Equalitarianism is morally and socially deranging
Embracing a hereditarian reality is necessary to maintain free societies
This is the final of three pieces addressing ’s arguments, and more widely arguments the folk over at Magazine make. Lorenzo has linked to relevant material from both outlets (and elsewhere) throughout.
The first two pieces in the series are available here and here. and have also written responses/commentary on various recent bits of ’s work here and here.
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An old witticism about British politics says it’s a fight between the Stupid Party and the Silly Party. Philosopher Nathan Cofnas has published an essay on his Substack—Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem—that everyone should read.1 It provides an excellent introduction to one way that conservative political orientations can be Stupid (and if you don’t like those, there are others…). For ways in which left political orientations can be Silly, see Sir Keir Starmer’s current travails.
A recent US poll found that among elites—defined as people having at least one post-graduate degree, earning at least $150,000 annually, and living in high-population density areas (more than 10,000 people per square mile in their zip code—73 per cent identified as Democrat and only 14 per cent as Republican. The conservative side of US politics thus has a problem. Such a lopsided elite allegiance translates into limited institutional penetration and organisational capacity. There is little reason to think that matters are all that different elsewhere in the Anglosphere.
In his essay, Nathan Cofnas argues that the conservative side of politics must become much less the Stupid Party by attracting more smart people. This, he argues, requires explicitly rejecting what he calls the equality thesis and I have relabelled equalitarianism:
There are no inherent differences between human groups.2
If the equalitarian thesis held that there were no inherent differences between individuals, the claim would be obviously false. Equalitarianism is the claim that capacities and propensities are equally distributed among human groups. As it is obviously false at the individual level, equalitarianism requires the elevation of group identity as the proper unit of analysis and moral judgement, regardless of the level of overlap in group outcomes.
As we can see unequal distribution of social outcomes between groups all around us, the only intellectually consistent response to that reality—once one accepts the equalitarian thesis—is this consequent claim:
The lack of equal distribution of outcomes between groups in any society entails the persistence of social injustice that correctly applied social action can eliminate.
As long as the first leg of the equalitarian claim is accepted, the second follows. As long as they accept the equalitarian thesis, smart folk will grasp it and adopt whatever is the dominant form of equalitarian politics. Currently this politics is Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (PEP)—aka “wokery”. Hence it keeps winning, even though many of its claims are unpopular among the wider citizenry.
The second leg of the equalitarian thesis has such power because equalitarianism is false. The enduring reality of unequal social outcomes—due to there being inherent differences between groups—requires explanation. Hence:
the equalitarian premise + unequal outcomes —> equalitarian explanation —> equalitarian politics.
Nathan Cofnas argues that political and social progress can only come from an open rejection of equalitarianism:
Key traits are differently distributed across human individuals and groups, including genetic traits. Therefore, different distributions of social outcomes between individuals and groups are inevitable.
We know there are differences in genetic traits between human groups: e.g., lactase persistence, melanin content of skin. Due to power law effects, tail effects—differences in distribution of traits—matter. But the genetic signature of a trait one group has and another does not is rather stronger than differences in the distribution of the same set of traits. Comparing human sub-populations is also complicated by their being subject to social selection effects. Given the persistence of culture, and that there demonstrably have been differences in selection effects on human populations, some version of hereditarianism is true.
Differences in cognitive patterns between men and women is enough on its own to establish that equalitarianism is false. As politics directed to human flourishing needs to be grounded in reality, equalitarianism has to be abandoned and hereditarianism embraced. For this to happen—as Nathan Cofnas argues—smart people have to move away from the equalitarian thesis and the politics it generates.
The falsity of equalitarianism means there is a lot of contradictory evidence and experience. It can only be maintained as the basis for moral judgement and public policy by falsehoods, lies, censorship—including self-censorship and self-curating of information—and intimidation.
A key—even necessary—supporting Big Lie is that we are not currently suffering under a regime of censorship and intimidation. A lie that people furiously self-curate their information sources to maintain, dismissing any such suggestion that there is a regime of censorship and intimidation. No, all that has happened is that public morality has shifted—becoming, of course, much better.
Much of this rests on hiding the aggression involved—including from the enforcers themselves—by characterising it as social or moral concern. Social media enables such “just moral/social concern” aggression to be dramatically upscaled.
