A non-sequitur about Trump’s America, and where we’re heading. This is from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Sounds like Trump’s GOP:
“Remember the Whigs, Larry? They went belly up, with no warning at all, when a handful of young politicians like Abe Lincoln decided to move out on their own, and fuck the Whigs which worked out very nicely, and when it became almost instantly clear that the Whig hierarchy was just a gang of old impotent wind-bags with no real power at all, the Party just curled up and died . . . & any politician stupid enough to ‘stay loyal’ went down w/the ship”
Just saying, nothing ever stays the same, and everything is repeated in similar historic patterns. Maybe it’s some multiverse thing, maybe it’s Aldous Huxley saying we’re not learning from history as the most important lesson of history. But the end of eras is a human thing, whether the Whigs, or whether Trump’s GOP. But there’s a question of why systems are constantly pressured to change, and in modern times the lingering peculiarity of equality and equalitarianism rearing its head in the most dark or controlling of political situations, and it’s been a powerful movement for some time that seems to have synchronicity across multiple cultures and societies.
And like the book Sapiens mentioned, the move towards equality may be a knee-jerk evolved hunter-gatherer era of cooperation to survive, an egalitarian notion of clans and community (tribes) looking out for one another in a systematic way where altruism helps the collective fitness of the group, therefore keeps the individual healthy. I would say that evolving to the hunter-gatherer stage is 98%+ of human evolution. We spent 5 million years evolving into hunter gatherers, and 10,000 years ago started farming. Since the agrarian revolution that started ownership of land, divergence of wealth, and commodification of nature (have and have nots… I have grain, you do not), and the development of trade created an uneven aspect of society for 10,000 years or so, which developed the “haves” controlling “have nots” to build pyramids, easter island statues, temples to god that advanced architecture, etc. Despots, Kings, ruling clans, etc.
Then comes democracy, rooted in a notion of equality, at least greater than prior autocracy, etc. And as that advances, people from all over the world LOSE THEIR MINDS in 1801, or whatever, when we had a peaceful transition of power. The entire world lost their minds that we could do something so politically fair and democratic. I don’t think anyone had ever seen that in world history, right?
So I don’t think the end goal is an objectively empirical and measurable notion of “we’re all equal”, but an ideological framework that is not zero sum that is “let’s get as equal as possible in representation across all race and gender so we can improve the collective fitness of our entire broad clan, and therefore enhance each individual’s individualism and station in life”.
I mean, if we’re still talking about this ineffable notion of “why is egalitarianism so popular, and why does it always appear on the outskirts of any society or political ideology in modern times”, and that might simply be that it’s an ingrained evolutionary trait that betters the individual through enhancement of the fitness of the whole. Something we lost sight of, during the advent of agrarian needs for trade and methodology for creating a system of exchange.