I reject Robert D. Kaplan’s lazy first-sentence premise — that “everyone loves equality.”
I don’t.
As a friend of mine likes to quip regarding the academic received wisdom about race:
“Equality is a social construct.”
Anyway, Kaplan goes on to say some other stuff that’s a bit more hard-ass:
The fact is that domination of one sort or another, tyrannical or not, has a better chance of preventing the outbreak of war than a system in which no one is really in charge; where no one is the top dog, so to speak. That is why Columbia University’s Kenneth Waltz, arguably America’s pre-eminent realist, says that the opposite of “anarchy” is not stability, but “hierarchy.”
Hierarchy eviscerates equality; hierarchy implies that some are frankly “more equal” than others, and it is this formal inequality — where someone, or some state or group, has more authority and power than others — that prevents chaos. For it is inequality itself that often creates the conditions for peace.
