The abstract ideal of human equality secretly serves totalitarian homogenization

Evidence

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality. The technique of the concentration camp is to make the prisoners like their guards, the murdered, murderers. The racial difference is raised to an absolute so that it can be abolished absolutely, if only in the sense that nothing that is different survives. An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences. Politics that are still seriously concerned with such a society ought not, therefore, propound the abstract equality of men even as an idea. Instead, they should point to the bad equality today, the identity of those with interests in films and in weapons, and conceive the better state as one in which people could be different without fear. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 117

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense, paradigm-shifting reversal: tolerance’s equality claim is turned inside out to reveal it as a tool of the same machinery that wants everything alike. The four-step maneuver — equality as stigma, camp technique as equality-making, emancipated universality as reconciliation of differences, better state as difference-without-fear — is a genuine dialectical achievement that resists one-sentence summary.
• XREF: Foreshadows the identity/difference politics debates of the 1990s (Young, Fraser) and connects to the ‘All men are alike’ line’s resonance with how liberal multiculturalism absorbs difference. — connects to: The cult of humanity leads to Comtean humanism and fascism — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 32; Political equality made society secretly more hierarchical than before — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 269; Bourgeois tolerance functions as a mask preserving the status quo — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 342 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Political equality made society secretly more hierarchical than before #corroborates (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 269