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| | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. |
| | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. |
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< | Equality and Myself |
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> | Equality |
| | -- By KateJLee - 06 Mar 2017 |
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< | The Concepts of Equality |
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> | The Definition
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”
Over 240 years later, equality is still sacred. At the time of drafting, “all men” excluded slaves and women, but today, at least for most students at a law school like Columbia, equality includes everyone.
We rarely consider the depth of this belief. We fail to consider what “all men are created equal” looks like, and we fail to compare it with our reality.
It goes without saying that equality for human beings does not mean the same.
One may be tempted to use an analogy like this one: there is a large jar of candy for sale, and each piece is $1. Regardless of what color the candy is, each piece is $1, so they are all equal. But are they? There are always popular colors and flavors, even if there are no empirical reasons to support a certain flavor’s popularity.
And as intuitive as that candy analogy may be, the way human beings operate is a more complicated and repulsive matter than that of different candies selling for the same price. Unlike candies, human beings are not priced the same—and this is evident in how much we are paid, which lives are saved, and which lives are extinguished with no fanfare. The boy who sews blouses in China will never be a lawyer at Cravath, no matter how hard he works. A life extinguished in New York City means more to the world than the hundreds in North Korea.
The Effect
The greatest harm that occurs from our love of equality is when we strive for an equality that is harmful. This is the equality that is comfortable, that requires no sacrifice. The type of equality that allows a travel ban of majority Muslim countries, or the type of equality that demands that extraneous effort on the part of the disadvantaged instead of the advantaged. We speak of hurdles for people to overcome instead of hurdles for the privileged to tear down.
A consequence of this is that people will focus on those who are disadvantaged instead of those who have power. We rush to the symptoms of the problem, hastily putting band aids on the oozing wounds instead of addressing the source.
This is why people will spend thousands of dollars to fly to Mexico to build houses, but still support the building of a wall that will separate the nations. This is why instead of saying, “he raped her,” we like to say “she was raped.” We immediately want to know what the victim was wearing or doing—the focus is on the weak instead of the strong.
By focusing on the victims of inequality, and by perpetuating the idea to others and ourselves that we are helping the victims, we believe we are fighting against equality when we are slowly destroying it. We assuage our guilt of being born in the better circumstances this way.
A secondary harm from a shallow understanding of equality is complacency. There is a false, shallow concept of equality that will be satisfactory for most of the privileged classes. It is a superficial implementation of equality in America, but it does not, or it need not, stretch to countries like China, Iran, or God forbid, North Korea.
But equality, true equality, should stretch to all humans, not just those within the borders of America. |
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< | Subsection A |
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< | The Effects of Multiple Concepts of Equality |
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> | Why Equality is Attractive |
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< | Subsection B |
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> | Why do we still insist on putting the idea of equality in a document as famous as the Declaration of Independence when a few minutes of thought will lead anyone to believe that even if it’s true theoretically, it’s not true objectively? |
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> | Perhaps it’s because we love ourselves, and have incredible difficulty accepting that someone might be worth more than we are worth. So instead of dealing with this issue head on, we simply equal the playing field. This is a selfish reason, but not implausible. |
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> | A more hopeful reason may be that we love others. We’ve bonded with our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, lovers and friends. And we do not want them to be worth less than anyone. |
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> | On the other side, we love feeling superior. We long to fill our endless search for satisfaction and contentment with a short-lived vindication of our value fueled by doing “better” than a fellow human being. |
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> | This is all quite easy to think about until we think about death. What does it mean to let a small group of people die to possible save many more? And what if your family was in that small group of people? What does it mean to let your mother die to save two people? Does the concept of equality bleed into these scenarios at all? |
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> | So here we are. |
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> | All men are created equal. Can we still believe and hope in something that has never been true? |
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< | Where do we go from here? |
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> | I think we can believe in it, hope in it, and begin to slowly create a world that reflects it. It will just be a much more complicated and flexible version of equality than we are used to. |
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< | Subsection A |
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> | Where Do We Go From Here? |
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> | We stop thinking for a moment about how we can save others—and we begin to change ourselves. We try to find a contentment with life that does not stem from being better or worse than others. And with this complete contentment and self-produced satisfaction with life, we begin to tear down the hurdles that we have erected that are choking the others. |
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