Owning morality
An embedded claim to own morality is natural to the progressive mindset. Conservatives typically anchor their identity in things outside themselves. Hence the classic conservative concern for order, for the preservation of things with which they identify.
By contrast, progressives typically ground their identity in things within themselves—various moral, emotional and cognitive commitments. This makes disagreement much more likely to seem an attack on their identity and increases the reassurance value of self-curating any information flows.
While neither past nor future exists, the past is informationally superior to the future, as we have no information from the future. Except when they fail to adapt to sufficiently high levels of social stress, conservatives do not create the level of social disasters that progressives do, for the past is informationally superior to the future. Conservatives deal in far more reality-tested ideas than do progressives: people have tried them before.
Unless, of course, conservatives also buy into the equalitarian thesis and start behaving like progressives. We can see this pattern strongly in the UK’s post-2019 Conservative Government but it’s been a general tendency of conventional centre-right politics for years.
If one applies the equalitarian thesis to history, past inequalities become yet another sign of how sinful it was, how unworthy it is of emulation. After all, it’s full of male faces (patriarchy!) and white (white supremacy!) faces. Centre-right politics that accepts the equalitarian thesis is crippled in its ability to defend or even invoke that heritage and all its embedded learning.
Such politics becomes unable to conserve anything, so increasingly pointless. Hayek’s criticism of conservatism as having no intended direction of its own—hence just going in directions set by others, albeit a little more slowly—applies with particular force when elites are compliant in the face of networks operating the non-electoral politics of institutional capture.
The rise of national populism is deeply connected to the failure of conventional conservative politics, something worsened by the conservative presumption that institutions should be allowed to run themselves. This presumption is inadequate for institutions—whether public or private—coercively funded by taxpayers. These are more subject to institutional capture than those who have to gain consent for their income: although regulation—anti-discrimination and civil rights law—can shift that dynamic as well.
Less moral than thou
Equalitarianism’s claim to inherent moral superiority is nonsense. Falsity in a basic claim about humans and social reality is never morally superior to the truth. It’s no accident the dominant form of equalitarian politics is based on denying that we have reliable access to any underlying truth.
Equalitarianism arises naturally from a blank slate view of Homo sapiens—that humans are made by their social environment—as any inherent cognitive structures provide a basis for systematic differences between groups. Blank slate views also suggest intellectual capacity is self-developed rather than being largely inherited from one’s parents. This is both congenial to—and encourages moral and cognitive arrogance among—the ostentatiously smart.
In the name of creating equalitarian social orders, ideologies based on false blank slate visions of humanity have killed tens of millions of people and tyrannised hundreds of millions more.
The blank slate thesis facilitates tyranny and mass murder, because it claims any social vision can be written on the human psyche—it’s a blank slate—given application of enough social power. The more morally urgent the goal, the more the wielding of social power to achieve it is justified. Any resistance to that vision must be wilful, or manifestations of malign forces.
This explains the need to wield enough social power to eliminate—or otherwise neutralise—any resisting human dross. The aforementioned poll also found that US elites have become increasingly hostile to freedom:
Among members of the Elites who are 55 or older, just 10% think there is too much individual freedom—a majority (54%) of Elites under 35 hold that view.
Mere inequality in outcomes between groups—even if overlap between groups is greater than differences between them—becomes oppression. Deranging and false characterisations devalue citizens’s choices in free societies and their heritage of human striving.
The characterisation of democratic societies as full of oppressive discrimination that has come to be so prominent in scholarly and media discourse devalues citizens’ present and past choices. If—after decades, or even centuries, of citizens voting, societies are a mass of bigotry and structural oppression—then clearly the citizens cannot be trusted to get it right.
Hence the need for inquisitors and commissars, labelled as diversity officers and bias response teams. Diversity officers operate on the Inquisition’s basic logic: error has no rights and inquisitors can identify error. The contemporary version of these claims come from Herbert Marcuse’s immensely influential essay Repressive Tolerance.
Such politics generate and attract those explicitly committed to degrading social functioning on the basis of social alchemy theory. That is, burn away the “oppressive” present and any transformational future will emerge from the ashes, like gold emerges from base metal when the latter is burnt away.3 Commitment to what is functional within an existing society becomes commitment to its oppressive social order.4
Such theory-and-practice activism pumps social corrosion into society, seeking the equal outcomes between groups that equalitarianism promises but cannot deliver. With enough crushing of freedom, equalitarian politics can deliver a horrible simulacra of an equal-outcomes society.
