No One Actually Wants an Equal Society

[InquiringMind]

Well, people do like to bitch and moan.  However, it's just as easy to imagine that people are bitching and moaning rather than expressing a legitimate concern.  They could be doing both...and at least in context, very often are.  The person bitching could be a talentless hack with no work ethic..but it still doesn't help that the game is rigged either against him, or in someone else's favor, nor would his bitching alter the fact that it was.  There are plenty of harder working and more talented people than myself who are richer than myself, but even more are poorer.  Go figure.  If it all went away and we woke up in utopia I;m willing to bet that people would still bitch...but a least then their bitching would be unfounded, lol.  

Status isn't a fixed number.  Some societies are inculcated with different notions of a professions relative status.  Doctors, for example...were once the lowest form of life on the social status rung.  I think that a society which either affords equal "status" or simply does not adhere to notions of "status" is probably more within our reach than a financially equal society.  At least the metrics of the former are wholly set by ourselves and variable.

And my point is that even if there really is equality of opportunity, the losers will often complain that there was not equality of opportunity, while the winners will feel that there was equality of opportunity.  The one metric where large inequality of opportunity does exist is wealth - having rich parents gives one a huge advantage.  But whatever inequalities of opportunity do exist because of race, gender, sexual orientation etc. are much smaller than the differences in talent, intelligence, hard work, and luck between individuals.  I assert that a person's success in our society's competition for money and status is much more dependent on that individual's talent, intelligence, hard work, and luck than on their race or gender.  

But beyond that, even if we consider talent and intelligence, equality of opportunity is impossible.  Some people, because of genetics, are still going to naturally be more talented and intelligent than others.  And if we created a society that really did have complete equality of opportunity based on race, gender etc., then the people who were less genetically well-off and who were less talented and intelligent because of genetic factors could still legitimately complain that society unfairly favored individuals who had better genes.   

And yes, status judgments are indeed relative and subjective.  I can't think of a way to measure an individual's status in a way that we can all agree on.  And the symbols of status do change over time. But status is still very real in that people respond to it.