The Human Condition: Equality

By Daniel Schnee on December 28, 2022.

As the remaining few days of 2022 come to a close many of us think about various New Year’s resolutions. We seek to change in some way: set new career goals, get rid of old habits and so on. This means making better choices, which is particularly vital in this sociopolitical climate in which we find it increasingly hard to truly retain our rights. How so?

For example, my rights are being violated if I am not allowed to buy, own, or read religious material. But my rights are not being violated if other people get to do the same thing. We are all equal but I do not get to somehow be “more equal” than others; get more social powers than they do. Being “more equal” than others though is how politicians exercise power.

When politicians are voted into office they have a mandate from us to exercise power on our behalf. For example, we conservatives are a group of people sharing common values and goals, so we will basically vote as a bloc. Our votes may put our candidate in office, and thus they then get the special power of making their individual choices “our” choices; they are equal to us, but in a larger way.

But if they do things we don’t like then we don’t have the power to vote against them until the next election (unless others intervene in the legislature, senate, or parliament). This loss of power is called “disenfranchisement.”

Disenfranchisement is the risk that we take in elections, as voting someone into power on our behalf is to choose to make them more equal and ourselves less equal, i.e. disenfranchisement by proxy. But what if the more-equal among us end up even “more-equaller” than the law?

The President of the United States for example, by law, goes through a mandatory tax audit when taking office. President Donald Trump did not get audited for years during his presidency. But despite the legal delays in court, the Internal Revenue Service was (by its own admission) ill-equipped to handle his complex filings. Thus, they intentionally and more strictly focused on the simpler tax circumstances of the average American, and seemingly ignored the problem.

In another more local example it was revealed that the Alberta Energy Regulator terminated the contract of whomever was responsible for preparing the release of records of its meetings with lobbyists from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. This created major delays for anyone interested in trying to find out why the AER suspended a multitude of environmental and economic rules for oil and gas companies, all without formal review, or public consultation with Indigenous leaders, etc. This shady, outright illegal behaviour is yet another example of the “extra” equality politicians seek and abuse when sitting on such joint committees, and how we disenfranchise ourselves through choosing these politicians in the first place.

So in 2023 we can resolve to make sure the more-equal among us do what we ask of them. Vote in people who deserve to be more equal, while also making them more accountable for their equality. They will do the right thing in the legislature… if we do it first at the ballot box.

Dr. Daniel Schnee is an anthropologist and jazz/rock drummer

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