"Everyone has an equal right to inequality"
About this Quote
A sentence this compact is basically a trap door: it sounds like a liberal reassurance and lands like an indictment. John Ralston Saul pairs the warm, civic language of equality with the cold, structural fact of inequality, then welds them together with the word "right". That’s the whole move. Inequality isn’t framed as an accident, or even as a regrettable byproduct of freedom; it’s reframed as an entitlement, a claim protected by the same moral vocabulary we use to defend dignity.
The intent is to expose how modern democracies launder hierarchy through rights-talk. By saying everyone has an equal right, Saul mimics the egalitarian cadence of constitutional rhetoric, then twists it: if inequality becomes a right, opposition to it starts to look like intolerance. The subtext is about consent. We don’t merely endure gaps in wealth, status, and power; we get trained to narrate them as legitimate outcomes of a fair game. The phrase also hints at the comforting fiction of equal starting lines: if everyone is equally entitled to the system, then whatever the system produces can be treated as morally neutral.
Contextually, Saul’s work often circles the failures of managerial politics and the way public life gets reduced to technocratic inevitabilities. This quip reads like a critique of late-20th-century neoliberal common sense: deregulate, privatize, call it choice. The brilliance is its deadpan symmetry. It doesn’t argue; it mirrors the logic back to you until it looks grotesque.
The intent is to expose how modern democracies launder hierarchy through rights-talk. By saying everyone has an equal right, Saul mimics the egalitarian cadence of constitutional rhetoric, then twists it: if inequality becomes a right, opposition to it starts to look like intolerance. The subtext is about consent. We don’t merely endure gaps in wealth, status, and power; we get trained to narrate them as legitimate outcomes of a fair game. The phrase also hints at the comforting fiction of equal starting lines: if everyone is equally entitled to the system, then whatever the system produces can be treated as morally neutral.
Contextually, Saul’s work often circles the failures of managerial politics and the way public life gets reduced to technocratic inevitabilities. This quip reads like a critique of late-20th-century neoliberal common sense: deregulate, privatize, call it choice. The brilliance is its deadpan symmetry. It doesn’t argue; it mirrors the logic back to you until it looks grotesque.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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