Society & Politics
15 d

Fixing the societal Missunderstanding of Inequality.

Stop using the word "inequality" incorrectly!

So to prefice this: i do not believe that formal education should be a marker of quality of an argument. Arguments should stand on their own but i do have a degree in social science and in social science we correctly use the word "inequality" so i'm just saying this because "maybe" you need that level of education to avoid being missguided in todays society and you shouldn't feel bad if you missunderstood it, cause everyone is trying their best to make you missunderstand it.

What is inequality?

I think the definition alone won't suffice to understand but for completeness, here's the definition: "Inequality is the relation between two expressions that are not equal".

to relate that to society and social scientific measures, i think an example will show it best. So here's a simple explanation of the word "inequality" in social science to help everyone understand what it actually does mean. so let's say you ask a large group of randomly mixed people what their favourite color is. some will say red, some will say yellow, some will say pink, some will say green and so on right? so now if you decide to devide that group of people into any sort of subset. be it women or men. young or old. rich or poor. whatever it is doesn't matter. then you compare these groups and look at their preference in color. for example you can measure that younger people prefer blue. and older people brefer green. that's an example of "inequality" and there's many such examples. this is just an example and is not meant to be a fact. it is not a fact. also consider: there's no value judgement attached. it's an objective measure of factual difference between a chosen subset of people. there's no moral in here. no normative argument. in fact a simpler way to relate to "social inequality" would be just to call it "measurable differences between people". what exactly is bad or oppressing or unfair about that? and why does society and media always frame inequality as if it was all these bad things?

Relating Inequality to Diversity

Fixing the societal Missunderstanding of Inequality.

If you're looking at this picture thinking it's a good representation of "diversity", you're a racist in my opinion.

So now we have arrived at the reason i decided to write this take in the first place and from now on it becomes less scientific and more my opinion that you're invited to disagree with. mind you, it's still an informed opinion and not a hot take with the intend to make people angry. So people can differ across all sorts of different measurements. color of skin, gender or age are a few of these measurable differences. and there is measurable differences in these differences that correlate with different objective values in very interesting ways. like edication levels, income, marital behavior, criminal behavior. all sorts of statistically significant things. however that is "correlation" not "causation". habitual (or in laymens terms life style) choices of an individual have way stronger significance when it comes to outcomes in society. so what that means is: forcing equality of gender, age and skin color actually reduces diversity to an extend beause you're influencing peoples behavior. the more you force equality, the less different people will be. and if you force them to be different in one aspect (like forcing more equality into racial matters) means you actually will reduce diversity in lifestyles, individual choices and in society as a whole. removing inequality means removing diversity. replacing highly significant diverity (diversity of lifestyle, thoughts and preferences) and replacing the removed diversity with an insignificant diversity (mixing people of different colors, ages or sex) is in my opinion very racist and sexist but i'll admit that's not scientific of me to say.

Our societal missunderstanding of inequality and a resulting focus on increasing a terrible concept of "equality" actually reduces diversity and creates racism and sexism

why do i say this? because in every public debate i see, "inequality" is meant to be synonymous with "opression" or "social unfairness", when really it's not that at all (as previously explained). and from that missinterpretation of the word, our society started the desire to fight these things that are merely an expression of our societies diversity. which results in the creation of racist and sexist issues that arise which don't fix any of the societal problems that we have and instead create new ones we previously didn't have.


Examples For the problematic missconceptions of "inequality" in our society:

  • Affirmative action: meant to adressed what was framed as "generational oppression and unfairness" towards certain people. in effect that project has NOT helped the people it was supposed to help and even if it did, that would not legitimate the blatant systemic racism it created. don't think in colors here. the fact that "a group of people gets easier access to higher education" is discrimination. and discrimination based on race is racist. so affirmative action is racist, while the fix to the problems that certain races have is habitual in nature. it has nothing to do with their skin color or country of origin. yet the missunderstanding of "inequality" has lead to this creation of structural racism
  • Female quotas in Corporations: meant to remove natural gender differences that arise from the fact that measuring certain variables across the arbitrary subset of gender. As a result from emerging differences between our society is currently tryng to remove these difference because "inequality" is missunderstood as "unfairness". and therefore a institutional sexism was created in form of female quotas.

so im sort of done talking even though there's still a lot to be said. i'm hoping you all will ask questions if you didn't understand something i said or try to give constructive critique if you don't agree with a thing i said. and i sure hope you all don't continue believing that "forced equality" is a good thing or that "inequality" is inherently a bad thing.

Fixing the societal Missunderstanding of Inequality.
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