We’re all losers. At something anyway. Some of us are much bigger, more spectacular losers than others. None of us will probably ever be President of the United States. Some of us have resigned to the fact that we won’t want to.
Modern libertarianism, especially those on the anarchist bent, tends to say that both human beings are equal and that the individual is sovereign. I think they don’t realize how both statement contradict each other.
Firstly, human equality is, at best, an abstract concept. If you are going to claim equality, then you have to compare it against something. This is why the concept is bogus because those who claim that we are all equal are usually not providing any kind of metric.
Secondly, if the individual is sovereign, then he or she is not equal to another person. You cannot simply have it both ways. Either the individual is distinct or not. That is what we are really saying here. If we are all equal, which is demonstrably false, then we are not sovereign as individuals but as a group. If we are sovereign individuals, then we are not equal but distinct.
Some people are better than you. In fact, I suspect that most people are better than you. I know that many are better than me. I know that my blog will never be remembered for being anything other than the one with the guy who called Chris Kyle a liar and a sociopath. That is literally the blog that gets the most page views every week.
Does that make me a good blogger? Not really. But I’m still posting because it is something I want to do. There are bloggers out there who are literally funding their lifestyles with their blogs and posting a lot less. I’ve tried to do that and found that I’m terrible at it. So I removed the ads and just accepted this as a hobby rather than a serious money-making venture. My writing doesn’t appeal to people and I don’t do a good job of promoting myself. It’s all right though, my day job is pretty good.
My point is that I am not equal to other bloggers out there. There are much better people out there whose writing puts my pathetic musing to shame. This is not humility. This is fact.
I am a sovereign individual with a slightly above average IQ, a decent sense of wisdom, and slightly above average knowledge of this world. This makes me a slightly above average intelligent person. But I’m no genius. I am not their equals.
We are all sovereign individuals. But we are not equals. This does not mean that the government should treat us different when it comes to matters of justice. It just means that equality is just another term for collectivization.