The third humantrue principle is equality. The concept of equality has long been entertained and is often mooted, but although felt to be desirable it has never been found possible and is therefore thought impracticable. Why has it been thought and felt desirable? The fact that it has been so indicates an underlying wish for it, and this is no doubt linked to a parallel wish for freedom. We desire equality because it makes more humansense than inequality. Instinctively we are divided between compassionate care for and preservation of life, and passionately aggressive destruction of it. Our free intellect tips that balance right over to the side of compassionate caring. Consciously or unconsciously, clearly or vaguely, we are aware that co-operation is our best way of preserving life and that competition in the hands of applied intellect spells disaster - that equality is necessary to co-operation, which is impossible without it.
This being so, why has the principle of equality been found impracticable? Because our awareness of our own good reason for it is largely hidden, or deliberately put away from our minds, to give way to the automatic reality which makesit impracticable and is pressing all around us; because human individuals quite evidently do not have equal attributes - of physique, beauty, talent, skill, mental capacity, virtue, character and personality; and because we do not possess equal status in the Machine - of birth, gender, class, nationality, education, opportunity, property, privilege, income, credibility, preferment or authority. These inequalities are facts of our existing competitive reality which render the principle of equality impossible, and which we think are inescapable. That is why we believe the application of that principle to be impracticable.
But considerthose facts. Our attributes are to a very large extent a matter of history, of past experience shaping present humanity. They are passed to us by our antecedents, affected by environment, diet and consequent health, both theirs and ours, affected by our stimulation, the ease or hardship of our circumstances, the degree to which we have experienced achievement and tranquillity, or frustration and tension. The shape and proportion of our bodies can be malformed by overwork and malnutrition, past and present; our faces can be marred by worry and anxiety, or depravity and cruelty; our minds can be stunted by neglect and lack of fulfilment; our attitude, bearing and manner can be subdued and crushed by deprivation and indifference or puffed up with arrogance by pride and privilege. The Machine continually moulds us in these ways, determining the opportunities to be presented to us according to its consequent evaluation of us and the abilities it has bequeathed to us, judging success, beauty, character - us, and our status - by its own criteria. How we judge ourselves and our society depends on whether we use these same unequal criteria of automatic reason, or whether we weigh the worth of our existing reality against the humantrue principles of co-operation, freedom and equality.
See how these facts of automatic reality dictate our thinking. Though we acknowledge equality as a worthy principle we treat it as naïve and unrealistic ideal. We recognise that it is good to give but keep our giving strictly within bounds because our reality is a system of taking. Were we to give away all our worldly goods we would court destitution, or, if we were lucky, society might then provide us with bare subsistence. To be satisfied with such a state of deprivation we must have our beings in supraconsciousness, with a determined expectation of having humantruth realised in the world. Otherwise we would have given away not only the trappings and ways of living in the Machine but also the objects and meanings of life itself in terms of existing reality. Very few of us, it seems, are yet prepared to make such sacrifices to the ideal.
So though we inwardly knowequality and co-operation to be preferable to inequality and competition, automated experience tells us, and so we obediently think,that it cannot work out in practice. Our thinking can be illustrated in this way. A man imagines himself working with another man on the same job, for equal pay. Both are fit and strong, but while he is labouring hard, looking over his shoulder he sees the other slacking. He can not accept this. He is willing to work for equal pay if his companion works equally hard, otherwise he expects to be paid more. If he can not secure more pay, and his mate continues to slack, he sees no reason but to slack also. In a limited way this isa partial concept of equality - that the amount of labour be equalled by the amount of reward and vice versa - but it does not take into account that our opportunities and abilities, our measurements of both effort and reward, and most of all our awareness and understanding of our responsibilities, are unequal. This man is aware that many others are willing to give as little as they can for as much as they can get, but he is also aware that if everyone slacks the work will not be done and eventually no one will get paid. That is why he cannot accept the principle of co-operative equality. He believes that work is produced only by the incentive of commensurate reward and that the products of work are to be distributed according to the degree of effort, skill or expertise put into their production, represented by the possession of reward-money.
But he is using automaticreason and judging by automated experience. It is the principle of competition, on which the Machine is founded, which has developed this reasoning and experience. This automatic reasoning has stood on its head and obscured from our understanding the true function of human effort - to fulfil itself by providing human needs - and has drawn us away from co-operative equality which would have been the logical result of that understanding. Automatic reasoning has substituted its own system of reward incentives, with this result - not only is the individualworking for rewards rather than to provide the necessities of life but so is the organisation or institution of the Machinethat employs him. In this Machine-reality reward is the motive for all production and the fulfilment of real needs is merely incidental - not only money reward but status, recognition, power and privilege. Consequently most of what we labour to produce is unnecessary or unsuitable, therefore wasteful, and not for the equal fulfilment and satisfaction of common need. The general quality of human life has come to be represented by a striving to raise ourselves in the scale of comparative automatic inequalities, and a self-valuation in terms of automatic achievement, favour and possession.
