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Friday, July 18th, 2008 04:18 am (UTC)
Well, you can certainly find people willing to attribute vast quantities of historically recent nastiness to "equality bias": mass murder in socialist states, postcolonial political violence, criminal violence in mixed-race societies. The idea seems to be, not just that the Inferior People (I speak ironically for the moment) can't govern themselves, as individuals or as a society, but that the ideology of equality actually encourages their rampages, because it says that their relative lack of success must be due to something other than their own qualities.

Like you, I'm Australian and this is all very far from my experience. But when I read about the criminal inferno in South Africa, or the ethnic gangs of the United States, or the various atrocities committed in the name of socialism, it certainly gives me pause. It is at least logically possible for a doctrine of equality to have the described effects. The question is whether that possibility is just science fiction, or whether it does have something to do with the real world we are presently inhabiting. This conversation has got me to the point of explicitly formulating the question, but I'm still working on the answer.

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