Max Horkheimer, the founder of Critical Theory, was very clear that the pursuit of liberatory—i.e. equalitarian—justice requires the crushing of freedom:
Marx did not see that freedom and justice are dialectical concepts. The more freedom, the less justice and the more justice, the less freedom.
Because the equalitarian thesis is false, a free society will generate social patterns that contradict the equal outcomes it demands. It will produce information that blatantly contradicts what it claims is so, hence the need for regimes of falsehoods, lies, censorship, and intimidation.
Equalitarianism is, however, very simplifying: if outcomes are unequal, there must have been injustice. This is an analysis any midwit can do, with maximum self-righteousness. Moreover, as citizens’ free choices created this blatant injustice, clearly resources and control have to be handed to said self-righteous midwits.
Equalitarian progressivism creates a moral perfectionism that enables adherents to critique everything and take responsibility for nothing, all with maximum self-righteousness.
Mobilising narratives
We live in societies awash with information. That generates two pressures. One is to create framings to make the flood of information manageable. Amongst the highly educated, there is strong demand for framings that preserve an identification as being of the Smart and Good. More and more, “quality” media is structured to generate, communicate and coordinate narratives that do precisely that.
The second pressure is to channel information to protect those narratives, to develop mechanisms that shield against contradicting information. The simplifying falsity of equalitarianism gives it powerful advantages in mobilising framing narratives.
It provides a simple criteria of judgement—do we observe equality in outcomes between groups or not? It provides a simple explanation—structural injustice. It provides a basis for moral perfectionism—via an imagined future without reality tests. This imagined moral splendour has a profound rhetorical advantage over anything that already exists—i.e., actual human striving and achievement—with its trade-offs and imperfections and conflicted histories.
It also provides a costly signal of worthiness: the willingness to systematically ignore contrary information and rationalise doing so. All this provides a protective social cordon sanitaire of people whose status strategies and cognitive identity means that they are invested in the operation of—and yet denial of the existence of—the regime of falsehoods, lies, censorship and intimidation.
We humans are easily up for the moralising self-deception this requires. This need for distinguishing moral signals generates the continual shifting of linguistic sensitivities —e.g. Latinx, non-binary—and searches for new moral projects to be getting along with.
We humans communicate by narratives. Any narrative that is wielded to provide a marker of what one must adhere to to be of the Good and Smart has to be a lie, as it requires there be no legitimate grounds to disagree. Yet it needs people to disagree—or who can be portrayed as disagreeing—as otherwise there is no status benefit from adhering to the narrative.
The status-narrative structure thus relies on inaccurate, de-legitimising stereotyping of those who disagree—or are deemed to do so. It uses various emotion-laden trigger words to create, as writer Chris Bray puts it, a wall of noise, designed to prevent understanding. It also provides a very clear message of what the Good and Smart people believe.
All this means we live in a time when the “quality” media pushes a truly astonishing—and ever-growing—set of narrative falsehoods. To list but some:
• The 1619 Project, which projects a false view of American history.
• Russiagate, which told a false narrative of Russian collusion. It was QAnon for the college-educated.
Claiming that:
• Russian disinformation had a significant impact on the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election in 2016: no, it did not, but such claims play into “the citizenry are incompetent choosers” narratives.
• African-Americans suffer under a regime of racist police brutality: no, the tiny number ofunarmed African-Americans killed by police in any year is outnumbered by those who are unarmed and not African-Americans who are killed by police in any given year.
• US is an inherently racist country: it is one of the least racist countries in the world.
• CRT is not being taught in schools: it is, just repackaged.
• Migration is inherently positive for the resident working class: no it is not.
• All migrant groups are inherently positive for their society: no they are not .
• Someone with a penis can be a woman: no they cannot.
• There are more than two sexes: no, there are not.
• There was no good reason to believe that Covid 19 resulted from a lab leak or that gain-of-function research was involved: yes, there was and is.
• Everyone was at risk from Covid: nope, it was a pandemic of the metabolically compromised.
• The mRNA inoculations were transmission-blocking vaccines: no they weren’t — boosters can even increase vulnerability.
