Is Equality Possible?

 

This graph is an extremely broad-brush view of socio-economic change across history.

• The grey line represents the time in which we lived as hunter-gatherers, i.e. most of human history.
• The green line represents the time where most people lived as farmers, i.e. roughly 10,000 BC to 1800 AD.
• The red line represents today, i.e. an industrial civilisation lusting for economic growth, but forced by progressive movements to spread its wealth out.
• The blue line represents a possible future. Because humanity is on the verge of colonising the solar system, and thus able to exploit a vast amount of energy and matter, this line could continue to rise for a very long time. To be clear, this does not represent a smooth continuation of neoliberalism. The future will no doubt hold revolutions and conflicts between different groups of would-be elites. Also, bear in mind that the graph is only concerned with those who are alive – perhaps in 2100 everyone will live in a happy, prosperous society, but the world’s population will only be 4 billion. History might judge the atrocities of the 20^th Century to be simply warm-ups for the atrocities of the 21^st.   

Clearly this graph isn’t uncontroversial. Were hunter-gatherer societies truly egalitarian? Was their standard of living really better than peasants? But of course the most controversial thing is the gradient of the blue line. Old school Marxists would argue that a classless society will eventually emerge from the dictatorship of the proletariat, in other words that the line will be perfectly flat. Others, such as Yuval Noah Harari, would argue that the line will become steeper than Everest.

First, let’s think about how an equal society might come to be. Far from heralding the dictatorship of the proletariat, automation and AI will probably herald the obsolescence of the proletariat. But at the same time, it could undermine the justifications given for inequality. Imagine a car company which developed AIs which could design cars, design the machines that built the cars and manage the factories. The owners of the company could afford to fire almost all its workforce (perhaps even those who developed the AIs) and then just sit back and watch the money roll in. No-one would be contributing labour or innovation. This is what Peter Frase calls ‘rentism’.

Would the public accept that those who owned the means of production had the sole right to the profits? Perhaps for a time, but the justifications would start to sound ridiculous – “I am entitled to a share of the profits because my late father had the foresight to invest in this company. The fact that I have not lifted a finger for this money is irrelevant”. As inequality grew, the government would come under pressure to nationalise more and more industries. Eventually all the means of production would be in public hands, and their fruits would be distributed evenly.

In such a world, there would still be what Francis Fukuyama calls megalothymia – the desire to be seen as better than other people. But this could be satisfied by working towards self-improvement and personal achievement. Indeed there’s a big advantage in switching to a value-system based on achievement: unlike wealth, the masses can’t demand it from you. You can demand the right to climb Everest, but you can’t demand to have climbed Everest. In this way, hierarchies of a sort would still exist, but would have no impact on the standard of living.  

Although such a utopian world is possible, we have reasons to believe that it is unlikely. Firstly, although old capitalist justifications for inequality might become weak, the elites could find new justifications. For example, the rich will be the first to take advantage of cybernetic and genetic enhancements, which would enable them to say with some truth that they are superior to baseline humans. An ideology could emerge which claims that wealth and technology should be kept in the hands of enhanced humans. Someone might argue “everyone agrees that weapons should only be wielded by people who are mentally stable and trained to use them, so by that logic surely only people with the most optimised brains should control complex, dangerous technologies? Because irresponsible use of technology could end the world, isn’t this necessary more than ever?”

Secondly, being seen as better than other people is not the root of hierarchy, and so giving awards to vain people in an egalitarian society would not be enough. People are insecure about how others perceive them because they do not want to show weakness. Social status is a means to an end – with respect and resources, you can better defend yourself when the shit hits the fan. The desire for safety, through esteem, is the root of hierarchy. There is a constant climb to the top because that’s what others are doing as well. Although it may be better for your mental health to stop worrying about the social ladder, doing so would leave you vulnerable to the whims of more ambitious people. A perfectly egalitarian society would not be sustainable – it would only be a matter of time before a group tried to gain advantage over others. Even in a society where there was no rational reason to fear others, an instinctual wariness would gnaw at many people’s minds. The Soviet Union had a good stab at creating an equal society, where even politburo members lived in normal apartments. But people in cities, particularly those who were demonstrably loyal to the Party, had better access to luxury goods than those in rural areas – not to mention those in the Gulag.

Hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian because in terms of permanent possessions there is little to go around, and nearly everyone plays a vital role in keeping the tribe alive. Agricultural societies produced food surpluses, but even the first ‘proto-cities’ were egalitarian – everyone’s house was roughly the same size as everyone else’s. Hierarchy first reared its head with the invention of bronze. Now people could extort others and use the threat of violence to defend their homes and status, becoming the first elites.

Ever since, the history of civilisation has been the history of new elites usurping old elites. Often this would be thanks to the innovative use of new technology. Some technologies, such as agriculture and smartphones, can be widely distributed and so appear to be ‘egalitarian technologies’ which give power to everyone. But there are no egalitarian technologies. Even for those that can be widely distributed, there will be some people who don’t use them well or don’t use them at all, putting them at a disadvantage. New technologies, or new ways to use old technologies, are discovered and taken advantage of by groups, not by humanity as a whole.  

As well as technology, developing more efficient organisational structures or more inspiring ideas are also proven routes to power. Because technology and the ways people think are constantly (albeit usually quite slowly) changing, the board on which the game of civilisation is played is always shifting. Those that can adapt to the present circumstances will rise to the top, and those whose adaptations were only useful in a past era will be overthrown. The 21^st Century is much more likely to see the board shifting again and new elites rising, than it is to see the end of the game.  

A third reason why equality is unlikely is that elites tend to accumulate resources and power faster than the masses can push upwards. Harari argues that in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries elites gave education, healthcare and the vote to the masses because it benefited them to rule over societies which were educated, healthy and motivated. It’s probably more accurate to say that elites only came to see and accept these benefits after the masses fought for them. The shockwaves from the French and Russian revolutions still reverberate around the world today. They gave more peaceful progressive movements the ability to demand a fairer distribution of the fruits of industrialisation.

But progressive movements have grown weak, and are likely to grow weaker. This is partly because as automation and AI improve, there will be less need for an educated, healthy and motivated workforce. But as noted above, although the masses of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries had economic and military strength behind them, it was their resolve to demand more that built a fairer society. Automation and AI will make humans’ relative economic and military value fall, but we will still be intelligent, creative and driven creatures. The great push from below will be slower than it was in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, but as long as we have the resolve to demand a better life, we will eventually get it.

A bigger threat to progressive movements is that they’ll get what they want. Just as your standard of living is probably better than Elizabeth I’s (she only ate potato once, and it made her ill), it’s quite possible that even the worst off in 2100 will live a more comfortable life than Mark Zuckerberg’s. The great push from below has always been driven by need, but in a post-scarcity world that urgency will no longer exist. There would also be no need for philanthropy. The nobility in generosity and rebellion would be gone. With the masses satisfied with their lot, the elites could focus on climbing ever higher.

But what exactly are progressive movements pushing towards?

 

The State of Nature

Living things evolve in such a way that they are happiest in an environment where they can meet all their needs, an environment to which they are completely adapted. A favourite topic of discussion for early modern philosophers, today we could call hunter-gatherer societies as living in the State of Nature. It has been estimated that if we could go back in time to 70,000 years ago and steal a baby to raise in today’s world, no-one would notice anything different about the child. If we went back further, the child would struggle to fit in. 70,000 years ago was about the time of what Harari calls the Cognitive Revolution, when we started thinking abstractly and symbolically. Since then, humans have continued to change, both in mind and in body. But humans evolved to live as social hunter-gatherers, and we still have the brains and bodies that were honed to survive in that way.

What was it like in the State of Nature? Clearly there isn’t a single answer to that question. The life of a hunter-gatherer battling the cold in northern Europe would have been very different to another living in the warm grasslands of the Fertile Crescent. But they probably had a lot in common: they would have been physically fit; they would have had varied diets; they would have used their intelligence and imagination on a daily basis; they would have had close social relationships; if they survived childhood, they could potentially live to their 70s; and, apart from in particularly harsh environments, they would have had a lot of free time. However life wasn’t idyllic – not only did they have to deal with predators, the weather and the constant threat of starvation, we have reason to believe that murder accounted for at least 5% of deaths.  

