“More Equal Animals” is a reference to Animal Farm, by George Orwell, a thinly veiled allegory for the Soviet Union. In Orwell's book the animals overthrow the farmer and establish their own government, known as Animal Farm. The “constitution” of Animal Farm defined the highest law of the land to be “All animals are equal”. In theory, all animals on the farm are supposed to have equal rights in their animal democracy. In practice, the pigs took over and started behaving like the farmer they previously exiled. The pigs made a mockery of the other rules in their constitution and eventually corrupted the very meaning of the highest law of their constitution by claiming “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
The animals had hoped to form a society where everyone was equal, but the statement that some animals are “more equal” than others exposes a contradiction in the highest law of the land. How can everyone be equal if some are more equal? In the case of Animal Farm and our society today, we are all presumed to be equal under the law and to have equal power, but in practice we know this is far from reality. The concept that things can have a degree of equality is like defining equality as the difference between two animals. The opposite of more equal would be less different. Perfectly equal animals would have zero differences. The “more equal” the animals are the fewer differences one would expect.
Equality and difference are always relative to a standard. More equal could mean making everyone more equal to the most powerful or more equal to the least powerful. Typical democracies go bad because, in the name of making 99% of the people more equal to each other, they magnify the difference between the most powerful and least powerful individuals in society.
With a wide enough tolerance for difference, all animals can be considered equal (they all fall in the animal kingdom), but some animals are more equal than others (they have the same species). Marxism aims to make all animals equal in wealth, but in doing so makes them extremely unequal in power. Extreme power inequality power results in extreme wealth inequality.
This blog is about making people more equal in power and letting the wealth fall where it may. The premise being that all wealth is created using manpower and if men were more equal in terms of power, then they would naturally be more equal in terms of wealth. One of the primary ways of achieving that objective is by using decentralization.
Creating a system of government that is resistant to concentration of power is tricky. The power hungry among us are experts at manipulation and deception. This is why the art of democracy is subtle. It must walk a fine line while under constant attack by those wishing to co-opt the power of the people for personal gain.
