it must needs be that there be an organization of my people, in regulating and establishing the affairs of the storehouse for the poor of my people, both in this place and in the land of Zion—
4 For a permanent and everlasting establishment and order unto my church, to advance the cause, which ye have espoused, to the salvation of man, and to the glory of your Father who is in heaven;
5 That you may be equal in the bonds of heavenly things, yea, and earthly things also, for the obtaining of heavenly things.
6 For if ye are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things;
-thus D&C 78:3-6
Like some of you, I have developed an allergy to the concept of equality, as who wouldn’t if the whipmasters shouted “equality” with each blow on you of the lash. But that is the fault of the whipmasters, not the (sadly much abused) concept.
Paradoxically, I have become more alive to the idea of a group of people joining together as peers because of some great animating friendship and cause. Like it says right there in those verses, “to advance the cause.”
But that isn’t the point of this post.
Somehow out of verses 5 and 6 I got the realization that equality is not a status. Equality is an action. It is the action of acknowledging someone with respect and friendship. Oh, those aren’t the right words, but that is the idea. Equality is the action of fellow-feeling. The same thing as ‘fellowship,’ if that word hadn’t acquired its own set of connotations where we have lost the connection with ‘fellow.’
What we commonly say against schemes of enforced equality is that they deny agency. In other words, they are bad because they mandate us to do something that we could gain moral value in choosing. That’s true, as far as it goes. But the real objection to schemes of enforced equality is that they are impossible. They are trying to enact a contradiction. They are like mandatory love. Literally, actually. True equality doesn’t mean sameness in status or condition, which is mostly impossible and not actually desirable anyway. True equality is the action of a kind of love.
So a scheme of enforced equality is actually at very best mandating the results of mutual recognition, mutual respect, and mutual love, without actually mandating what causes the effect, because the cause cannot be mandated.
Sometimes schemes of enforced equality do get real equality, when the forced giver and the forced recipient unite in their mutual hatred of the schemer. But not always and not often, because often the point of enforced “equality” is to prevent real equality by giving the giver and the recipient a reason to hate each other.