Modern society has become obsessed with the idea of equality. Public schools have especially become proponents of making everybody equal, even if it means making others miserable:
A talented head cook at a school in central Sweden has been told to stop baking fresh bread and to cut back on her wide-ranging veggie buffets because it was unfair that students at other schools didn’t have access to the unusually tasty offerings.
What’s next? Will a high school football team with a great quarterback be forced to remove him from the team to ensure teams with poor players can compete equally? Reality doesn’t concern itself with what’s fair. Some people are simply luckier than others and nothing can be done to correct that. While many children are born into poor families in third world countries some are fortunate and born into wealthy families. Most children are both with good health but some are unfortunate and have horrible health issues starting at birth. When we obsess over perfect equality or fairness we are effectively saying we must bring everybody down to the lowest common denominator, which will require lowering the standard of living for a huge number of people.
Instead of punishing those with advantages we should be striving to boost everybody’s quality of living to match those of the more fortunate.
This story has already been written, Harrison Bergeron one of the great Vonnegut short stories. Essentially this form of equality taken to the end.