• The hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of children represents good medical practice: it doesn’t.
• DEI is a good investment based on good evidence that makes us all systematically less racist: it isn’t.
• There was nothing to the Hunter Biden laptop story, it was probably a Russian op: it wasn’t.
• The climate alarmists are correct about impending ecological disaster: they aren’t.
This ongoing and entrenched pattern of false narratives creates a clever-stupid elite: folk clever enough to rapidly pick up what currently marks one as of the Smart and Good—and to engage in the various supporting rationalisations—but who commit to a series of false narratives while curating their own information flows. Hence the corrosive babbling to which much “elite” discourse has dwindled.
The equalitarian thesis is the Ur-lie. It is the core falsehood that generates a pattern of derivative and piggy-backed falsehoods plus the mechanisms—and cognitive and linguistic habits—that propagate them.
The corrupting effect of equalitarianism, and its supporting distorting narratives, manifest again and again. If there is no legitimate differentiation between groups — apart from how far they depart from average outcomes5—making distinctions in migration policy becomes much harder. Having honest public discussion of such differences is harder still. A great advantage of the Australian points system is that, by individualising assessment, it shifts to the level at which differences are accepted.
Because it is false, equalitarianism requires what Chris Bray nicely describes as total immunity to information. An inoculation against information then spreads across domains.
Equalitarianism is the Ur-lie in the development of mad views to engender perverse moral differentiation based on an ability to rationalise nonsense. The most extreme current manifestation is Trans: it involves the most blatant lying about biology.
A case study—that practically amounts to a fieldwork report on our morally diseased academy6—is provided via the UK employment tribunal’s judgment in Jo Phoenix v Open University.7 The Open University’s name became literal false advertising. Unfortunately, the pattern is not restricted to matters Trans.
The lying about biology8 involved in equalitarianism—that breeding populations separated for hundreds or more generations will generate no differences in distribution of traits; that male and female expression of genes are not subject to different selection pressures with cognitive consequences—is more indirect than lying about the basic biology of sex, but is still a commitment to systematic untruth.
Corroding the rule of law
Basic to the rule of law is procedural equality: that rules apply to everyone. As equalitarianism is false, it can only be achieved by handing out special privileges, which is precisely what we see it do. As equalitarianism is false, basic signals of competence will be achieved unequally between different groups. To generate equal outcomes between groups requires systematic degradation of signals of competence, which we see happening.
You cannot run a complex, technological society without robust signals of competence. The more people are perceived to be diversity hires—and, because equalitarianism is false, equalitarian politics must lead to the multiplication of diversity hires—the more people will fall back on stereotypes to form their expectations about competence. Given the reality of stereotype accuracy, stereotypes may well be better grounding for expectations of capacity than degraded signals of competence.
Because equalitarianism is false, procedural equality is utterly incompatible with equality of outcomes between groups, hence the constant pressure from equalitarian politics to subvert it. One of the more confronting realities is that procedural equality—equality in process—is very different from equality of opportunity. Your family is going to matter, for good or ill.
That families matter—both in frustrating equality of outcome and as loci of resistance to concentration of social power—means that equalitarian politics repeatedly seek to degrade familial authority. We see this, for instance, in Trans, where school systems seek to hide children’s life-changing choices from their parents.
The adoption of a new language of identity also separates school children inculcated into it from their “normie” parents, whose confusion can be characterised as a lack of empathetic understanding, which also undermines their authority. The destruction of childhood innocence is deliberately intended and both requires and seeks the undermining of parental authority. It flows from Theory rooted in a blank slate conception of human nature that overturns biologically-grounded conceptions of childhood development.9
Policies based on the denial of differences in the distribution of traits between human groups must be justified by lies and falsehoods and protected by censorship and intimidation. Equalitarian politics thus degrade the functioning of society and are ultimately incompatible with a free society.
Blank slate equalitarianism generates corrosive nonsense that degrades our societies. This will continue until we accept that the social is emergent from the biological, and so both the blank slate theory of humanity, and the equalitarian thesis it naturally gives rise to, are false.
References
Books
Joyce F. Benenson with Henry Markovits, Warriors and Worriers: the Survival of the Sexes, Oxford University Press, 2014.
Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.
Jeb Kinnison, Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, Jeb Kinnison Publishing, 2016.
