I’ve been thinking about my earlier post on the contradictions between the ideas of “freedom” and “equality.”
Today I came up with a briefer version of what I’ve been trying to say, in epigrammatic form.
Below: Walker’s epigram on freedom and equality in political theory:
A man who loves freedom will wish to free the slaves.
A man who loves equality may wish to free the slaves, or he may wish to enslave the free. Either way will achieve his purpose.
Wow. Lars, you’ve just managed to express in one simple epigram something I’ve struggled to formulate for years, from the first time I looked at some of the rights we’d lost in modern Britain and thought rather plaintively “I thought progress and equality were supposed to give everyone the the rights and privileges that once belonged solely to the upper classes… not reduce everyone to the level of the peasantry…”
Shades of Harrison Bergeron.