Were hunter-gatherers egalitarian? It’s hard to know for sure, because the only evidence we have comes from today’s hunter-gatherer tribes, and they may be very different from those who lived in the Upper Palaeolithic. But if they were like today’s hunter-gatherers, then yes they were egalitarian – in today’s tribes the sexes are equal, and some tribes don’t even have chiefs. This is because no-one owns plots of land, and because cooperation between everyone is vital. Being nomadic also helps, because you can simply avoid domineering individuals by moving to another camp, and because ties within families are less important. Chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relative, are naturally very hierarchical, so it has been argued that resistance to hierarchy was a key factor in the evolution of the human mind.

Humans were kicked out of the Garden of Eden about 12,000 years ago. In a matter of decades, climate change turned the grasslands of the Middle East into desert, forcing people to domesticate plants and animals to survive. Agriculture caused a host of problems: keeping fields irrigated was such hard work that skeletons from the time are painfully deformed; everyone lived on a diet of porridge, unleavened bread and little else; the high density of people and animals was perfect for diseases; and now there was a reason to wage war over land. But agriculture was an efficient way of securing calories, and for that reason people couldn’t return to the State of Nature even if they wanted to, even after the climate improved again. If a village decided to go back to just hunting and gathering, at least some people would starve. The gates to Eden had been locked behind them.

In the millennia since, some problems have been overcome and new ones have arisen. Slavery, war and environmental destruction became the norm. But people still dreamed of returning to the State of Nature – after all, we are wired to survive as nomadic hunter-gatherers, so although the memory of the State of Nature had long since faded, we instinctively knew that we did not belong in civilisation. This yearning for the State of Nature manifested itself in the idea of a blissful afterlife, and also in the ideals of fairness and equality in this life. Societies which enshrine equality in law, from the Achaemenid Empire to modern democracies, are usually the product of negotiation between self-interested masses and open-minded elites. But the promise of a more equal society helps the slow push towards one, and comes from the niggling feeling that inequality is unnatural. We want to live in a more equal society, not just out of self-interest, but also because we feel it would be a society that makes more sense. Usually this desire for equality and justice extends only to our tribe, but occasionally the recognition that all humans are indeed human leads people to demand equality and justice for the whole species.

Some readers may question this viewpoint. Rather than some ancient instinct, surely the demand for equality is thinly-veiled self-interest? Perhaps in part. But if you don’t value equality, then this is probably because either you stand to lose from society becoming more equal, or you listen too much to the elite’s justifications. Civilisation requires ideas that suppress the desire for equality, which both pacify the masses and ease the consciences of the elites. And while you may believe that perfect material equality would be undesirable, I would hope that you believe in other equalities, such as equality of opportunity and equality before the law. If your ideal world is completely hierarchical, without a shred of equality, you probably ought to be sectioned.

Humans in general and conservatives in particular fear change, because they fear the unknown and are anxious about what it would take to survive in it. But perhaps there is also the sense that so-called progress is taking us ever further from the State of Nature, and so progress must be slowed or stopped altogether if we are to avoid civilisation’s worst excesses and a dystopia that is alien to human nature. Progressives, on the other hand, recognise that change is inevitable, and that civilisation isn’t all bad. Returning to the State of Nature is both undesirable and impossible. Instead, we should aim for a civilisation-enhanced State of Nature, henceforth referred to by a rather clunky acronym: the CESON.

The CESON is an artificial environment designed to allow humans to be as comfortable and healthy as possible. It satisfies our biological and psychological needs as humans. Our evolution as hunter-gatherers shaped our desires, but the environment often made life hard, frustrating and dangerous. The CESON is an environment where our hunter-gatherer desires are actually satisfied, with the help of technology. It is a simulation of the State of Nature, with as few of its disadvantages as possible, and with as many of civilisation’s advantages as possible. It’s like the environments we try to create for our pets and animals in zoos – you may worry about that comparison, but who hasn’t envied their pet, even if just for a minute?

To be clear, the CESON is not a place of constant bliss. Even in the most comfortable environment possible, there will still be grief, anger, loneliness and other all-too-human problems. Life would be made easy, but it would still be up to us to find happiness. Nor is it a place of passive, mindless consumption, like the spaceship in Wall-E – humans are not passive or mindless creatures. To satisfy us, the CESON would have to include challenges and places to explore. The CESON might be a physical place, or it might be completely virtual. An average day in the CESON might start with a lie in, followed by a morning hunting robotic/virtual bison with friends, an afternoon finishing a painting which you then share on DeviantArt, and an evening watching Netflix with your nearest and dearest.

