People are not treated – neither by circumstances nor by other people – as “equal” practically anyway: we are born in different circumstances and with different traits. And those traits and characteristics are shaped or modified through a certain interaction with what surrounds us – which by definition, is different for everyone.
Furthermore, these interactions are not comparable on the same terms: a person can spend “a lifetime” – or even “lives” – behaving as if everything were “theirs” and they could do what they “want” without apparently suffering too many consequences by his actions and without reflecting before going through a “painful” experience that forces him to “doubt” or “change” or “hide” his impulses and be forced to look for other ways to satisfy himself or survive. And another person can receive “serious” consequences for the slightest “mistake” or “miscalculation.”
Someone can get carried away by his impulses and go through many dangerous situations and hardly realising it and another person can even “perish” in the first “dangerous” situation that he encounters.
The “measures” that we have “invented” are far from being objective. Even physical standards – such as the standard “meter” or “kilogram” – have a degree of “uncertainty” and “subjectivity”, let’s not talk about the patterns that depend on other parameters that people “perceive”. Like money as a measure of “effort” or “merit”, these categories also subjective and dependent on many parameters totally subject to perception: someone can do an activity that for another is equivalent to “moving a finger”, such as dancing or singing in front of a camera and get thousands or millions of times more than someone who does daily physical efforts that require a lot of calories and energy – like a “star” in “show business” compared to a “star” in construction or cleaning.
The “same” type of effort in a “developed” country as in one of the so-called “developing” countries has different results in the “objective” profit in money.
We could go on and on about the mechanisms that determine rewards – the military and financial systems, the ways in which a person can relate to his surroundings to “show off” what he “does” and “demand” a reward for what he does- or doesn’t- etc…
But the more sophisticated the forms of greed become, the more potentially harmful they can be – and inevitably turn against those who consciously or unconsciously raise them – and the point of mentioning it is to get to its root:
It is disconcerting that so much blood has been spilled and so many resources have been wasted throughout history in the name of a concept as “blurred” as “equality.”
The fact is that no person, group of people, or society, seems to be able to bear the feeling that he or she is getting “less” satisfaction than his or her peers. In this way, claims for rights and equality are always towards a possible greater “satisfaction” and once “achieved”, a person or society begins to seek greater satisfaction by comparing itself with “others”. From there arise all comparisons and all interactions between people, without this mechanism each person would live in “their world” of their own satisfactions and needs without detecting that there are other desires and needs around them – a state to which we seem to get closer and closer…
We know that no one makes comparisons of “equality” towards “below” – no one says “I also have the “right” to be an “outcast”, despised and without basic needs and I demand it” – and that in practice, we see how movements in which people compare and compete – and ultimately “kill” and “exclude” – which is worse – have generated somewhat more advanced societies that “exploit” other less advanced ones through “global” systems and where their inhabitants have more guarantees of surviving and having a minimum of satisfaction similar to their peers – something more or less of “equality” in practice.
There is also migration – the result of having access to ways of “life” around the world – and the problems it generates are proof that the world needs to move forward as a “whole” and at its “roots”.
In the “exploited” parts, a “shake” can begin that can leave behind the atavisms of “class” or “race” or “position” or any other “ancestral lie” that made people believe, to varying degrees, that certain traits and circumstances are not “comparable” with others – and return them to their circular and mutual form.
However, we see how even in the most “developed” parts, the way of “life” ends up producing isolation, depression and exacerbates “narcissistic” and “sociopathic” traits – the “logical” result of putting any person in this situation where apparently does not “need” anyone “else”.
Ultimately, if we imagine a fully “developed” world in the terms we have “attained” until now, we would have to imagine a global village where no one “lacks” “anything” and even receives it in the place where they are through automatic production and distribution, receiving without any “shame” because it no longer compares to what that “others” or their “qualities” do or do not do, but as a result, consisting of isolated, depressed, narcissistic and potentially psychopathic people – incapable of “respecting” or “caring” for anyone else – if we allow them to “live together”… etc.
Each one will lack “nothing”…but all…
It doesn’t sound like something “possible” – or even “development” – but can we imagine something different?
The fact is that when the “competition or “comparison” “inserted” within each person reaches its “limit”, it generates the need for an increasingly objective standard. And the only way to be objective with respect to the aspirations and sensations of others is to “acquire” them as if they were “your own” – not to “simulate”, not to show “empathy” with a gesture, but to feel it as “your own”, which is the root of the feeling of possession that makes us “compete” and “exclude”.
It seems like an “inconceivable” state. Seeing the world from that perspective would be equivalent to actually seeing “another world” that we cannot even imagine.
However, history seems to lead us towards it irremediably, even if it has to do so by pushing “comparisons” and “competition” to the “borderline” of mass conflicts and “famine” – like the First and Second World Wars.
Furthermore, in practice we have never experienced something that has no antecedents – a consequence without a cause – and aspirations within each person that do not seem to have a basis in “reality” – such as the feeling of being “unique”, “irreplaceable” and “eternal” – empirically, they do not seem to be the exception.
Snakeeskin 