Equality is a concept that is central to much of political and philosophical discourse in the west right now. This makes sense since in the abstract world equality seems to promote fairness and justice for everyone, why wouldn't you practice that? But in reality the reasonable origins for the concept have been completely forgotten and we are now operating with a severely perverted and overdeveloped concept of equality. This broken understanding has taken over our culture, media, academia, etc. It has directly or indirectly caused many things: Marxism, The civil rights act, critical race theory, and the destruction of the family unit. This distorted and evil form of equality I will refer to as "profane equality".
Profane equality is derivative of the traditional and legitimate forms of equality. It is the result of man's tendency to build strange and unnecessary falsehoods on top of concepts that are perfectly fine without them. Man wants to create but sometimes he just needs to practice the truths that have always existed instead of trying to manufacture new ones. Most profane additions to the core truth of equality are simply non-sequiturs or misinterpretations. The conflict between traditional and profane equality can also be understood as natural vs artificial equality. With this article I would like to show the differences between several forms of legitimate and profane equalities. I want to point out with some precision where equality truly exists and where it doesn't.
This is the most basic and fundamental form of equality. "All humans are created equal", what does this mean? Well it certainly doesn't mean everyone can perform equally to Kyriakos Kapakoulak in a weightlifting competition. But there are those who associate with a "body positivity" movement that would have you believe that weightlifting is actually fat shaming. Clearly at some level they view themselves as equal to a powerlifter, not equal in terms of weightlifting potential but equal in some sort of vague and abstract sense of personal validity. The body positivity activist has asserted their own validity whereas the powerlifter has earned and demonstrated it. The body positivity movement is just one example of this specific profane equality.
This vague and meaningless concept of personal validity is applied to everyone through a profane form of equality. Now everyone is equally valid regardless of any outstanding individual achievements or lack thereof. The powerlifter is now a problematic right winger because he believes in earning validity through effort and struggle. This form of profane equality is clearly a sort of rationalized jealousy, a cope for miserable and unmotivated people who can't be bothered to validate themselves through effort. While I can't really blame them for being miserable in this horribly broken world, I can fault them for the destructive lies they are spreading which make the problem even worse.
The moral system where everyone is seen as equally valid is obviously a problem, if everyone is equally valid then blatantly evil things such as homosexuality, pedophilia and hedonism are perfectly acceptable. And less evil but still unhelpful things such as laziness and lack of personal achievement are tolerated as well. Even though not all who practice profane equality will take it so far as to support things like pedophilia, that is the natural trajectory of the idea because it is universal (capable of applying to everybody). We can already see society progressing towards these ends so its not a stretch of a prediction. If an idea's trajectory is this awful perhaps the idea itself is evil in some way. Of course most people will never fully practice such an unbelievably perverse moral principle, people have a vague sense of its artificiality and will not adopt it as a universal truth. But its presence in several key places such as academia, politics and social media drives policy and culture enough to damage society in numerous places, making life feel uncomfortable and artificial in general.
Universal validity is a concept likely derived at least in part from the oldest and most fundamental form of traditional equality, equality before God. In many ancient religions and many current ones all people are viewed as equal in the specific sense that they are all God's creation, can relate equally through God, have equal access to the religious experience and are all equally in need of God's mercy. However, equality before God does not mean equality among men. These two forms of equality are similar in that they are univeral, but they differ greatly in the extent and nature of their use. While everyone may be allowed equal participation in a religion, that is not even close to meaning that all humans are equal or equally valid in every worldly circumstance. The unverisality of this religious principle has been maintained in our culture despite the decline in religious affiliation, turning it into a broken secular ethic. In some sense modern man is practicing a secular religion of egalitarianism. He is worshipping equality instead of the God who creates it.
In today's world men and women are artificially viewed as absolute equals, they must work the same jobs, be treated exactly the same in social activities and be given the same opportunities economically and socially. The original point of legitimate equality has been completely overshadowed by innumerable manufactured and profane equalities. Particularly the various waves of feminism (including the first) have introduced increasingly dangerous ideas into our culture which have caused such things as reduced wages, the destruction of the family unit, and even lung cancer in many women.
It is valuable to understand many of the terrible side effects of feminism as results of incentives, often economic ones. During the first wave of feminism women managed to get the right to vote. This originally didn't really involve finance or the economy but was a moral issue, obviously originating from the previous issue of all humans being equally valid, a woman's vote should be as valid as a man's they said. But this newfound empowerment opened up opportunities for capitalist entities to exploit it for profit.
One of the oldest and most successful instances of capitalism exploiting feminism was Edward Bernays' (nephew of Sigmund Freud) 1929 marketing campaign for a cigarette company. Cigarettes were marketed as "freedom torches" for women to demonstrate liberation and empowerment. Seems cheesy nowadays but it was genius at the time. A form of empowerment was completely manufactured just to sell a product. The campaign massively increased cigarette sales because it had effectively doubled the customer base from just men to both men and women. Now that this marketing strategy of introducing women to something that typically only men do has been invented you'll see it quite often and it is quite profitable. And what do women get out of this empowerment? Lung cancer, birth defects in their children and nicotine addiction. You'll see that introducing women to men's activities for the sake of "equality" doesn't always increase their well-being.