In my previous post, I argued that human nature is a rather empty concept. There is no list of fundamental human characteristics, there are only probabilities. For example, because we evolved to live in communities of about 150 people, the CESON will mostly consist of small, mobile communities with large territories. But after millennia of civilisation, many people are now comfortable living in large, high-density communities, and so there would be at least some cities in the CESON.

Of course, the CESON would be egalitarian. Everyone would have roughly the same standard of living, and no-one would be put at a disadvantage to anyone else in the CESON. There would still be some hierarchies, for example some will be better at playing music than others. But those hierarchies would have no impact on standard of living.

In the State of Nature, there was little conflict between our desires and what was good for the tribe. What you wanted to do was also your role in society. But for civilisation to function, it had to force people to do things they did not want to do. Oppressive regimes and forced labour have been becoming slowly rarer over the past 200 years, but even today in the First World we still lead stressful lives because of the obligations placed on us by society. In the CESON, technology would make the imposition of alien obligations redundant, and people would be free to do as they please. Everyone’s needs are different, so the CESON would have to allow for different lifestyles.

I would be surprised if the CESON was built by 2100, except perhaps for a small minority. But no matter how weak the bargaining position of progressive movements is, they will continue to push until eventually everyone is in the CESON. However this all assumes that we will continue to have the bodies and brains of hunter-gatherers into the future. There are 2 alternatives: humans die out, or humans’ desires are altered. Or perhaps all 3 situations will exist simultaneously: some will live in paradise, some will be enslaved, and some will be left to die.

The CESON is not the State of Nature – it still exists within civilisation, and so it can never be a perfect simulation. Progressive movements will eventually hit a brick wall, and although they may keep pushing they will be eternally frustrated. This means the CESON might not be quite as idyllic as I’ve just described. Precisely what limits civilisation would put on the CESON is hard to know until we reach them, but we can be sure that one feature of civilisation will persistently ruin the CESON. Everyone within the CESON will be equal, but what about those who live above the CESON?

 

Godhood

If you think I am rehashing Rousseau, you will be surprised as I now veer dangerously close to Nietzsche. While the masses may be nostalgic for the State of Nature, the elites owe their position to our exit from it. The desire to dominate socially is older than the egalitarianism which helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Nonetheless it continued to exist, and it found particular outlets under civilisation.

Parallel to the yearning for the State of Nature, civilisation has been fascinated with gods. In the State of Nature we believed in nature spirits, but after we became farmers they started looking and acting like humans. We were starting to dominate other animals, the environment itself and other humans, and so when imagining the most powerful forces in the world it was only natural to imagine them as being like ourselves. And if the gods are as vain and crazy as humans, we had better work hard to get on their good side. Many gods came to represent different aspects of civilisation, and most cultures believed that civilisation was a gift from the gods. Some kings even claimed to be gods themselves. The idea of gods was not just a celebration of civilisation, it was a celebration of domination.

The relationship between gods and the yearning for the State of Nature differed between cultures. For example, in Ancient Egypt the gods were largely just and allowed the pure of heart to live forever among the lush fields of Aaru after death, whereas in Ancient Greece the gods were unpredictable and ordinary people could look forward to an afterlife in the dark, miserable Asphodel Meadows. Part of the reason why Christianity and Islam were so successful could be that they were a synthesis of the epitome of an imaginary CESON and the epitome of the idea of godhood – in other words, not only was eternal bliss open to everyone, it was guaranteed by a god so powerful it doesn’t make sense.   

Eventually humans started looking at the world with a more empirical mindset, and so far science has yet to find any evidence of gods looking down on us or meddling in our affairs. But we may be living in a relatively brief window between worshipping imaginary gods and worshipping very real ones.

For most of history, change was so slow that it was hard for people to imagine that the past was much different from the present, and they didn’t think much about future except that it might involve the end of the world. It was only in the 19^th Century that technological progress became impossible to ignore, forcing people to imagine what the future might and should be. Forward thinking attitudes accelerated social and technological change, creating a virtuous cycle. Change is now expected and sought after. A century ago science fiction was fringe, but today it’s mainstream. In H. G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free, a son asks his father to stop trying to invent a flying machine because his classmates are ridiculing him for it. Today, a child would probably brag if their parent was working on reusable rockets or hyperloop. This pivot to a forward-looking perspective set us firmly on the path to godhood.

