Recent events, and the way some reacted to them, set me thinking about how confused lots of people are about egalitarianism, in the same way they are about opinions and freedom of expression. The fact that we are all equal under the law is confused with the non-fact that we are all equal. The fact that everybody has a right to express their opinion is confused with everybody having a right to hold that opinion – something that makes no sense because people cannot be prevented from holding opinions in the privacy of their mind; they can only be prevented from expressing them. And then people confuse their right to express their opinion with something to which they have no right at all: the ‘right’ to express that opinion on somebody else’s media.

Views on equality, opinions and freedom of expression are then all three confused in the view that all opinions are equal and that the freedom to express them somehow translates into the right not to be criticised for them. You tell somebody that their opinion is rubbish – with varying degrees of politeness and tact, depending on the circumstances – and they react with defensive self-justification. Instead of explaining why they hold that opinion, they will fob off all further discussion with a dismissive “I have a right to my opinion.”

This is peculiar reasoning: the person who says this is communicating, in his defence, the nonsense that ‘my right to an opinion = my opinion is right’. But as soon as they say “I have a right to my opinion”, you know that they will brook no further discussion and will block all attempts at having their sacred opinion, to which they say they have a right, questioned. The reason they are so defensive, of course, is that they have not given the reasons for their opinion much thought at all, that it is based on what they picked up here and there, generally gossip and prejudice and half-baked bits of information. This should be obvious: somebody who cannot distinguish between the right to an opinion, the right to express it, and the right of others to describe it as rubbish does not have the skills, generally speaking, to analyse information and form a proper opinion.

Then there is the much-vaunted equality – egalitarianism. Malta’s is a very strange society in European terms, but not at all strange in the context of the southern Mediterranean. In the southern Mediterranean, people believe that they are all equal to each other in terms of qualities and abilities, but then not equal before the law. This is the opposite of the mindset elsewhere in Europe that people are naturally not equal though they are all equal before the law.

The reasons for the difference in how northern and southern Europeans view equality before the law are to be found in the social and political history of southern Europe, in endemic corruption, and in systems of patronage, either political or religious. But the reasons why the more backward communities of southern Europe, including Malta, are convinced that all individuals are naturally equal, as distinct from equal before the law, are a little more difficult to work out.

Yet there it is, and the attitude is felt even in language expressions. “Int x’ghandek ahjar minni?” “Dak x’ghandu li m’ghandiex jiena?” “Jahseb li hu xi haga imma hu bhal kullhadd.” And so on – there are more. I think it’s because the unevolved nature of society for hundreds of years, well into the 20^th century and indeed right up to our own time, left people unable to manifest their particular gifts and talents and so it did not become obvious, as it did in more advanced societies, that some people are undeniably and manifestly more gifted than others. Just as there is no equality of physical appearance – some people are very beautiful, others are downright ugly, and most are just very ordinary – so there is no equality of the less visible attributes.

Even today, in the 21^st century, Maltese people will not accept that even though we are all equal before the law and have equal rights under the Constitution, this does not mean we are equal in terms of abilities and attributes. So you will get parents forcing their children into more and more private lessons in the mistaken belief that intelligence or the lack of it make no difference and that all that is required is to load the child with more and more to do until he makes it. This turns into a nightmare for the child and a nightmare for the parents (though usually the mother) when he or she doesn’t make it.

The root source of the problem is that Maltese parents refuse to accept that there are different levels of intelligence just as there are different heights, shapes, degrees of attractiveness and hair colours. Because they cannot actually ‘see’ intelligence, because it is abstract, they assume that everybody starts out with the same natural ability and the only thing that makes a difference is studying, training, schooling, and above all, luck and ‘contacts’ (lil min taf).

It follows, with this line of reasoning, that when individuals who are more gifted than others find interesting work, rack up many achievements, and a life that is different to the norm, it is because they have “contacts” or because they “sucked up” or because they used the casting couch. People in Malta will believe anything as long as they don’t have to confront the fact that while we are all equal before the law, we are not equal in any other way. And because variety is the spice of life, that is exactly how it should be: different people, with different abilities, having different gifts and talents, some good, some bad, some indifferent and some exceptional.