Barnum's original statement was more complex than is known: It is not just that a sucker is born every minute, it is that Americans want to be fooled.
Equality is a difficult aspiration. Remarkably, equality before the law is a cinch compared to other types. There is, after all, a lot of differences among people unless you plan on repealing the bell-shaped curve. And we don't have to go far to find them. Angelina Jolie--Tamara Press, Ray Lewis--Stephen Hawkins. How would equality be created here? Would someone be upgraded? How? And what would be emphasized? Would you make Lewis smarter or Hawkins more physical? Would you make Tamara prettier or Angelina stronger? What about Angelina and Ray Lewis? Or is there some subtle, deeper element of equalization the equalizers are not sharing?
Leveling out is never done by leveling up. Historically, equality is usually achieved by subtraction, not addition. The poor are never made rich, the ugly never beautiful. So Angelina would be scarred, Lewis hamstrung and Hawkins hit on the head several times. Vonnegut in one of his books tied weights to the legs of athletic ballerinas so the audience would not be ashamed.
The very nature of life is diversity, diversity not for variety but for competition, destruction and advancement. It is the true dialectic. The great religions solve this by putting worldly inequity aside and making all men spiritually equal before God. But in the demands of worldly homogeneity, because we are not the same, it must be made to appear we are. This involves fooling ourselves and each other with imitation, disguise and deception. Participation in the deception creates not equality but similarity disguised as sameness.
Cross-dressing.
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