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Fairness and Equality in America-- Self-Evident or Not So Much?

By Dr. Gerry Lower  Posted by Rob Kall (about the submitter)       (Page 2 of 3 pages) Become a premium member to see this article and all articles as one long page.   No comments
When Jefferson used the term "equality," he referred to our being equal in the eyes of God. This can be literally translated out of religious terminology (in Jefferson's mind and words) as being equal in the eyes of "the people" and their government (which itself has no basis for prejudging anyone on personal theological ground as long as they do not impose upon democracy's theological ground).

In other words, in a democracy, we choose an equality of human rights and we bestow these rights equally upon ourselves as individuals comprising a people. What individuals accomplish as a result of having those rights honored is largely up to the individual. There are no specials favors or pardons for those people intellectually-encumbered by too much wealth and power.

Jefferson did not intend that we ought be equal in reward and recompense. He did not intend that we all be the same in theological belief. He did not intend that we all have the same personal net worth. He did not intend that we devote ourselves to the pursuit of money but rather to the pursuit of honesty and compassion and quality in thought and knowledge.

At the same time, Jefferson did not intend that we compete and scrap with each other over necessities, as they did in Europe at the time, necessities like educational and medical needs, which are equateable with human rights. Today, these rights have been largely honored in the European Union member nations, despite American capitalism, which has been more concerned with its own rise to dominion than with human rights as Jefferson and Franklin saw them.

Meritocracy in America

America's fathers did intend that we provide ourselves a full education, a public education obtainable in any and all schools. Our fathers, Jefferson especially, had little to say about medicine because it was in such a frightfully ignorant state in his times. It would be another century before Newtonian deductive thought would find application in the work of Henle, Koch and Pasteur. If medicine had, in Jefferson's time, anything much to offer, he would have certainly given it due consideration.

Beyond that, Jefferson and Franklin wanted to establish a meritocracy that rewarded people for their time, effort, competence and contribution. Implicit in a meritocracy is the concept of both lower and upper limits to wealth (Defining the Already-Too-Rich, Frameworks for a Meritocracy in America, Axis of Logic, May, 2005). After all, its not about you and me. Its about the people. If we all take good, honest care of the people, you and I will be just fine too. That's the way democracy works when it works.

This is, to be sure, a genuine step up from being a "born-again christian." Think about it ... to be born equal in the eyes of God, who is in the head and heart of the people, who have chosen to honor nascent Christian human rights (thanks to Jefferson) in public life, regardless of what they believe in private life. In arguing for freedom of religion, Jefferson was arguing for freedom from religious oppression, in the name of nacent Christian human rights.

We must, therefore, provide ourselves, as a people, with equal opportunities for growth and maturation as humans. We must provide ourselves with equal opportunities for meeting our educational and medical needs. We must provide ourselves with equal opportunities for meaningful work and meaningful lives.

Equality comes from Fairness.

The concept of fairness is closely-related to the values of democracy. Webster's Revised Unabridged (1913) describes fairness in terms like "equitable; honest, freedom, candor; just; free from obstacles or hindrances; direct; unencumbered; characterized by frankness, impartiality; open; upright; free from suspicion or bias. All of these concepts found favor during the EuroAmerican Enlightenment, all are virtually absent from capitalism's America.

Concepts like fairness and equality simply do not emerge from Old Testament Roman religious belief or from the world view of crony capitalism. Accordingly, fairness and equality are not part of religious capitalism's program in action (which, by definition, emphasizes competition over cooperation).

In all fairness, religious capitalism thrives on unfairness to create a two-tiered economic caste system of haves and have nots. In all fairness, capitalism's dominion has created the political imbalance which has unleashed virtually everything that is wrong with post-WWII America and allowed America to fall behind the European democracies.

A Knowledgeable Equality

Over-capitalized Americans know very little about the nascent values of democracy, they know less about how democracy came to be, and they know even less of why it came to be, being kept unfamiliar with the theological issues beneath the American Revolution and the penning of the Declaration. Jefferson worried that we could become all body (Constitutional policies) and no mind (Declaration values).

In America, we are not equal in general knowledge and that is to deny what Jefferson and Franklin believed to be the most essential element of democracy's entire agenda, i.e., the dissemination of human knowledge to the people. On principle alone, that leaves religious superstition (and "intelligent design") out of the American curriculum, since these superstitious viewpoints do not constitute human knowledge (constituting "knowledge" only to the superstitious).

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Rob Kall Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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