perhaps selfishness differences (and/ or economic factors) can be explained-away in terms of culture - some cultures, once established, have specific socio-political or ethical systems in relation to selfishness, or specific types of economies, which lead to everything else...

Yes, okay, but what about the differences between cultures?

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The terminus of this debate can only come when the ultimate explanation is found to be random, sheer luck.

In explaining-away and explaining-away any departures from an observable state of equality between groups, the only stopping point is luck.

(Luck of climate, geography, the random acts of natural disasters, random differences in the effects of disease... whatever).

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And furthermore it must be assumed that random chance is self-perpetuating - because repeated acts of pure chance would tend to equalize, not polarize - so there must be first luck and then some kind of intrinsic tendency for the unequal operations of chance to be sustained and amplified.

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So, everything is down to randomness, and the tendency that random differences are self-perpetuating. What of it?

If the assumption of equality is to be sustained then luck must be regarded as an unacceptable reason for group differences, at best non-moral - but in practice luck must be regarded as immoral.

It must be regarded as morally wrong that some cultures have more luck than others.

Indeed this is the bottom line for assumptions of equality - luck is immoral.

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According to this line of argument, since luck is immoral, therefore people must be equalized, to compensate them for the unfairness of bad luck.

(And the process of equalization must be impersonal, machine-like, algorithmic - in practice bureaucratic.)

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But why?

I don't know - because (please try to follow this!) if it is (merely) our our culture that tells us that it is not right for luck to generate inequality, and culture is (merely) a matter of chance, then this moral principle (that random chance is evil) has zero traction.

That same morality which tells us that luck is unfair is itself (merely) a matter of chance.

In explaining-away apparent inequality of intelligence, you have explained-away any morality which might regard inequality of intelligence as undesirable.

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So, by logical steps we reach a bottom line of nihilism in which nothing matters because nothing is real.

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Sorry, I have momentarily forgotten; what was it we were trying to explain-away?

Oh yes, the apparent differences in intelligence between groups...

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On the other hand, what if the spontaneously apparent differences in IQ between groups is real?

Just assume this, for a moment, for the sake of argument.

Errr... no problem with that.

No infinite regress opening-up with that assumption.

End of discussion.

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*
 A religious politics is one that tries to establish the conditions necessary for the practice of - and beyond that the thriving of - its religion. And the religion provides the meaning and purpose of life.

By contrast, secular politics has not meaning or purpose - it is a means not an end, and it is a means which denies the reality of ends.

In practice, therefore, secular politics never stops, it just keep on expanding - secular politics is totalitarian by its nature. Yet this totalitarianism is not about meaning or purpose - it is about means to an end which is denied.

So, secular politics might be about freedom (or equality) - but cannot answer the question 'freedom for what' (or equality for what?) - but must assert that freedom (or equality) is in and of itself good, and that there cannot be too much of it - so everything is about wrangles over whether or not policy x truly increases 'freedom'/ 'equality'.

Politics becomes a fight over definitions, and definitions are arbitrary and incomplete and biased - yet definitions direct policy because there is nothing else to direct it. So with secular politics there is a totalitarianism of definitions which, actually, nobody believes in - and the only alternative is another set of definitions.

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(And this model itself contains the definition of 'religion' - a real religion is one which can coherently, without leading to paradox, provide meaning and purpose to politics. SO the traditional monotheistic religions are religions in this sense, while ideologies such as communism, fascism, socialism, liberal democracy are revealed as not really being religions.)