Emptiness is the Highest form of Equality

Yeah, you read the title right. Nothing is equality. This is a mathematical certainty that I hope I’ll be able to demonstrate to you. But I begin by saying this: for absolute equality to exist, there must be nothing to measure.

Why? Because anything that exists has attributes. And attributes, by their very nature, can be compared. The moment you compare two goods, you invent a hierarchy. And with a hierarchy, equality dies. Tragic, you may think, but it’s more beautiful than this.

Let us begin with the largest possible state of existence: infinity. Infinity should be the end of all comparison; nothing compares to infinity, right? But we know that some infinities are simply larger than others. You can map one infinity onto another and find that one contains the other. So imagine this: take an infinite number of resources and distribute them equally to everyone. As absurd as this sounds, people would still ask who has the largest infinity. They would still want to add to their infinities. Why? Because to exist is to be measurable. And to be measurable means there will always be goods above and goods below what you have.

But still, this does not prove that nothing is a form of equality, let alone the highest. So let us think about this for a second.

Darkness is the absence of light. Death is the absence of life. Now gaze into a room full of darkness. What do we see? Absolutely nothing. Now turn the lights on in the same room. Suddenly we introduce perceptions, a thousand points of comparison. In darkness, everything was the same, because we could not perceive anything at all. And that is precisely the problem: once we perceive things, we can compare. And once we compare, we are back to measurements.

Life operates in the same way. We exist in different bodies with specific capacities at specific times. They are not equal, and they are not meant to be. Life, therefore, becomes an engine of inequality because of all the attributes it introduces. In death, we are reduced to the same state of emptiness. That is why death is the true equalizer. We often say that life is not fair, and we are not wrong. But neither is death. Death just makes us equal because we become empty.

Emptiness has no parts, no attributes, no dimensions. You cannot say that this emptiness is greater than that emptiness, not like you can with infinity. Emptiness is singular. There is no comparison. There is only the absolute sameness of nothing. And that is as equal as it gets.

Let us bring these arguments closer to home.

Why do you think marketing is as effective as it is? Because the moment we become aware of the existence of something, we suddenly feel a deprivation within us. We are naturally wired to want what is best for us. Whatever metrics exist, we want to be at the top, be it social media presence, salary, or our children’s success. We always have some metric to compare ourselves against, and we set ourselves as either better or worse off. Equality promises to end this by giving everyone the same metric. But you already see the problem with that. We will simply find new metrics. Even if they become more intrinsic, we will still find ways to compare.

But really, we should ask ourselves: why do we need the things we need? Did you see your neighbour with something and mistake it for a universal good? Or do you need it to survive and thrive? The truth is, sometimes we borrow our wants and needs from others. I am not saying that all our needs are borrowed, but a great many of them are. And here is the cruel truth: even if we achieved perfect equality of resources, comparison would not end. Mimetic desire would simply attach itself to intangible things: love, status, recognition. You can argue that equality does not strive to give us the same social hierarchy, but the mere existence of social hierarchy tells us that we can never be truly equal.

The only way equality could exist despite our intrinsic needs and wants is if we did not have these desires at all. And the absence of desire goes back to emptiness. Yet again, we arrive at the same conclusion.

So what am I saying? Is diversity the reason we cannot achieve equality? That is exactly it, and that is the beauty of it.

A lot of what you can do, I cannot. These are not failures of equality; equality was never meant to succeed in the way we imagine it. If we all had the same starting line, we would have the most unfair race. Some of us cannot jump; some of us cannot even stand. Life is not the Olympics. We don’t want to be similar, not really. It is diversity that makes us beautiful, because everywhere you look, there is a story you have not heard. Equality, as we understand it, is about putting everyone in the same bracket. And even though that seems amazing, all of humanity united, it is really not what works best.

So we are left with a choice. We can either strive to give everyone nothing, which is a waste of resources and a waste of life, or we can find a better way to approach distribution. We do not have enough to give everyone everything. But we can make sure that the people who need a good the most get it first. If we go for equality in the absolute sense, we will run out of resources by giving them to people who do not even need them.

The bottom line is this: as we are, we cannot achieve equality. Emptiness is the highest form of equality, and we do not want that. We cannot be empty. We are too full of stories, desires, and differences. And perhaps that is not a failure. Perhaps that is the point.