The way we play politics tends to be magnetic, just like we are inclined to only choose leaders who display a 'magnetic' personality. When we pick either side, we stick to it wearing loyalty on our sleeves until death (or so it would seem). The only sin you can commit is changing sides, just as much you as you can never go wrong by sticking with your side, regardless of what it makes you believe or defend. You've got to be a team player, or you're no player at all - even if you don't see sense in the strategy. Sometimes, that includes randomly taking one for the team, ironically.
This results in diametric opposites in views - boxised versions of how best one's country must be run: capitalism vs. socialism/communism, welfare vs. earned privileges, affirmative action (reservation) vs. society benevolence, and the topic of this article: equality vs. equability.
The whole context to this war over ideology is, on one side, the belief that the happiest world is one in which every person has the environment and the freedom to succeed and achieve limitlessly with skill is the only limitation. In other words, you should be able to achieve whatever you want, if you can pull it off. This world rewards you fairly for the effort you actually make and the success you create in the process is yours to take. So, the more you put in, the more you reap. Or simply put the best win.
The ignored sidenote here is that reward should be preceded by fair advantage. That is to say, if life was a track race, everyone must be exactly similarly poised to win - the only impediment being how well they are able to eventually perform. They start at an equidistant starting point to the finish line and have the same minimum standard running quality gear and training & facilities. Anyone with any less is at a disadvantage and the competition is not fair - whatever all the fuss about it is worth. This kind of a world is perfectly fair to ensure that only the best performers win and their success should be proportional to performance. Neither of them should have an inherent advantage over and above the performance they pull off.
As in a real-life track event, all these factors are achievable if all participants are equally well off to afford them, or can match up to those who can afford them easily with access to them i.e. financial support, benefactors, ability to take loans, official support from sports organisations, etc. Those who are well off have the privilege of waltzing through all of this with no stress, unlike those who don't, which makes this idealistic equality impossible. Balancing it involves the natural benefit of years and years of privilege.
As much as we try to get as close as possible to construct a world where we are relatively equal enough to call it a fair race, we realise that even if we can, we really can't. There are too many variables in between. What we can do is to ensure that life goes on, even for the darkest of those who fall under those variables. Their fate is worsened by the fact that we live in a world where work and life are intertwined.
To have a better life, people take up better work because nothing should come completely free in a healthy world. The competition to get this better life can get ahead of itself, though, where it is more about the competition for its own sake and less about that better life (if at all) - perhaps the genesis of the rat race. The problem with its obsession is that there will always be losers, with more of them losing the harder we play.
Our performance in this rat race defines our access, or lack thereof, to the very basics that define a good, healthy, human life. The more losers, the more people "lose" the opportunity to get these things, the more out of reach they get. This turns the tables completely on what society was. Society used to be structured to feed, clothe and sustain its citizens. Now, all those resources have become dog and the bone candy for people's ambitions, and only a few lucky winners have the human privilege of being comfortably fed. The other humans become dogs to the rest, eating breadcrumbs that fall off the table.
In the equality vs. equability debate, we mask this battle of victors and losers as the next level of human worth, where we better ourselves unconditionally without counting the cost. One of the first problems of this progression is assuming that we all are in an equal place and privilege to take up this challenge. In truth, it is an exercise of boredom that the privileged winners have from when this has been done before, over and over by those before them. It only causes a split between the really few winners and the many losers who then get relegated to breadcrumbs for life. While one side insists that you should be able to achieve whatever you want, if you can pull it off, the other side asks, "what if you can't?"
With our stubborn resistance, equality can only be brought by distribution, just like how it was before the rat race was on. Not necessarily handouts, but availability, access, and equal access to availability: when everyone was better poised to win, and work and life weren't intertwined. There was a hunger for success but we knew the limit of it to be our sustainable sustenance and nothing more. It doesn't take much to know that you've lost the plot when you've bargained the Holy Grail for personal glory but greed is a bitch.
The privileged winners believe in a kind of equality which says that nothing is of value unless it is earned, full and well. That makes perfect sense in a perfect world. What doesn't is that anything they do will always be advantageous against the others unless there is drastic action to address the inequality between the two groups i.e. equitability. The reason we have to resort to handouts, today, is because we lost our minds a long time ago and let the sin multiply to a point where even the best-balanced medicine won't work wonders. This is where complete student loan waivers, free houses for those how never historically had decent ones, better-by-miles education access to those generations never had the privilege, and the like.
What is needed is a jolt to the system and it will jolt both sides. That's the only way you can fully repair a permanently broken structure. Of course, there will be bruises to egos but that's a part of the journey to equal progress. You win some, you lose some, en route to a happy world. If you don't want any of that, you will always be at the butt end of a broken one.
One of the reasons the world has come down to this is because we have confused thrills for kills - like we confuse a sports game for real life. A game is played, a team is cheered, a winner wins, and everyone cheering gets back to their not-so-exciting lives based around putting food on the table, and trying to stay away from getting to be the ones who eat the crumbs that fall off. The game is the thrill. It's what we entertain ourselves with for a break from the kill: putting food on the table every day. But a skewed world interchanges them. Putting food becomes the thrill while we kill survival. If we are so cruel as to make play work, and work play, what's at stake, and raises it dangerously, is our happiness and survival - all to fuel ambition we are too proud to shake off. Ambition can only ensure food on the table for very few of us, even in its best avatar. The rest us just have to make do with crumbs.
Trying to create any kind of paradise in an equal world is impossible. Paradises are myths. It is we who make up for paradise that it can ever be and prove the myth to be real. The world that we take pride in bares open our best values as individuals and as a group. We can go with the survival of the fittest to the point that death for its sake is alright, highlighting power and ego. We could, otherwise, choose to take care of everyone so that we all get to eat and live happily and well without having to beg our way up into better chances of survival - whether it's a socialist paradise, a capitalist haven or a thought through system that embodies only the best of our virtues.
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