Equality is vague and bad

Equality isn't a value, it's a meta-value

It is true that, today, a very small number of people control the fate of almost everyone on the planet. And these people are doing a bad job. Likely any small ruling class would do a bad job. But the real harm, what we are actually concerned about if we dig down, isn't inequality.

Equality is a measure of something else that we care about, like freedom, dignity, participation, access to food, land, cash or shell reserves, etc… Values like dignity, freedom, and participation come prior to equality in human thought. Aiming for those primary values more directly, might be a more useful way of achieving our real goals.

Note: Sam Moyn disagrees, claiming that the failure of the human rights movement has been its lack of insistence on material equality.

See: Not Enough (2019)

Material equality doesn't matter

It doesn't matter if you have more stuff than me, unless you can use that stuff to compel me to do things for you. Your wealth becomes a source of power when a lack of wealth would put me at risk of dying or starving.

The Wendat had significant material inequality. But their wealth couldn't be used to exert power, because no one was allowed to go hungry or homeless.

Money doesn't make us free. Mutual aid makes us free.

Two types of equality

Everyone is equally the same, aka equivalence by homogeneity.
Everyone is equally unique, aka equivalence by the impossibility of comparison.

Spartan equality

Equality wasn’t particularly popular even with the wise old Greeks. Athenian democracy established political equality between citizens (who were 10-20% of the population). These citizens had the equal right to participate in public decision making. Many Athenian intellectuals found this system to be "tawdry"

Intellectual Greeks preferred the Spartan system. Sparta was ruled by an even smaller minority, the Homoioi (aka “the Equals” or “Those Who Are All The Same”). The Homoioi trained for war constantly, disdained luxury as effeminate, and ate in communal messes.

Spartan equality was the equality of shaved heads, aka type 1 equality.

Europeans were equally slaves

Equality before God and the King made Medieval and Renaissance Europeans equally slaves.

More: Europeans agreed that Indigenous Americans were more free.

War needs two clear teams. Like Hatfields and McCoys. Or France and Germany. Each member of each team must be interchangeable for the violence to scale.

All forms mass violence depend on this kind of social substitutability.

You can only kill a lot of people if you think they're basically the same, aka equal.

Bureaucracy was invented as an equalizer

As they were inventing money, the Sumerians also invented bureaucracies. These bureaucracies were a self-conscious attempt to make sure that money didn't become inequality. The effect, however, of equalizing bureaucracies is cold and heartless rule-following.