Life & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

Equality doesn’t end competition; it just democratizes it. Mason Cooley’s line lands like a small, sharp paradox: the more a society flattens old hierarchies, the more crowded the scramble becomes for whatever status remains. It’s not an argument against equality so much as a warning about what humans do once the obvious barriers fall away. When fewer people are automatically sorted into “above” and “below,” more people can plausibly imagine themselves at the top - and that imagination fuels friction.

The intent is coolly diagnostic. Cooley is tracking a shift from inherited dominance to contested dominance. In an unequal order, predominance is often preassigned: class, race, gender, family name. Equality, even partial, turns predominance into a tournament. That can look like progress - it is progress - but it also produces a new kind of anxiety: if everyone is “allowed,” then failure feels personal, not structural. The subtext is that egalitarian reforms don’t remove status as a social currency; they often intensify its psychological stakes.

Context matters: Cooley wrote in a late-20th-century America steeped in meritocracy talk, civil rights aftermath, and the expanding promise (and pressure) of individual achievement. His aphorism echoes Tocqueville’s insight that democratic life can breed restless comparison. Predominance doesn’t disappear; it migrates to subtler arenas - credentials, taste, lifestyle, online clout - where the rules look fairer, but the hunger to win is just as old.