We have so far traversed almost two dozen concepts at Mutant. And yet every word thought and spoken in these dialogues, it might be said, is about one humane dream: equality. Every episode in which we have spoken of caste, of the figure of the migrant, of the logics of segregation, of thinkers of the Black radical tradition; every reckoning we have made with our neodemocratic condition, with its cruelty and the decomposition of the human, and with our abandonment of the social contract, has returned us to the strange absence of moral and political equality on our planet.
And yet it is freedom today that animates our rhetoric and galvanizes democratic politics worldwide, while equality—foundational to the very compact we make to recognize each other as human—remains ambiguous, even opaque.
“Democracy is consumed by the question of freedom,” says @realaishwarykumar. “But politics is the expression of freedom, not the problem that politics seeks to solve. To what end, after all, do we seek, as Hannah Arendt might say, the freedom to be free? The problem that modern democratic politics seeks to solve is of equality.”
Therein lies its fundamental paradox. For the grounds of our equality do not exist. Human beings are born unequal, sometimes unbearably so. They bear the brunt of earth—its water and fire—unequally. And they form unequal societies to maintain this disparity, slyly mocking the state of nature from which they claim to have emerged.
“There is nothing radical about evil, Hannah Arendt would later concede,” Aishwary reminds us. “It is equality that is radical, precisely because it's so elusive, and because it can be understood only as an act of faith, one whose pursuit requires both political trust in our institutions and the moral courage to disobey them. Equality will require what Ambedkar calls force. A force that ends inequality.”
“Like gravity, this force—the desire for equality—might already be in us, weak but irreducible, even if we remain unsure what an equal earth would look like.”
Image from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
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