The other day I was on the subway in my city, I managed to hear two people talking, and since I was really bored waiting to get to my station I started paying attention to what they were saying.
Their talk was about an issue that may sometimes be common: "equality".
One analyzes this word and may have different derivations in its meaning. There may be equality of results, equality before the law, equality of opportunities, among others that don't come to my mind right now.
Sometimes I have heard the famous "The system is unfair because the wealth of the world is not equaly distributed". A sentence that if is analyzed at the beginning in a superficial way seems to make sense or be reasonable, but by focusing a little more on the meaning of this, many doubts arise about the validity of it.
The two people who were talking in the subway had totally opposite views, one advocating the "equitable distribution" of wealth while the other was totally opposed to it.
- Man 1: Wealth is poorly distributed, how is it possible that so few people have so much wealth while the vast majority suffer economically?
- Man 2: Maybe it has to do with some people trying harder than others.
Only that small piece of conversation helps me explain a key point, if the riches were evenly distributed and they would be so from now on, then what would be the point of trying to do things? any kind of things, work, entrepreneurships, Whatever... even going to university to get a degree in whatever wouldn't be attractive for many people, with their exceptions who study university careers for mere vocation and maybe they don't care so much about the monetary return.
People study, work, strive, develop and provide services of any kind for the simple purpose of creating inequality, for nobody is a secret that living in a mediocre manner is not attractive at all, and the only way out of this path is creating inequality, there is no other one.
In fact, just by checkin the history of humanity a little you may realize about this irrefutable fact. Let us compare two periods in terms of the development that the human race had, let us compare the period between the first century to the eighteenth century and the period between the same century and the twenty-first century.
18 centuries passed in the first epoch and only 3 centuries passed in the second, but in which the human race was more developed in multiple areas was in the period between the eighteenth century and our days. The reason is simple, due to the political, social and economic changes that produced the revolutions of France, the United States and the industrial revolution allowed men to have greater freedom of action, which gave men the incentive to create inequality, rise in the social classes by own merits, which previously was impossible because the social classes were dominated by privileged classes like the monarchy, the clergy and the nobility, people who were not there for "meritocracy" but mostly by inheritance.
The point is that if man didn't have the incentive to create inequality, would be pretty useless, would be one more animal in the world living only by their primitive instincts, but fortunately the conscious mind that has a human being is the key point that differentiates humans from animals, and in this conscious mind is the desire to excel, work, reward, the key to all individual and even collective development. The only equality that must be opted for is equality before the law.
Images taken from pixabay.com