We Are All Equal
What does it mean to say ‘we are all equal’ ? With my slowly-developing new outlook on life, I have found myself saying this quite a lot. But why am I saying this? Does it mean anything at all? Is it anything more than a handy feelgood statement to make everyone feel at ease? Or an icebreaker to make everyone feel socially included? Or just a glib bit of sloganeering to make me feel good about myself. Has such a statement got any real substance?
Many would point to political or legalistic interpretations which take into account equal rights and equality of opportunity, and these are very important. But that’s not why I have been saying ‘everyone is equal’. I think it has more to do with the uniqueness of each individual being. And how easy it is to override a feeling for this. And how difficult it is to respond to people in the spirit of equality – that anybody is equal to anyone else.
Certainly we fit into shared social patterns which produce predictable social behaviour and that makes many of us predictable at least on the basis of averages: actuarial tables and consumer choice based on membership based on broad social categories. And talk of a ‘hive mind’ (a term I find fairly sinister it has to be said) as a sort of collective intelligence seems to place the wisdom of the crowd over the distinctiveness of each individual.
The problem with observing such patterns is that it gives the impression of ironing out the heterogeneity of human experience into averages. Before long, instead of taking the average as a rule-of-thumb, you start wondering why the individual does not fit with that average. I think this is what gives rise to the fallacy that if everyone is equal and to be treated with equal respect that means everyone must be treated the same. This is, of course, not a desirable outcome of equality at all. The old feminist slogan: ‘Different Therefore Equal’ seems more appropriate (albeit completely illogical).
‘We are all equal’ is a very easy thing to say – but are we up to the task? To treat people as equal we have to be able to see beyond the various categories on which inequality is based: status, looks, gender, relative wealth and poverty, race…This would entail the ability to apprehend every individual we encounter in our daily lives as a unique living soul. If we were capable of seeing and responding to people in these terms our own lives would be transformed as well as the lives of those we come in contact with. The psychology of individual differences would be a basis of this rather than the social psychology of market research. A Big If, I suppose. But perhaps a reasonable aspiration to endeavour to do so. More than a mere slogan or feelgood expression. And the political and legalistic affirmations of equality will be meaningless unless they flow from such experience of human beings.
Sadly, I do not take my own advice and grapple every day with a highly-developed sense of social inferiority, the source of much annoyance and frustration if not everyday anger which I am trying to say is irrelevant. But the fact is equality is a reality. It is accessing that reality which proves tricky, possibly impossible!
One of the best statements of the equality of everybody that I have found recently is by the spiritual teacher Sydney Banks (click on Video Playlist and it is a brief clip entitled ‘The Equalizer’).
I will comment on some practical aspects of equality in daily life in follow-up posts.
