Science Quote by Mary Douglas

Douglas tosses off this line like a dry aside, but it’s really a scalpel aimed at modern moral reflexes. The first clause nods to the obvious: inequality produces suffering, resentment, wasted talent. Then she pivots to the less confessable truth that many institutions run on hierarchy the way engines run on compression. “Equality” isn’t attacked as an ideal; it’s framed as a friction point. If everyone must be consulted, if status can’t be invoked, if no one has the recognized right to decide, coordination becomes expensive: slower decisions, more negotiation, fewer defaults. The joke is that equality’s “downside” is not moral but operational.

As a scientist-anthropologist of classification and social order, Douglas is speaking from a comparative vantage point. Her work (notably on how groups police boundaries and manage risk) treats “fairness” less as a timeless principle than as a cultural technology. Different societies solve the problem of collective action with different mixes of authority, obligation, and consent. Her subtext: you can’t wish away trade-offs with righteous language. “Equality” can be a rallying cry that quietly masks who will actually do the coordinating labor, who bears responsibility when things fail, and how decisions get legitimated without rank.

The context here is late-20th-century liberal democracies that want both maximum voice and maximum efficiency. Douglas is warning that coordination is a power problem before it’s a values problem: if you flatten the ladder, you still need a way to move.