A Dark Take on Inequality

I have been hearing a lot about inequality lately. Everyone, and I mean literally everyone, has termed it greatest evil facing mankind. Really?

I say inequality is about as crucial to life as air to breathe and water to drink, but only when you’re on the right side of it. If you’re on the wrong side, you’re fucked. If everyone’s rich and educated, who’s gonna scrape the commode clean when I’m done taking a shit? If everyone goes to McDonald’s to place the order, who’s gonna deliver it to me? If everyone is Steve Jobs, who’s gonna die of heat and overwork at a Chinese factory while making one of his phones that I can use to retweet the news of that very death?

Human race needs inequality to progress. The poor are nothing but the modern euphemistic equivalent of slaves, whom we all must thank for enabling the super comfy world of today. Nothing has changed. Back then, there were chains to tie them up with, now there is hope. Hope that one day they will, too, be rich.  Hope is the opium of the poor. Hope is the dangerous cocktail and it comes packaged in the form of promise of education and equal opportunity, leading to social mobility and eventual richness down the generations. This isn’t too different from how men have controlled women, previously by force, and now by the lure of good looks, big boobs, tight ass, shaved vagina, waxed legs, perfectly-done eyebrows, earrings, nose-rings, big bags, high heels, tube tops, low necklines.

Let’s leave the women for later and come back to controlling the poor through hope. Hope is often considered a necessary evil. It isn’t. It is either necessary or evil, but never both at the same time – necessary for the rich, and evil for the poor. Hope is necessary for the rich to maintain society’s status quo. Hope is evil for the poor because it is a mirage that the poor die chasing, exactly what the likes of Paul Krugman want them to do as they draw six-figure Dollar salaries for researching and writing op-eds about inequality. Hope is Huxley's dystopia brought alive. Hope is the carrot that those on the right side of inequality dangle just high enough to keep those on the wrong side jumping up perpetually without realising how shitty their lives are. Of course, time and again, the carrot is lowered just enough to let a few grab it. That serves a purpose too – of making hope realistic, and making those unsuccessful jumps permanent and all-captivating.

Don’t believe what I say? Try to justify some of the euphemisms that the rich have coined. Now, the poor are “economically disadvantaged”, the garbage collectors are “sanitation workers” and the watchman is a “custodian” – all tools to make the poor aspire endlessly to an unattainable aspiration even as they feel vaguely sure and happy about having attained it already. The latest euphemism is Swiggy’s delivery boys being called “delivery executives”. Executives, really? Can someone explain to me why - other than furthering the cause of the rich - do uneducated, broke people whose authority ends at denying me change for Rs.2, deserve to be called “executives”?

Some fools on the right side are in the business of trying to help those on the wrong side. The usual M.O. is dispensing with money and food, mostly leftovers from their plate. These days, camera-toting rich, especially the Caucasian ones, also uplift the spirit of poor people – a definitive panacea for poverty - by clicking selfies with them and uploading them on Instagram. Sometimes the do-gooders go to the extent of adopting/supporting a stinking kid from the streets. Do these people really think they can change anything? No, they can’t. The destiny of human race was decided in transactions that happened eons ago.  No matter how much they help that beggar on the street with half a limb, chances are that he will give birth to 10 kids, 3 of whom will die at birth and 1 will turn out demented. All the rest but one will have their arms cut off and one eye gouged out of the socket to be worthy participants in the begging industry. The randomly chosen lucky one will be hauled up to act as a beacon of unrelenting hope for the rest, and thus the cycle continues, so sit back and relax and watch the world unfold as it must, instead of trying to stick out like a sore thumb. Life sucks, fuck hope. Social mobility is dead.

Of course, not all poor are equal. The rich need them for all sorts of jobs, ranging from scraping shit to making phones, and those higher in the social and economic hierarchy have carefully manipulated the ones below them. The motif underlying all kinds of poverty is hope. Those who scrape shit want their children to clean the streets, and those who make phones want theirs to use them, not too different from how the author of this post wants to write for FT and NYT one day, and those reading it want their names to feature in those papers. We’re all in this together, folks. You’ve been dealt a better hand than most, and hence you feel happy, even proud, and probably poke fun at those who haven’t, but remember, someone is laughing at you right now.