Against Egalitarianism: a spiritual perspective

There is a single conviction that the modern world holds beyond all argument, the one axiom a man may not touch without being cast out: that equality is good. You are free to doubt God, nation, family, even reason itself. You are not free to doubt equality. It is the sacred center around which every other modern value arranges itself, and precisely because it is sacred, it is never examined. One is permitted to ask only whether a given egalitarian program is practical — never whether the goal itself is true.

Let the forbidden act be committed. Let the question be asked: what is equality, actually?

Murray Rothbard, in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, performs the simplest and most devastating operation: he takes the word literally. Two things are equal when they are identical with respect to some attribute. Two sticks are equal in length when their lengths are the same. There is therefore only one condition under which two men could be equal in the full sense the egalitarian demands — they would have to be identical in every attribute they possess. Equality, carried to its conclusion, is not fairness. It is uniformity. It is the erasure of every distinction that makes a man this man and not another.

This is why the only honest portraits of a fully equal world are works of horror. Rothbard reaches for Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, in which the year is 2081 and everyone is “finally equal” — the strong weighted down with chains, the graceful crippled, the intelligent fitted with a radio that fires a burst of noise into the brain every twenty seconds, lest anyone think a thought his neighbor cannot. The State that enforces this carries the only title it could: Handicapper General. Such a world provokes an instinctive recoil, and the recoil is itself the argument. Beneath thought lies the recognition that the human species is defined by variety, by differentiation, by inequality — and that a regime of enforced sameness is not justice but mutilation.

Rothbard’s verdict is merciless. The egalitarian does not merely hold a mistaken policy; he denies “the ontological structure of reality, the laws of human nature, and the universe.” He revolts against nature itself. And a war against the structure of being is not idealism, whatever its priests claim. It is antihuman, and therefore evil.

Yet Rothbard, for all his force, fights on the enemy’s chosen ground. He answers the egalitarian with biology, with the natural facts of difference — and the modern man, hearing “nature,” thinks only of matter. Here the argument must ascend, and for the ascent it turns to Evola.

In The Race of the Spirit, Julius Evola insists that man is not one thing but three, arranged in a hierarchy. There is the race of the body — the biological, the inherited, the measurable. There is the race of the soul — character, style, the inner form of a people. And above these, crowning them, there is the race of the spirit. The relation between them is not democratic. In the normal order, the spirit gives form to the soul, and the soul to the body, as a composer gives law to sound:

“Behind the race of the body, of the blood, and of the soul itself, there is a race of the spirit.”

This changes everything. For if the deepest truth of a man is spiritual, then the deepest inequality between men is spiritual also. Two men of identical stock, identical blood, identical measurement, may stand at an infinite distance from one another in the only dimension that finally matters. Evola draws the line not between races as the biologists draw it, but between what he calls the races of nature — those centered in instinct, in the collective, in the subpersonal genius of the herd — and the superior races, in which a suprabiological force has taken command and made of mere nature its instrument. The Person is not a birthright. It is a conquest. It is what remains when the spirit has subdued the animal and stamped its own form upon a life.

Now egalitarianism stands revealed for what it is. It is not a horizontal idea — a generous spreading-out of goods among brothers. It is a vertical idea, and it points down.

To demand that all men are equal is to deny the hierarchy within each man: to insist that the center of the human being lies not in the spirit but in what is common, countable, and shared. It is to take the race of nature — the instinctual, the collective, the subpersonal — and crown it as the measure of all things. This is why Evola saw in modern materialism, even in its crude biological racism, the same disease it claimed to oppose: both reduce man to a datum, a quantity, a corpse of the spirit dressed as science. Democracy is merely the political confession of this faith — the doctrine that the opinion of the ignorant weighs exactly as much as the wisdom of the sage, because, at bottom, there is no sage, only opinions, only numbers.

The egalitarian age does not lift the low toward the high. It cannot; the high is precisely what it denies exists. It can only drag the high down to the low and call the rubble justice. Harrison Bergeron in chains is its perfected image: not the elevation of the weak, but the handicapping of the strong, until the silence is universal and equal at last.

If equality is the great inversion, the response is not nostalgia and not a political program. No vote restores a hierarchy of the spirit, because the spirit was never on the ballot. The work is interior, and it begins in a single act of refusal: the refusal to let the center of yourself fall where the age commands, into the common and the collective.

Evola called the reawakening of the spirit an asceticism — not the sad self-punishment of the cloister, but an active overcoming, a heroic detachment, the subjugation of the merely human element in oneself so that something higher may take form. This is the labor the differentiated man sets himself while the leveling runs its course around him. He builds the vertical where it can still be built: in his own discipline, in the few he recognizes as kin, in the refusal to mistake the measurable for the real. He does not ask to be equal to other men. He asks to become equal to himself — to the highest that is latent in him.

The mass demands that the mountains be brought down to the plain. The task of the sovereign individual is to remain a mountain.

Equality is the religion of those who have forgotten the spirit. The forgetting is not yet total.