Science Quote by Mary Douglas

“Real equality” arrives here without the usual halo. Douglas treats it less like a moral finish line than a maintenance-intensive social technology: if you want outcomes that stay equal, you cannot rely on a one-time reform or a noble declaration. You need a system that keeps checking who has what, who’s gaining, who’s slipping, and then recalibrates. The phrase “continual revision and monitoring” quietly punctures the fantasy that equality is the default state once “unfairness” is removed. It’s work, and it’s political work, because “distributions” are never neutral; they’re the visible record of power, access, and cultural legitimacy.

The second sentence is the sharper provocation. Equality, Douglas suggests, strips away “buffers” - the status gradations, etiquette, and distance that hierarchies provide to keep people from rubbing up against each other. In more stratified systems, your social lane reduces friction: you know who defers, who commands, who gets the benefit of the doubt. In egalitarian arrangements, those lanes narrow or vanish. People have to negotiate norms in real time, constantly. That’s the “colliding”: not just interpersonal annoyance, but a structural feature of a flatter order.

Context matters: Douglas, as an anthropologist of how institutions classify and control risk, is allergic to utopian simplifications. The subtext is almost diagnostic: if an egalitarian project feels exhausting, tense, even petty at times, that may not mean it’s failing. It may mean it’s telling the truth about what equality actually costs.