This man is assuming that both automatic reason and judgment will still apply in a humantrue reality. He fails to realise that humantruth brings changed evaluation of all things and supraconscious minds shall judge very differently. That the slacker refused to do his share of useful work is hislack, a lack of intellect and its satisfaction. That he is unwilling to earnreward or to labour hard for greater reward is a refusal to obey instinct alone, for itssatisfaction. His slacking is a ploy of instinct and intellect combined, craftily seeking to cheat both by compromising them for maximum gain for minimum effort but expressing the true satisfaction of neither, in a sort of no-man's-land of reason. The one good reason for labour is the awareness of a vital need for it, and to fulfil that need is then the greatest satisfaction. Both the slacker and he who works for reward alone lack that awareness and satisfaction, yet the latter does work whilst the former is sensible of no reason to do so. But what one man intends and willingly performs so may any man. And if one mind can perceive humantruth so may all minds. The principle of equality is not a matter of imposing the rule of equal giving and receiving but of equal understanding of it as our common responsibility and desire.
There is no intellectual reason why labour should be connected with reward, nor why work should be avoided, only instinctive reason, or conscious thinking applied to instinct. Instinct puts the carrot in front of the donkey and the donkey has no other incentive to go forward. If it has easier ways of filling its belly and prefers them to the attractions of the carrot, or if it is able to snatch the carrot without moving forward, it will stand still. A supraconscious intellectual donkey would proceed as necessary without the carrot, or not proceed unnecessarily despite the carrot, and if one were available would eat it only if it needed it and then only if its fellow donkeys got one too, for their equal need, whether or not they equalled its effort and ability. Humantrue intellect perceives the need for labour, decides the body to dothat labour as best it can, and the doing of it requites the perception and fulfils the need. No further satisfaction is required. The maxim 'to each according to need, from each according to ability' is a good one, but cannot apply in the Machine, however modified, because human needs and abilities vary, and can only be judged by individual consciousness of the responsibility of each to the whole, and the whole to each. The Machine judges needs and abilities by economically calculated standards, using human abilities as needed for its prosperity and apportioning human wants as it is prepared to afford them according to that measure, leaving individuals to prosper, or fall by the wayside, as they may. The maxim need not be appliedto humantrue reality, for it will be the successful resultof the willing co-operation of equal, supraconscious minds.
We reason in automatic ways because the Machine really existsand appeals to instinct. We respond with instinct because we have not risen above it to fulfil intellect. Instinct tells us that individually we must fight for ourselves and our kin strictly according to that reality. The Machine is competitive, so we compete for unequal advantage - to win, for fear of losing. By behaving so we perpetuate the Machine that makes such behaviour necessary. But our true awareness quietly but insistently points the other way. If we follow this other way, in our minds, our intellect will convince us of the need to change to a humantrue alternative, show us the necessary principles of freedom, co-operation and equality, and make clear to us that every main feature of present reality militates against those humantrue principles.
For instance, the money economy is an automatic means of compelling us to live by the competitive ways of instinct, whose conflicts cause much of man's inhumanity to man. The chief reason for money existing is that it is a token of competition for unequal possession and reward. It could be said that it also represents a medium of choice, in that some of us are free to convert more or less effort into more or less money and free to spend it as we choose. This is not true freedom, however, but a matter of freely taking part in a laid-down, unequal process that feeds on itself. Our choices are provided by institutions and organisations for the chief purpose of capturing our money, and our desire for money and the freedom to choose what to spend it on is an automatic substitute for true human reasons for labour. In a humantrue society our labour would be given freely to provide equally for true human needs. I repeat, if that society retained the currency of money this would be earned equally and spent in exactly the same way by everybody, thus ceasing to be a necessary or significant token.
The concept of possession of any thing represents automatic success in competition; it represents the instinctive satisfaction of adding to one's self by ownership, the substitution of objectives and valuations of the Machine for humantrue reasons for living, a legal guard over our automatic title to things, from real needs to extravagant goods and chattels, protecting them from an automated society motivated to try and dispossess us. The concept is another founding principle of an existing reality that presently obliges us to conform and contribute to the Machine because only the air we breathe is free, and everything else, even our most basic needs, must normally be possessed by means of money. In a humantrue society, which would give and receive equally, it would be unnecessary to possess. It is impossible to possess equally, for ownership of things inevitably leads back to competition for their unequal possession.
