The 20th century is a testament to how organising societies around the concept of 'equal outcome' or equity is a fundamentally bad idea. And yet, the incessant narrative of forced equity in all domains seems more pervasive now than ever before. One would think that this debunked narrative would be forever etched in our minds as one of humanity’s many miserable failures. But as has been reliably demonstrated since time immemorial, people have a tendency to forget and repeat past mistakes.

These days, this tendency has manifested itself in government policy, with the "equality act" and "equality commissions act" being two of the latest kingly gifts bestowed upon the Maltese people. Amidst the near infinite amount of criticisms one could make however, one in particular stands out. And this is the intellectual sleight of hand that saw the concept of equality radically redefined – from equal opportunity to equal outcome (a Marxist tenet).

Despite being constantly undermined, part of the western ethos asserts equality before the law, and that people existing within this framework have the right to pursue their endeavours without government interference (roughly speaking). On the other hand, however, equal outcome requires that everybody should literally be equal, be it in terms of material wealth and resources, social status – everything. And while no effort was made to announce this fundamental change – as those who promote this dishonest doctrine so often fail to do – the definitions could not be more important. Indeed, this slippery move has escaped criticism and has made consistent and concerted strides, successfully infecting the media, academia, politics and the legal system to varying degrees.

It’s fascinating that this is happening despite the fact that the dogma of equal outcome falls apart even under the most basic scrutiny. Indeed, if one believes that everything from resources to social status should be equally distributed, then why bother striving for anything? The reason for bettering yourself or attempting to gain more resources is to produce inequality. Every time you make an effort to achieve something, you are trying to rise above the masses. To the extent that it’s possible (an assumed caveat), the way things currently work is for those to achieve their goals (i.e. to make the world more unequal) in a just way, such that their future prospects are predicated on individual choice more so than anything else. And this idea is in part propagated through the articulation of common knowledge; that if one works very hard then that person deserves an unequal outcome. But in the eyes of social justice victim culture, competence means nothing, or worse yet, is merely a prelude to “exploitation”.

Naturally, Marxism has already been thoroughly dismantled by intellectuals like Friedrich A. Hayek and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, not to mention the utter devastation it left in countries that dared to implement it. Instead of fading away as a definitively disgraced ideology, Marxism persisted, shifting the emphasis from the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the “oppressed” and the “oppressor”. According to social justice luminaries, reducing everything to this dichotomy makes one capable of solving everything. This is of course utter incoherent nonsense, but let’s entertain the idea for the sake of argument.

At present, the doctrine has partly manifested itself in the recent interest in enforcing group quotas or “group representation” on otherwise meritocratic processes. Put in practice, this policy necessitates that a social institution, like a University or the workplace is analysed at every stratum, from the executive and administrative levels down to the student level. This is then compared to the community demography, whose characteristics are conveniently arbitrarily defined by those doing the analysis, and matched accordingly. This makes finding grounds to reconstruct any institution incredibly easy, as the subjective nature of such categorization means that the same way one enforces arbitrary 50-50 gender quotas for example, there is no reason why one should not have short/tall, ugly/handsome and fit/obese quotas. Since all these groups can be construed as being “oppressed” one way or another, the oppression Olympics can replicate itself infinitely and indefinitely.

In truth, even if equal outcome were achievable, which it isn’t, then there still needs to be a conversation about whether it is desirable, which there hasn’t been – at least not recently. What’s more is that the idea of forced equity through the coercive power of the state is a blatant denial of the individuality of every human being, as how can one assume that individuals in their top-down, prescribed status do not have different expectations, aspirations, beliefs etc. from one another?

Indeed, the idea that the state should impose equal outcome in the form of equal representation despite people’s individual differences, is to say that in order to equally represent arbitrarily defined groups, the state should treat different people differently to put them in the same position. Quite the paradox.

The latest catastrophic failure that has succumb to the doctrine of equal outcome is Venezuela, a socialist “paradise”. One would not usually associate starvation, rampant thievery and looting with pure bliss, but you see this is a special kind of paradise – one that will see inflation exceed 2220% this year. Naturally, the aforementioned social justice luminaries – with their unflinching ability to turn a blind eye to facts that repudiate their fantasies – won’t ever bother to look into this. At best, they’ll dismiss it as being “not real socialism or Marxism”.

In truth, social justice is characterised by an incredibly shallow, low-resolution and self-congratulatory way of thinking that is used to justify the latest “ethical” flavour of the week, which amounts to nothing more than moral posturing, disguised as profundity, but ultimately meaningless. It is code for good things nobody needs to argue for, and no-one dare argue against. One need not even get into the implicit assumption that "the anointed few" can oversee the implementation of "fairness" and "equality", as this ideology doesn't even attempt to reconcile itself with reality, as I shall demonstrate in the next piece.