In a previous blog post I wrote about some of my questions about equality. Why do some people actively seek it and why don’t others? Is that they already see the world as equal as it can be? Do they simply accept a natural order in which things are going to be unequal? Or are they simply selfish, knowing inside that equality might remove them from a position of privilege?
Whatever the answer to that question is, a recent conversation with a friend, and articles about the inequality that exists in areas of Baltimore, got me thinking a little more about equality. I started to think about the question: What does equality even look like? Is equality a state of perfection that we cannot attain? Are we caught in idealism and not being practical? How can equality be achieved, when we are all different? I think those of us who fight for equality have visions for what that might look like, but have we ever actually seen it? Does this sense of equality only lie in our hearts and we push in a direction not really thinking about where we end up? Even though nature often tends towards balanced, it is state rarely reached if ever. Instead we find most things oscillating about a state of equilibrium. Many times that oscillation is damped, meaning that while we never quite reach a state of balance, each oscillation is not as wild (or in other words doesn’t take us as far from equilibrium as the preceding oscillation). Is this perhaps what the fight for equality looks like – swinging back and forth until finally the oscillations about that state of equality or so minute that we can no longer detect the inequality anymore? In a complex society where one can find many areas in which inequality exists, do we prioritize the most obvious ones first, until other ones seem resolved to the point that new areas of inequality see more important? Or as a fellow blogger wrote when addressing the issues of vaccines, can we sometimes make the issue worse by continually fighting for something even when the problem doesn’t exist because of the time and energy we have invested into a cause? A recent Daily Show piece discussed how anti-GMO groups have actually helped large corporations, like Monsanto, to gain more of a stranglehold on the food supply because they are now the only ones with the money to be able to afford all the bureaucracy it takes to get a patent on a genetically modified seed.
It occurred to me that although we might be great at pointing out inequality, how often do we have a conversation about what equality looks like, and does it exist anywhere? Are there real examples we can use? Are there any microcosms of the larger society we all want to live in? It is has only been within the past 30 years or so that a lot of psychological research shifted away from just looking and ailments of the mind and started focusing on the more positive aspects of our humanity, like happiness. While depression is terrible and it is important to help those with depression out of those states, is learning how not to be depressed that same as knowing how to be happy? Can we always derive what a good example is, by simply only looking at bad examples? I believe the answer to that is no. Growing up with an alcoholic father, I learned about the kind of husband and father I didn’t want to be. But as I had marriage troubles in my own life it occurred to me I never thought enough about what a good father and husband is supposed to be like. It required a certain rewiring in my thinking. When it comes to studying happiness it required asking a set of questions that haven’t been asked before. What makes people happy? What kind of behavior to happy people exhibit? What kinds of societies are happier? These questions are important to ask and science has helped make a lot of progress in the area of happiness.
So while we are all pretty great at point out inequality maybe we should shift our focus to talking about what equality would look like. Find real world examples. Analyze how and why those societies work and how they are advantageous to what we already have. Pointing out inequalities between men and women have value, but let’s have a conversation about what are the positive values we want a human to have, regardless of gender. Let’s have an idea of where we are going, before we push. It might even help us get there faster
no supernatural forces at work; it’s a conspiracy that involves this plane of existence. It’s physical and tangible in a very real sense. We can actually settle the debate. With God, you’re never going to settle it, because God cannot be disproven in a strictly logical sense (of course that’s because for something to exist the onus for proof is on those that would assert its existence).
that people give them credit for is truly astounding. The really corrupt ones are so obviously corrupt and drunk on power there is no need of secrecy they do it right in front of your face. And of course I know many scientists. They are some of the finest people I know: curious, intelligent, and for the most part noble and compassionate. Corrupt scientists are few and far between and are easily exposed because scientists believe that what they are doing is valuable and important and have zero tolerance for those that would make a mockery of the scientific process and allow bad science to flourish.
-mail (Not even Robert Pikus, but john Robert Pikus), logical errors like the fact that this agent is in charge of the Albany FBI department, but is notifying us via an FBI department in Cotonou, Benin. I don’t think the FBI has any foreign departments given that they are the Federal Bureau of investigations, and they of course aren’t called department offices but bureau offices when talking about the FBI. There is some good old fashioned confusion here as well. Like why are we sending this money to Donald Emeka, what does “Test:…. Very?” actually mean, why $98 dollars, why is “Note that you?” a question, and do I have even enough information here to make such a payment?
makes sense to want to hurt them back. But if you’ve ever lashed out at your spouse or partner in anger, at your child (either physically or verbally), it almost seems counter-intuitive that this would ever be a solution to alleviating your own feelings of hurt. Sometimes those that we lash out at, aren’t even the ones that have hurt us, and so it seems even more strange that we should have such behavior. On a more personal level, it seems to me that in my life when I experience a lot of hurt I often feel like I’m in the dark. Perhaps that is not necessarily the best analogy, but what I’m getting at is that the solution for making oneself feel better is not clear. So perhaps that’s why I equate it to being in the dark, because when you are in the dark it is difficult to find a way out. Depending on the depth of the pain we may start to panic and fear sets in, so we get desperate. We want the pain to end, and get out of that darkness so bad that we claw, and scramble, and we try to move quickly. But like any fast movement in the dark we don’t know what we are grabbing at, we don’t know what we are reaching for and we hit all sorts of things along the way, hurting others and ourselves. Flailing in the dark is never going to be best solution over keeping calm and thinking our way out of that dark palce.
memes, and self-help books that tell us that harming others is never a bona fide way of alleviating our feelings of hurt, but nevertheless we seem to drift towards hurting others who hurt us. Most of the time we just hurt people in a moment and then we quickly realize what we’ve done and apologize. Sometimes we feel justified in hurting others for the short-term satisfaction it brings, even though it doesn’t end our suffering over the long-term. When I look at war torn countries, where so many people have lost loved ones, and you wonder how can they alleviate the hurt that they feel without continuing a cycle of violence and feelings of hatred? I wonder if this just isn’t a darker part of who we are, and the only thing we can really do for ourselves is to be aware of it, and hope that in the moment we can focus on what will eventually lead to true happiness in the long-term instead of just hurting others, especially those we care about, even if they’ve inflicted pain on us. Maybe they are just as in the dark as we are.
Cloak Unfurled 