Also unnecessary is permanent authoritative leadership, because it robs the majority of equal responsibility. In a humantrue world mankind would be led by an agreed social constitution. Certain individuals might take the lead from time to time in finding solutions to unforeseen problems, and all would have equal opportunity to do so, but they would be but temporarily followed, by willing agreement. The event would not give them permanent authority or status nor accrue to their special benefit in any way. It would be a matter of their momentary inspiration, unequalled by anyone else at the time, freely given and accepted as such rare occasions demand. It would not be assumed that this made anyone fit to lead on every occasion but recognised that next time someone else might be inspired.
The concept of employment is also unnecessary, being a practice which bends humans to obedient service of narrow objectives of the automaton, keeping them from supraconscious awareness of the fact by the pretence that the Machine's dominant power indicates superior knowledge and wisdom. In a humantrue society the inequality between employer and employed would be replaced by equal individual understanding and voluntary effort.
It is true that were all automatic inequalities removed there would remain those physical and instinctive differences between us. But, provided we have all fully explored our mental potential, there shall be no great difference of mindbetween us. When we are all supraconscious, we shall recognise that our fulfilled postconscious minds are equal, despite our superficial differences of conscious ability, strength, temperament etc. We shall rise above these differences, ceasing to identify with or exploit them as the Machine presently requires and encourages us to do. We shall subdue those animal instincts which are inappropriate to humantrue society, and no longer needed to guide us, until they die out for lack of response and are replaced by our supraconscious intellectual nature.
But in the meantime we have a complex physical external reality that is crammed full of inequalities and cannot be changed overnight. Some of us live in idyllic surroundings, in kind environments, but most of us in ugly cities, overcrowded towns and soulless housing estates, in hostile environments. This is partly a matter of where we chanced to be born, of course, but we have to recognise that the Machine largely created our circumstances, for its own purposes and prosperity. The Machine developed some countries but not others, and neglected to cherish or preserve much of the fertile Earth and its life. The Machine has given good houses in pleasant places with acres of land to its privileged, and poor housing in nasty places with limited space to its underprivileged. Some of us live in luxury with every facility and comfort, but some others of us live in unhealthy and degrading poverty, without even the most basic facilities and with little or no comfort.
For the present we have to tolerate those differences, share as best we can, and compensate wherever possible. Most of all we have to realise that the virtue of equality is equal giving, understanding and tolerating - not the jealous comparison of advantages enjoyed, or exact calculation of things taken, but a meeting of minds and equal desire for their commonly shared fulfilment. We have to work for the future, and in the meantime those who have more have more to give and those who have less may look forward to receiving their needs. In future we shall not build for inequality, for the Machine, but for equality in the humantrue spirit. There will be one standard of convenience and comfort, one objective in the arrangement and care of our environment - the equal well-being of all. It is common for the automated majority to regard statements like this as naively Utopian, but they make sense.
But howare we to adopt the principle of equality, and then bring it about? It is a matter of INTENTION. Despite all the automatic pressures and however impossible it may seem in the light of existing reality, and of our present instincts and customs, we have to rely on our judgment and determine to make it work.As we desire equality, so it is necessary to our achievement of a humantrue society. Just as inequality is inseparable from competition, so is equality vital to co-operation. If our humantrue supraconscious reason has convinced us that we must have co-operation and freedom, and now tells us that equality is therefore essential, then we have no humane alternative but to achieveit, whatever the obstacles.
Once more we see why it is necessary that we deliberately divide ourselves into two and make our inner awareness the motive for our actions. That our outer shells presently have to live in the Machine does not mean that we have to be automated. We have to be guided by our inner being, which can foresee how it would be were the Machine already dismantled and a humantrue reality established. We need to imagine how we would reason and feel in that other reality; we must ignore contrary automatic reason and dismiss our past emotional attachment to it, believing that we canunite to create a humantrue society, and that when it exists we shall be able supraconsciously to maintain it until it comes naturally to us.
The background of that humantrue picture which imagination can show us is like this : everyone regards everyone else as having equal right to satisfaction of need, and himself or herself as having equal responsibility with all others for providing those needs; everyone comes to adulthood with an equal level of humantrue understanding, and equal opportunity. No doubt some have more ability to fulfil these opportunities than others, and in different ways. But they are not more satisfied than others, for each is fulfilled according to capacity. And their unequal skill or talent or knowledge does not accrue to themselves, to give them unequal standing, but is given to others in order that all are brought to an equal level of benefit. This picture is not unfamiliar for it is reflected in our growing modern attitude to those among us who are physically and mentally handicapped, in that we no longer reject them and shut them away but do all we can to give them an equal share of life. Our humantrue purpose will not be to fulfil our competitive ego, achieve status, or secure special reward for self, but to use our physical powers to carry out our moral responsibilities as given to us by our intellect. We shall serve the community by fulfilling ourselves, thus achieving the fundamental satisfaction of both.
Pt.VII REALISATION
The PRINCIPLES
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