The most significant example of this is women entering the workforce. It is a universal incentive for companies to hire people for the lowest wage they can get away with, with simple supply and demand you can reduce the price of labor by increasing the amount of workers. The amount of work available will take a lot of time to catch up if it ever does and the damage to acceptable pay rates will have already been done. By marketing jobs and even whole careers to women the workforce nearly doubles. This is also why increasing the size of the workforce through immigration is such a big issue.
Women being in the workforce reduces the birthrate since it is very difficult to manage a career and start a family at the same time, most prefer to pick one or the other and the choice is easy because having kids doesn't pay the bills. Incentives like that are what have ruined the family unit. Note these statistics.
On top of that the rates of depression, suicide, drug use and mental illness diagnoses are up in recent decades partly because it is unfulfilling, undignifying and even maddening to dedicate yourself to a corporation that doesn't appreciate you personally. Everyone is deprived of the social validation they need because they often avoid committed caring relationships and the career they dedicate themselves to is very uncaring as well. Women are encouraged to do this anyway because men's traditional roles happen to be more quantitatively productive to the capitalist system.
It may seem like I'm just blaming women for all of society's problems, as you'll see very little critique of men in this article. But the reality is that women's roles in society have changed a lot more in the last century than men's have and certainly not for the better. The people to blame for this are not women (the victims) but those who have created and enforced this system of profane equality which has taken women from their dignifying feminine roles and forced them into the roles of men just to satisfy a flawed but profitable ethic.
Treating women like they're men by giving them cigarettes, careers and various other masculine things just results in complete disaster. You might think you're trying to practice the noble ethic of equality, but what you're actually doing is enabling awful exploitation and societal decline. So where does this profane liberal understanding of gender equality differ from the legitimate gender equality it is derived from?
Legitimate gender equality is very simple, men and women have different purposes, but those purposes are of equal significance. When two things are dependent on each other for success those two things necessarily have some level of equal significance. Society will be very unhealthy without both men and women fulfilling their traditional roles. There is a symbiotic relationship there as well as a balance of masculine and feminine that needs to take place for the social order to be healthy. Between the two traditional roles most of a human's core needs are satisfied. In the modern world one role is to some extent absent and our needs are not satisfied as a result. Time and effort spent pursuing education and careers is time necessarily not spent practicing and enjoying these timeless and functional traditions.
It is necessary to understand the specifics of each tradtitional gender role and how each one contributes what the other often doesn't. In the traditional world men work to provide survival resources, make leadership decisions, and contribute masculine social influences such as structure, hierarchy, authority, and discipline to the social environment. These influences are a guiding force in the community, they regulate behavior and encourage cohesion and collective identity which are healthy social stimuli. Women keep this social system running by raising children and ensuring that the next generation is capable of succeeding the current one, by providing quality of life resources, and by contributing typically feminine social stimuli such as empathy, aesthetics, and sympathy. The masculine social experience creates a sense of having a purpose within a greater collective effort. The feminine social experience is one of a very personalized, caring, and supportive atmosphere which fulfills us at a level which is distinct from the "greater" purpose that the masculine experience tends towards. Masculine influences provide the "macro" social experience while feminine influences provide the "micro" social experience. Both must work together to maintain a successful and happy society through a sort of symbiosis. That isn't to say that any of these traits are or should be entirely exclusive to one gender. They are simply prominent in one more than the other.
Where the modern world went wrong in regard to gender roles is the idea that men and women have entirely equal purposes instead of different purposes with equal significance. Many have taken it a step further and proclaimed that gender doesn't even exist, its just a social construct, or that gender is a purely subjective experience. Therefore all of us gender neutral humans are necessarily of equal purpose. In this gender neutral framework the concept of symbiosis through gender roles is offensive and must be destroyed for the sake of liberation and empowerment. These people are sacrificing the functional beauty of the natural world just to achieve some horribly individualistic "liberation". Despite being so empowered they statistically end up depressed, frustrated and unfulfilled, indicating that tradition is probably a better guide for life.
I hope I've helped you see this topic in a unique way that you hadn't thought of before, something a little more insightful than a shallow Ben Shapiro argument like "Equal opportunity not equal outcome.". It is important as always to understand the purest and most traditional forms of any concept. You'll often see that the modern ideas are illegitimate subversions of timeless truths. In this case the timeless truths of equality before God and equal significance of genders have been manipulated and made increasingly profane, resulting in a destructive and incoherent system of ethics that misguides our modern world.
Hopefully the value of traditional ideas has been made clearer and you're now equipped with a method of detecting and analyzing profane perversions of timeless truths. This method can help you to appreciate the usefulness of the concept of equality without dismissing it entirely as "libtard nonsense" like so many others in the dissident right would tend to. Knowing the value of traditional truths and using this method you can make lifestyle decisions to better align yourself with a natural and traditional lifestyle. You now have a reason to avoid a demanding and unfulfilling career, and now you might have an in-depth understanding of why marriage would probably benefit you. You can choose not to sacrifice a traditional way of life for something modern and profane. Good luck.