Friday, October 26, 2007
Equality is a Myth
I believe equality is a myth. When you ask somebody whether he is xxxx (put maharashtrian,gujju,gult,mallu,tam etc) and if he proudly says I am an Indian, he is differentiating between an Indian and a non-Indian. When somebody says I am a human being first, he is differentiating between a Human being and other living things like animals, trees etc. When he says (rarely I have heard saying somebody so) I care for living things, he is showing scant regard to non living things like water, air, petroleum etc. When somebody (assume for the sake of argument) says that I am all for anything that exists then he is differentiating between things that exist and do not exist, e.g. only conceptually exist, like law, ethics, designation etc. The argument is endless. Therefore I believe that equality is a myth. The only thing that is is important is ability to live with inequality.
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5 comments:
Yup! Mayur you are right. But everybody in this small world can't have that much thinking & of course analyzing power. Most of us do really want to have almost all the things available but we really forget that each and every individual's capacity(to pay)& in all sense is different look even our fingers too aren't equal!
And apart from all this I firmly believe that equality isn't possible & shouldn’t be there!
Well keep writing this kind of highly Intellectual stuff!!
equality becomes a myth only if the entire universe is the system under study. Idea is to divide this universal set in to partitions such that each partition has homogeneous elements. So in the partition of humans, all are equal.In a sub partition of humans, there are Indians and all of them are equal. The choice of the partition that a person chooses depends on his need and motivation at that point of time.
I'll disagree with you. You seem to be mixing diversity (in terms of value assigned to an attribute/feature) with unequality (in terms of care/preference/respect for it). In your examples you mention equality (or rather, lack of) of an entity in terms of both its state as well as its worth.
If I say I'm an Indian, of course I also imply that I'm not a non-Indian. But that doesn't mean that I'm implying Indians are better (or worse) than non-Indians.
For example, I am capable of differentiating between the colours Red and Blue. But saying they are different (unequal) doesn't imply that I have a preference for one over other.
@ Deep : Thanks!
@ book keeper : Once you accept the notion of partitioning the space, the who controls the choice of partition? In ancient India, people chose cast, white people chose skin colour and many others chose language as the partitioning rule. The problem really lies in the fact that many things are duel in nature and once you define something you are automatically defining its opposite. Equality creates contradiction because it is defined as sameness among two things, even with its opposite.
@ Outputstream : What you are taking about is Identity. Indian or Non-indian is one of the many identities you have. Considering your example of red and blue, I am not denying that equality can exist within the same class (in this case red and blue; which belong to the same class 'colour'). But how can you ensure that equality exists across classes (say 'colours' and 'trees') unless you merge the classes and give a common definition? Now, if you repeat the process of merging classes to create equality till all the classes are merged, you will essentially come to the argument that I have made.
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