Marx realised that we could use technology to build the CESON, but he didn’t foresee the problems that can be caused by apes wielding god-like powers or the possibility of technologies that engrave inequality into our DNA. Science fiction went from being distinctly utopian to distinctly dystopian as we tried to get our heads around what the consequences of acquiring god-like powers were. With the benefit of knowing what happened in the 20^th Century and research into the emerging technologies of the 21^st, Harari arrives at the opposite conclusion to Marx: that elites will use genetic and cybernetic technologies to enhance themselves and thus create a gap between us and them that will be even wider than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals.

I hope to outline what makes something divine more thoroughly in a future post, but in short I think we can call something a god if it is a conscious being which is so complex and powerful that its nature, capabilities and thoughts are at least partially unfathomable to we baseline, early 21^st Century humans. No matter how hard we tried, we would not be able to fully comprehend them. The gods of the future could be AIs, and it’s easy to imagine AIs being revered in the CESON as omniscient custodians. But unless an AI was so wise that it would be unthinkable for even the most powerful humans to ignore its advice, it’s probably more likely that AI will be a tool used by more human-like gods to ensure their dominance.    

There may be long queues for technologies which enhance the capabilities of our minds and bodies, but would people willingly alter their desires, or the desires of their children? If there was a switch which changed your favourite food from chocolate to Brussel sprouts, would you use it? You would get the same enjoyment, so why bother changing? You would only change a desire to satisfy a higher order desire, such as to be healthier, safer or a more moral person. Perhaps so that they could better adapt to their situation, the gods would remove the nostalgia for the State of Nature from themselves, and in so doing make themselves more unintelligible to baseline humans. What use would the desire for wide open, lush landscapes, or even the desire for close friends, be to a god? Perhaps some gods would try to be better people by removing the desire to dominate from themselves – however they would then probably be dominated by those who kept it.

What might the future relationship between godhood and the State of Nature be? Maybe one will destroy the other. Maybe the gods will grow so tired of demands for the CESON that they will remove the desire for it, either by tampering with human nature or simply by killing anyone who wanted it. Maybe the wars between gods will be so destructive that there will be no opportunity to build the CESON. Maybe the CESON will be so appealing that the gods will leave everything to AIs and join the masses in paradise. However I think the most likely future is that, as with the history of civilisation so far, the State of Nature and godhood will continue to coexist and find a balance. Perhaps we’ll invent an idea which brings them together, for example the gods could justify their position and pat themselves on the back by building and protecting the CESON. As Christianity and Islam proved, a synthesis of the State of Nature and godhood can be a very powerful idea.

There will no doubt be a hierarchy among the gods, with the weaker ones having to submit to the stronger. Nonetheless, I think it’s likely that humanity will split into 2: most people will live in the CESON, and some will enhance themselves to the point of becoming gods. Another way to put this is that humanity will split into the happy and the powerful. Those in the CESON may even consider the gods to be afflicted by an illness that drives them to seek ever more powerful weapons at the cost of their peace of mind.

Some gods might question the point of creating the CESON, but more compassionate ones might ask, “Why not? Why oppress, enslave or kill the masses, when pacifying them by giving them what they want is an option? At the very least, we could allow them to build the CESON for themselves.” However I doubt even these kind-hearted gods would treat the inhabitants of the CESON with the utmost respect. I love my cat and I want her to be happy, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s neutered. And because of their constant fear of rivals, it’s unlikely the gods would allow the inhabitants of the CESON to try and ascend to their level – they would try their hardest to enforce the split between human and god.  

Even the ancient Greek gods were nice to humans sometimes, and they provided rest for the worthy in the Elysian Fields. Were those stories told by the masses, and added to the larger mythology as a concession to them? Or do the elites have a smidgen of a conscience after all? We need to start thinking carefully about what we would like the gods of the future to be like. What myths will the gods want to tell themselves about their birth?

