Equality of opportunities vs. equality of outcomes

It is not just this or that or even the majority of men’s rights activists who miss the boat with actions against individual judges.

The bias of individual judges should without a doubt be used as examples of the consequences of systemic bias.  Still, all instances of such bias are problem symptoms, not fundamental problem causes.  No problem has ever been successfully solved by treating its symptoms.  Only by eradicating their fundamental causes can problems be cured permanently.

The bias goes far beyond “the shadow of the law,” and it is not merely bias by judges that needs to be of concern.

I believe that it was in about 1967 or so that a neighbour of mine (he intended to make a career in probation) told me that when he was doing his dissertation for his masters in sociology, he had wanted to expose the wide variations in sentencing in Alberta for crimes of equal severity.  His mentors soon convinced him that to write on that subject would cause him to fail or at the very least to irreparably harm his career.

My neighbour picked a different, less controversial subject for his dissertation, after having done a few months of work on the politically-incorrect one.  He made his masters, and he did well in his career, although eventually he left the Government and went into business for himself.

The problem is Western Chivalry, and that has not just merely the judges in its grip.  Western Chivalry has been around longer than the reverence for the Virgin Mary.  Even the reverence for the Virgin Mary, having done much to shape Western Chivalry, is nothing but a problem symptom.

It seems that it can be argued that reverence for women is as old as civilization.  In my mind there is no doubt that Aristotle was right and that reverence for women was the fundamental cause of the decline of Sparta.

Female supremacism is a crime of opportunity caused by men who let women take advantage of the opportunities offered through Western Chivalry.

The systemic bias against men will vanish as soon as there is mutual and equitable respect by the sexes, not for who they are but for what they do.  That requires the recognition of the vital differences between equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes.

A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.  The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

Milton and Rose Friedman
in Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
(Milton Friedman won the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economics)

–WHS

This entry was posted on August 8, 2008 at 7:50 am and is filed under Men and Women Work, Men's Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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