“I’m sorry, Lisa, but giving everyone an equal part when they’re clearly not equal, is called what, class?” – The Simpsons
The kids said they wanted a cat for Christmas. Normally we have ham, but I’m willing to give it a try.
In the early 2000’s I first came across the word, “meme” – and at that point, it didn’t mean just a funny picture of chubby cats lusting after cheeseburgers. The original definition that I saw talked about a meme being an “idea fragment” that would travel virally through the consciousness of a group. Essentially memes have a life based on transmitting themselves from mind to mind.
Examples of these simple mind viruses are all around us – we’ve been soaking in them since we were little. We don’t notice them so much because they are a part of our culture. What are some example memes out of the tens of thousands we’ve been exposed to?
- Majority Rules
- One Man, One Vote
- One Nation, Indivisible
- All Men Are Created Equal
- Wilder Is The Funniest Living Human Political Writer
Each of those (except the last one, of course) is demonstrably false.
The majority only rules when the vote is counted fairly, and there have been plenty of minority rule situations because the majority didn’t have guns. I’d say that the history of the world is the history of the majority not ruling.
One man, one vote? Obviously, the creator of this idea had never been to Chicago, Milwaukie, Detroit, or Atlanta. Most of those cities make the old Soviet Union look like Utah.
One nation, indivisible? 1860 proved that wasn’t the case. Did it get undivisibled? Well, yeah, but I’ve met plenty of people who are still sore about the War of Northern Aggression. Sadly, all of them think that iced tea should have sugar in it.
OSHA inspectors only drink safe tea.
All Men Are Created Equal, though, is the meme that I wanted to write about in this post. I know that what Jefferson and the committee were going for was that all people should have equal Natural Rights, and it probably tested well in focus groups.
And, I agree with the idea that all people should have the same rights, but even that is trivially shown to be false: ask the people from three of the nations that have never visited this blog (North Korea, Cuba, and Iran) if that’s the case. It’s also folly for Americans to fight to give those rights to other people around the world: you don’t value anything that you don’t fight for yourself.
“All Men Are Created Equal” is a nice phrase, but believing it has caused more difficulty than any other meme for the people of the United States. Why?
A conclusion this meme leads to is this: if all people are equal, all groups are equal. Again, all individuals should have the same rights, but why on Earth would we anticipate that all groups have equal abilities? For example, the aboriginal peoples of Australia had been separated from the rest of humanity for 50,000 years. Why would we expect them to have the same abilities as the Japanese? Why would we expect that Native Americans would have the same abilities as Conquistadors from Spain since there were at least 30,000 years where they had nothing to do with each other?
Keep in mind, folks, it took less than a third of that time to make miniature poodles out of wolves.
How do you call a wolf with Stockholm Syndrome? “Here, puppy dog!”
To be utterly clear: I am not making the case that any particular group is better than another group. There are people from every group on the planet that are nicer and better people than I am. But why wouldn’t we expect them to be very different peoples? I am personally so maladapted to life in the Outback that I would probably burst into flame and turn into a pile of dehydrated ash on day one.
But when I got off the airplane in Fairbanks at -30°F (-7m3), I have never felt more at home. There was, for me, something inherently right about the taiga and the long dark nights that sang to my soul. It resonated with me. I wonder if having ancestors that were adapted to long, dark, cold winters had anything to do with that?
What did Vikings call English villages? Chopping centers.
A second conclusion this meme leads to is: if all people are equal, women are equal to men.
Well, they’re not. In college, one of my friends was on the swim team. He told me that pretty much every member of the men’s swim team could beat every world record held by women. Every one.
But wade just a minute – our swim team was not good. But yet, every one of them was better than the best woman swimmer that ever lived. Yet, not a single member of the dude swim team could have a baby.
That is not equal, at all.
Men and women are different, have different skills, and have different abilities. They are not, and never can be equal. The difficulty that this leads to is that standards have been lowered so women can do physical things like “firefighter” or “soldier” without the concept that they simply cannot perform as well as a male. But when it comes to “making babies” and “getting me a sammich” they knock it out of the park.
If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do they all have to drown?
The most common refrain is that “Well, the standards were too high to begin with.” If the first defense is that we should have weaker and slower firefighters and soldiers to prove a political point, I’d assume that whoever made that argument wasn’t interested in saving lives or defending our nation.
“All men are created equal” also leads to a third conclusion: if all people are equal, then all cultures must be equal. Well, no, they aren’t. At all. Many cultures have produced wonderful things, yet in 2021 have utterly failed to produce first-world living standards for their people.
Hollywood® has done a wonderful job of marketing the ideas that:
- The United States doesn’t have a culture.
- Other cultures are heckin’ cute and valid.
- Cultures in close contact and overlap don’t create any conflict.
- Colonialism created conflict by drawing borders that put overlapping cultures in close contact.
Careful readers will note that points three and four just might contradict each other.
To dissect that the United States doesn’t (or didn’t) have a culture, well, fish really don’t know that they’re swimming in water. When I look at the leader of China wearing a suit and tie that could have been tailored in New York or London, well, I realize that European culture is so very ubiquitous that cultures all over the planet have appropriated it.
That’s what Xi said.
That’s okay. But it’s not okay to say that the United States doesn’t have a culture.
Are other cultures heckin’ cute and valid? Sure. But don’t assume that every culture produces the same results. Does South American culture produce the same level of material prosperity? No.
Can it produce happiness? Sure. I was in Santiago, Chile a while back. The people there were happy, and were making out on a warm afternoon in the broad plaza that led to some large government building. When I went out that night with some locals, the beer was cold, the dinner was wonderful, and everyone I saw was happy and safe.
Different. Not equal.
I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to think of examples where overlapping cultures cause conflicts. No fair in picking Canada where the English and French overlap, and after one huge argument in the comment section a while back, you can bet I’m not going to mention Ireland.
Oops, too late.
Again, I’m not saying that “not equal” means inferior. It means not equal. It means different.
But to have the idea that all men are created equal? That’s the insanity.
