Almost 200 years ago now, in his famous book Democracy in America, Alexis DeTocqueville taught us that equality is the driving force in American social and political life. The more I spend time thinking about this, the more I think he's right. In contemporary American life, we are seemingly just as obsessed with equality as ever.
In a republic that has increasingly become a democracy, this makes some sense, right? Our most important creed, which is basically as old as America itself, is that "all men are created equal," which of course comes to us from our Declaration of Independence. But what I've also come to appreciate about equality is that human nature doesn't completely allow for it. It turns out that equality is a bit of a paradox: two actually. These equality paradoxes also happen to shed light on another important topic, which is the cyclicality of life and cyclicality in human affairs, but we'll save that for another post. There are, however, very important implications from these equality paradoxes for our own political life, but I'll come back to that later as well.
In George Orwell's Animal Farm, he uses the famous phrase, "all animals are equal, but some of them are more equal than others." Orwell uses this phrase ironically through Napoleon (who represents Joseph Stalin) to help allow Napoleon to substantiate the unequal treatment of the animals on the farm under his newly Communist Totalitarian regime. This was despite the fact that one of the original seven commandments after the animals revolted was "all animals are equal." While Napoleon was using this phrase to justify different and unequal treatment of individuals by the new Manor Farm government, we seem to have partially internalized Orwell's irony and implicitly acknowledged that total equality in society is probably not possible either. This acknowledgement is subtle though, and our tolerance for inequality seems to have an important caveat, which is the first equality paradox: we only seem to care about equality when we're perceived to be unequal to others. Said differently, we seem to only care about equality when we feel we're beneath others, or when we feel less equal to others, to put it in Orwell's terms. If we think we're better than someone else, or in a better position than them, we might pity them or have sympathy for them, or we might have disdain or contempt for them, but in most cases this proves to be somewhat of a fleeting sentiment. We sympathize in the moment, but then the moment passes, and life moves on. We don't really seem to mind inequality in this regard the way we probably think we do, for better or for worse. We ultimately live with it, seemingly not only because we know total equality is impossible, but as we'll see in a moment, also because we don't even desire it either.
Said differently, the first equality paradox teaches us that we will always desire to catch up with those that we think are ahead of us, but we do not obviously and intentionally slow down when we think we are ahead of others. Income and wealth are the easiest examples to point to here. Yes, wealthy people often give to charity to better the situations of those less fortunate than them, but the vast majority certainly don't give away enough of their income or wealth to actually put themselves on level footing as their "un-equals". Nor do upper middle class people, or anyone above the median or average thresholds for that matter either. We seem to tolerate income inequality only when we're looking down then, but not when we're looking up. When we're talking about what we don't have, we're a little more envious, jealous and spiteful, though probably not as often and or as significantly as is often made out to be.
The second paradox is that the more equality we get, the less we like it, and the more we seem to desire to again be un-equal. What do I mean by this? Allow me to explain using three examples from ordinary life: fashion, "slang", and baby names. This will be the focus for most of the rest of this post.
Fashion is the first and probably most powerful example of this. Have you ever noticed, or thought about why, fashion changes as it does? Before we get to that though, let's demonstrate what I mean by using the example of the tie, which is usually a male accessory but not always. If you look at the tie, you'll notice there's quite a variety of types: there's the skinny tie, there's the medium tie, and the fat ("kipper") tie, but then there's also the boros tie and the bow tie. Though ties date back to the 17th century, ties in the way we know them seem to have come into prominence in the 1920's. Wide ties came into fashion in the 1930's and 40's, but by the 1950's and early 60's, the tie went skinny. By the middle of the 60's and through the 70's, the tie got fat again (this time really fat). Skinny ties came back again in the late 80's, and then again briefly in the late 2000's and early 2010's just as I was graduating college. Bow ties, given their difficulty to tie, have always been a little less common, but their difficulty has resulted in them being a tool to stand out from the crowd, rather than fit in. One would have thought that after all this back and forth, we'd just settle on a medium thickness tie and be done with it. But because there is no objectifiable end goal here, the fashionistas flout Aristotle's maxim of everything in moderation, and so the fluctuations continue.
This certainly isn't the only example of this either. Men's facial hair is another good example of this, particularly the mustache. The same is true of the turtleneck. Women's jeans styles are just as notable an example as well (sadly I'm old enough now to have witnessed the wide-leg jeans look be in style twice now). Perhaps the most obvious case of fashion flip-flopping was that within the span of the last ten years, a trend of wearing black shoes was quickly followed by a trend of, you guessed it, white shoes.
The important thing to understand about fashion is that it changes for no other reason than for change's sake. There is no ultimately end goal for fashion, or some ideal that it seeks to achieve. It is not trying to break a 4 minute mile, or run a 40 yard dash in under 4.5 seconds. It is not trying to become better. It changes simply because some people ultimately want to be different. Those people come up with a new style or trend to stand out from the crowd, the rest of us follow, and the process repeats. What is new eventually becomes old, and what was once old eventually becomes new again.
This is not to say that there are not secular changes happening underneath these fashion cycles. The casualization of fashion is certainly one of them. But the cycles persist in generally the same form as they always have, and always will. The initial driving force of these cycles is Equality Paradox 2. Our thirst for individual dignity results in us secretly dis-liking equality more than we realize or more than we might be willing to admit. But these forces persist because of Equality Paradox 1. When we're perceived to be beneath others, or in the case of fashion, "un-cool", we strive to be equal again (except not when we're the ones dressing differently intentionally). Equality Paradox 2 gets the ball rolling then you could say, but Equality Paradox 1 keeps it rolling.