Given that new technologies being discovered and used by groups is characteristic of civilisation, and that our technologies have been growing more powerful, and that self-modification is possible, then it is inevitable that civilisation will give birth to gods. Kings have claimed to be gods throughout history, but it’s only a matter of time before those claims become justified. Despite the tone of this essay, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Although they may be power-hungry, they wouldn’t necessarily abuse that power – a completely self-sufficient and invulnerable being doesn’t need the obedience of the masses. And the creation of gods would be one of the greatest achievements of humanity. That said, this doesn’t mean that we should sacrifice our values and the well-being of others in the pursuit of creating gods. Precisely because it is inevitable, it does not require sacrifices. Instead, our focus should be on steering humanity’s use of emerging technologies to ensure that when the gods are born, they are responsible, just and compassionate.

 

Revolution

If inequality is unavoidable, is there any point to revolution? Of course there is. If nothing else, revolutions remind the elites that it’s dangerous to ignore the concerns of the masses. The attempted Canadian revolution of 1837-38 failed, but it paved the way for the creation of Canada as an independent democracy. If an angry crowd demanding your head doesn’t make you rethink your policies, nothing will. However, clearly revolutionaries should be as smart and restrained as possible if they are to have any hope of achieving their goals. Reckless morons just end up in prison.

Revolution is the most powerful weapon would-be elites can use to usurp the throne. It would be an exaggeration to say that we can choose who our elites are, but the masses do have a measure of influence. Democracy’s biggest advantage over other systems of government is that for all intents and purposes it allows revolutions to be smooth, peaceful and orderly. Depending on who is elected, the State acts as a counter-balance to elites, or acts as a guard dog for the elites, or helps the rise of new elites. Would-be elites only need to organise political campaigns, and would only need to contemplate violent revolution if it was impossible for them to win an election. As elites get their hands on more terrifyingly powerful technologies, violent revolutions in the future are more likely to be brutally crushed, so we need to do everything we can to keep peaceful transfers of power the norm.

However democracy by itself isn’t sufficient to make elites behave. So far in this essay I’ve talked about elites and masses as though society is composed of two homogeneous blocks. But obviously society isn’t that simple. In itself, society’s diversity does not prevent the masses from uniting against the elites. But lies and distractions create the chaotic polarisation we are all too familiar with, and while the masses fight among themselves the elites carry on as normal. It seems many people have forgotten, or were never taught, how to think critically and broaden their perspective. The balkanisation of the internet, the inefficacy of our governments and the sheer complexity of today’s world do not help either. Hoping that nationalists will see the error of their ways is not working. As crises become deeper, nationalists may be forced to re-evaluate their worldview, but they will probably need to be dealt with forcefully (as the American authorities are currently doing as they hunt down Trump’s insurrectionists). Society will only ‘come back together’ once one side puts the other back in its box. Only then can the masses effectively make demands of the elites again.

The CESON is not one revolution away. The revolutions of the coming decades will probably revolve around issues such as universal basic income and climate change – concepts that will be completely alien to inhabitants of the CESON. But they will be a part of the long road to the CESON. We will only reach that destination through struggle, which will hopefully be as peaceful as possible, but will clearly involve breaking some rules.

Before I conclude this post, I should address one elephant in the room: despite having used ‘we’ and ‘the masses’ interchangeably, I’m from the middle class of a First World nation, so I’m arguably an elite. That said, I’ve never knowingly oppressed anyone, and I doubt any of my descendants will have the money or influence to become gods. Call me a champagne socialist if you want, although I much prefer whiskey.

Not all elites are bad people, although those that are seem to be having the greatest impact at the moment. It’s bad enough that some elites are fomenting xenophobic movements, they also working hard to prevent any significant climate action, and so will be responsible for the deaths of millions if not billions – and all so that they don’t have to pay more tax. As Warren Buffet put it, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” A society can work well when the elites have the interests of the masses in mind, but today’s elites don’t care if we live or die. Some may realise that the world is going to get very bumpy in the coming decades, but instead of trying to solve the problems they are setting the masses against each other in the hope that they’ll have the money to defend themselves when the shit fits the fan. In abandoning their social conscience, they have also abandoned their right to lead society. Some elites might complain that threatening revolution is tantamount to blackmail, but if that’s the case then every fight for rights is blackmail. You cannot call someone dying and asking for help entitled. Demanding rights isn’t a cynical ploy, it is an affirmation that your life has value. Equality is impossible, but by sending clear messages to the elites on the streets and in the ballot box, we can build a fairer, happier and safer society.