Arnold Kling, Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides, Cato Institute, [2013] 2017.
Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lives: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Harvard University Press, [1995] 1997.
Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, Red Pill Press, [2006] 2012.
Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, Free Press, [1982] 1992.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1998.
Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.
Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent, Harvard University Press, 2003.
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Quill William Morrow, 1987.
Articles, etc.
Abdulbari Bener, Ramzi R. Mohammad, ‘Global distribution of consanguinity and their impact on complex diseases: Genetic disorders from an endogamous population,’ The Egyptian Journal of Medical Human Genetics, 18 (2017), 315–320.
Jo Freeman, ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,’ Ms magazine, April 1976, pp. 49-51, 92-98.
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm
Tim Kaiser, Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, ‘Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset,’ Journal of Personality, 2020, 88, 415–429.
Harold Robertson, ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis,’ Palladium: Governance Futurism, June 1, 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/
David Rozado, ‘The Great Awokening as a Global Phenomenon,’ arXiv, 4 Apr 2023, 2304.01596.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01596.
Charles C Roseman, Kevin A Bird, ‘Between group heritability and the status of hereditarianism as an evolutionary science,’ bioRxiv 2023.12.18.572247.
Bo M. Winegard, Cory Clark, Connor R. Hasty, Roy F. Baumeister, ‘Equalitarianism: A source of liberal bias,’ Journal of Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science, 2023.
A recent paper defines equalitarianism as: (1) demographic groups do not differ biologically; (2) prejudice is ubiquitous and explains existing group disparities; (3) society can, and should, make all groups equal in society. I prefer to include cultural differences and structure the definition as a base premise with consequential inferences, including claims about structural factors.
In the words of Herbert Marcuse:
What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops. If we could form a concrete concept of the alternative today, it would not be that of an alternative; the possibilities of the new society are sufficiently “abstract,” i.e., removed from and incongruous with the established universe to defy any attempt to identify them in terms of this universe.
Max Horkheimer says essentially the same thing:
The Critical Theory which I conceived later is based on the idea that one cannot determine, what is good, what a good, a free society would look like from within the society which we live in. We lack the means. But in our work we can bring up the negative aspects of this society, which we want to change.
Hence phrasing such as “maintaining the capitalist/bourgeois/patriarchal/white supremacist, ...” society or rationality.
If they fall below average outcomes, they are “oppressed”. If they are above, they are “oppressors”, regardless of the level of overlap with other groups. This leads to a situation where a heterosexual Euro-ancestry male working in a coal mine in a depressed rural community is triply “privileged” while a female Haitian scion of a wealthy family who went to an elite private school is triply “marginalised”. The performative, elite-congenial, simulacra of social concern is stark.
Jo Freeman’s 1976 essay ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood’ is the original field report on these patterns within feminised progressivism.
The Tribunal so often says “we do not accept the evidence of Prof X or Dr Y that …” you could turn it into a drinking game. Lying about those who dissent from approved narratives, and false negative stereotyping thereof had clearly become habitual and endemic. The Tribunal notes and documents the negative and inaccurate stereotyping.
Equalitarianism also lies about culture, when culture generates differences across life strategies that vary in their results.
Queer Theory is about an identity without an essence: it is hard to image a more blank slate conception. Moreover, if the imagined future is your moral benchmark, the less polluted by the sinful past one is, the more morally pure one is. This elevates the choices of children over the (polluted) experience of adults.
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Once again, please be reminded that Lorenzo is in Australia and won't be around for several hours (currently 4:12 pm GMT). In the meantime, do play nicely!
Good Lord, this was excellent! A glimmer of sanity in our present day shitstorm of lies and censorship. You listed plenty of high-quality sources and carefully arranged logic and evidence to make an airtight case that shouldn't even have to be made, because it's so bloody obviously true that it should go without saying. It reads like Galileo stamping his foot and muttering under his breath, "Yet it moves." Someday, people will look back on our era and scratch their heads in bewilderment. "How could they have been so ignorant? Why did they follow such obviously stupid and destructive ideologies and ruin the civilization they'd inherited?"
Well, many of us didn't believe that nonsense, but the ones who did had the backing of a psychotic ruling class that invested all of its resources into imposing their luxury beliefs on everyone else.
Thanks so much for writing this! The world may be insane, but it's reassuring to know there are others out there who are not.