The cyclicality of baby names is another interesting example, which we spent time on in another post earlier this year. (For those interested, a great site for baby name analysis is nameberry.com) Nameberry talks about the "100 year rule," which basically says the popularity of names comes in 100 year cycles. In my analysis, I didn't quite find that rule to be consistent enough to be called a "rule," but there's something to what they're saying, no doubt. The same principle with fashion applies to baby names: old names sprout up and become popular again, people increasingly choose those names until too many people have done so, and then to make sure our child isn't just another Justin or another David, we choose something else, and the popularity of those names falls away, with new names replacing them. Here too, and as we discussed in our post, there's some secular trends in play. The melting pot effect has dramatically increased variety in names in the last 100 years, and some names just are just probably never coming back. But the key thing to notice here is that the vast majority of names today are chosen from a preexisting batch, rather than created brand new. Just as with fashion then, the cycles of baby names change for no other reason than for change's sake itself.
Slang is another example. Have you ever wondered why young people continuously and repeatedly come up with new words to describe something that already has a word to describe it? Take something we like or approve of: in the 60's, you'd say that was "groovy," "far out," or "outta sight". In the 70's, that became "psyched," "right on", or "dynamite." In the 80's, people chose to describe this as "gnarly," "rad," "stoked," or "totally." In the 90's, something we liked was "fly," "fresh," "da bomb," "dope," or my personal favorite, "all that and a bag of chips." In the 2000's, the vernacular of choice was "tight" or "sick". Can't we just save ourselves the trouble and avoid all this confusion by picking a word and sticking with it? But as we've pointed out, that really isn't the point. The point is to be different. The point is change for change's sake.
In case you're wondering, this is not a generational thing. If anything, slang cycles are happening faster now because of social media, which alerts us all to new phrases and lingo much more quickly today than might have been the case in the past. Regardless, the principle remains the same. Slang changes in the same way clothing or baby names do: people use the trendy terms as long as they're trendy, but when they then become used by everyone, new words or phrases come again about so that we can try and distinguish and dignify ourselves from the crowd. Then the new words and phrases get adopted by everyone else, the "cool" kids come up with something new again, and the process repeats.
As much as we all might be a fan of equality in theory then, it seems we don't actually seem to like it quite as much as we think. Human beings are without question social animals, and we learned this again during 2020 during the lockdowns (in case you're still skeptical of this, for those that ever go to workout classes, next time you go to one, see if you can maintain doing the exercises on a different timing from everyone else...I'm always amazed at how often I, and seemingly everyone else, subconsciously adjust so that I can be on the same cadence as everyone else). But as important as this social aspect of our nature is, we also need to establish and maintain our own individuality as well. Human nature therefore also seems to require that we don't simply become another brick in the wall. Our dignity prevents us from ever completely submitting ourselves to the whole and simply becoming an unidentifiable cog in the wheel.
Equality is therefore a kind of ironical "good": we only want it when we don't have it, but when we have it, we don't want it. The examples of fashion, slang and baby names all seem to teach us that we dislike inequality when we're perceived to be below our peers in something, but not when we're perceived to be above them. That can mean less cool, less trendy, less rich, or anything else. In that situation we strive to be equal. But when we're equal again, and thus again like everyone else, then we do whatever we can to be different. Then, we strive for inequality. The more equality we get, the less we want of it. These are the paradoxes of equality.
What are the implications of all these equality paradoxes? Probably most important is that while the hallmark American political maxim has always been equality, we may need to apply a dose of moderation to our favorite creed, simply because trying to eradicate inequality is probably a fool's errand. The history of Communism in the 20th century provides substantial historical evidence for the dangers of this. We might say that we want equality in society, but whether because it's impractical or impossible, it does not appear that we truly desire equality in our heart of hearts the way we say we do. We "talk-the-talk", but we don't "walk-the-walk", as we used to say in the 90's.
There is an extremely bright silver lining behind these equality paradoxes, however, and this silver lining may actually represent a key ingredient into the secret formula of American society's success. And that is that our thirst to not let others pass us by, or to not let others get too far ahead of us, actually drives progress. Our natural desire to be unequal drives us to be creative and ambitious, and this desire to stand out from the crowd leads to create new businesses, new art, new novels, new scientific discoveries, and so on and so on. It turns out that the equality paradoxes keep us competitive, and they make us all better.
What we really want then is equal opportunity in society, not equal outcomes. We should strive for leveling to playing field to advance, not to level the scoreboard. We want some people to take leads, so that we can then strive to catch them. Thankfully for us, our nature does not seem to allow us to completely eradicate equality anyways, but we shouldn't want to do that even if we could, simply because it would probably impair the very thing that has made American society great, and the thing that has made it pro-gress as it has. The great American political problem then is distinguishing when unequal outcomes stem from unequal opportunity, compared to when they derive from natural differences in abilities. This has been, and likely will forever be, our greatest dilemma as a society. Though we might not ever truly be able to get the balance perfectly right, recognizing the paradoxes and ironies behind equality will probably go a long way towards helping us keep a better balance between removing inequality from American life, and encouraging it.
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