{"id":82,"date":"2003-05-14T05:48:03","date_gmt":"2003-05-14T05:48:03","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:07:47","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:07:47","slug":"the_axis_of_equality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=82","title":{"rendered":"The Axis of Equality"},"content":{"rendered":"

I talked about “openness and incompleteness” as one axis of my 2 x 2 political Matrix (I have tickets for 10:00 pm Thursday, btw, with TG and the oldest boys…). The other is Equality.<\/p>\n

Equality is one of those words whose meanings change depending on your perspective; the two definitions seem to be “equality of treatment” and “equality of outcome”. I’ll be abstract from this and suggest that while this distinction is damn important, the more important one is between “equality matters” and “no it doesn’t, I rule”.<\/p>\n

Most societies have as their organizing principle the question of the distribution of power. Even the most repressive medieval societies were ruled by kings (and queens) who were caught in a delicate web of obligations … both upward and downward … and who usually prevailed or fell in no small part based on how well they managed them.<\/p>\n

In modern political thought, we have one pole which suggests that equality is good (in one form or the other), and another pole which suggests it is bad, whether because of Divine Right in some form or another or because of the Invisible Hand and humanity’s inherent variations.<\/p>\n

If you take this matrix, you get four quadrants:<\/p>\n

\"Equality.gif\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Let’s go through them.<\/p>\n

Closed\/Unequal. The Nazi ideal. ‘Baathist Iraq would be a good example. A rigidly controlled society in which a strict hierarchy is not only an incidental part of maintaining control, but is a part of the value system of the society. <\/p>\n

Closed\/Equal. The Socialist ideal. Soviet Russia, in the imaginations of its supporters. In reality, Pol Pot’s Cambodia probably would stand as a good (that can’t be the right word in this context) example.<\/p>\n

Open\/Unequal. The Libertarian ideal. Much of Dickens’ (Victorian) England would be the best historical example I can quickly think of.<\/p>\n

Open\/Equal. The American ideal. America doesn’t perfectly embody it, but certainly holds it up and makes an effort to do so.<\/p>\n

This maps to but doesn’t quite mirror Pournelle’s 2 x 2 matrix, which Trent Telenko pointed out to me in the comments to “The Fantasy Ideology of the GOP”.<\/p>\n

I’ll try and extend this a bit and explain the differences and why I like mine better…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I talked about “openness and incompleteness” as one axis of my 2 x 2 political Matrix (I have tickets for 10:00 pm Thursday, btw, with TG and the oldest boys…). The other is Equality. Equality is one of those words whose meanings change depending on your perspective; the two definitions seem to be “equality of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}