The Duplicity of Equality

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Democracy is the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, and for the people;” how right he was! In the pursuit of a more representative government the revolutionaries, or founders, decreed inalienable and God-given rights that made man equal.  The founders of these Western Democracies likeFrance and the United States, were revolutionary not only in their radical governments but in the concept of rights extended to their fellows.  Equality had never before been a blanket with which to cover mankind.  Prince had never been the equal of a pauper and the aristocracy could hardly be considered equal with the lower orders.  Democracy changed that.  The vote of the poorest wretch was equal to that of the greatest potentate. This equality was not ignorant of disparities in socio-economic means, education, and natural and learned talents—rather it affirmed that as Children of the Divine we were equal in worth and were entitled to the same rights. While equality and democracy were based on Judeo-Christian values society functioned at high levels.  Equality required the low to rise to the level of the high.  One became the equal to a peer; the peer was never lowered in value.  Equality was a rallying cry to progress and rise up.  Equality protected the people and provided the necessary inspiration and motivation for advancement.

Democracy was however, an expanding and evolving principle.  The nature of democracy was to destroy completely the old social orders and replace them with a new order.  In its destruction of the old hierarchies and authorities it waged total war against every principle and pillar of the ancient society democracy replaced.  In France, immediately after the revolution the Jacobins sought to destroy the Catholic Church and its culture, the very names of the days of the week were changed, and the metric system introduced.  This was merely foreshadowing of what was to come.  In later centuries Judeo-Christian values, so central to the definition of equality and civilized society made way to secularism.  God-given rights became natural rights.  Equality became less of an aspiration and more of an entitlement.  Equality in this new sense, equality by default rather than by divine right drove the nobility from equality.  Where before it was enough to aspire, today there is no need for aspiration-equality is achieved by lowering anyone above the lowest sphere back into the most base level.  In the name of equality sexual liberties take precedence over venerable and core religious rights.

At what cost do we abandon the old orders of religion and society?  A fundamental value of Christianity is equality in inequality; regardless of one’s circumstance all are equal before God.  This concept allows for progression, development, enterprise, and growth.  Religious values compose a key element of democracy, without which ethics and morality are a shifting morass and equality is a tool of the state.  Hitler and Stalin preached equality from their godless pulpits to murder thousands and plunder their peoples.  Equality is only truly possible, in an enlightened form while under the oversight of Providence.  Once secularism takes root, as we see from daily life, equality and society swiftly sink to a disinterested and despondent depravity in which everyone takes and nobody contributes.  Alas, as democracy bellows its clarion call to arms against oppression and proclaims liberty to all under her flag, she is poisoned by the liberty she announces. The people in pursuit of their rights abandon balance and reason to assert a faux equality in which the despot of the old order is buried under the tyranny of the masses; and thus the people destroy the true nature of equality and pollute the bright star upon which democracy was born, for unaccountable to God democratic equality must fall into the oblivion of oppression.