"That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent"
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Huxley’s line lands like a slap because it stages its cynicism as common sense: “at ordinary times,” he implies, equality is the kind of belief people applaud in public and quietly ignore in practice. The phrase “no sane human being” is doing double duty. It’s an insult aimed at pious rhetoric, but it’s also a diagnostic claim about social reality: everyday life trains us to see hierarchy as natural, inevitable, even comforting. Huxley isn’t merely denying equality; he’s describing how normalcy itself polices the idea.
The subtext is that “all men are equal” survives less as a lived conviction than as an emergency slogan. In crises, revolutions, wars, economic collapses, equality becomes a mobilizing myth, a moral accelerant. When things are stable, institutions revert to sorting mechanisms: class, education, race, gender, accent, taste. “Ordinary times” are when the sorting feels invisible, because it’s been aestheticized as merit or tradition.
As a novelist steeped in the early 20th century’s disillusionment - after industrial slaughter, amid mass propaganda, on the doorstep of technocratic social engineering - Huxley treats egalitarian language with suspicion. Not because he’s cheering inequality, but because he’s allergic to the self-congratulation that accompanies grand ideals. The sentence is built to provoke the reader into an uncomfortable question: if equality is the creed, why does sanity, in the social sense, require pretending we don’t believe it?
The subtext is that “all men are equal” survives less as a lived conviction than as an emergency slogan. In crises, revolutions, wars, economic collapses, equality becomes a mobilizing myth, a moral accelerant. When things are stable, institutions revert to sorting mechanisms: class, education, race, gender, accent, taste. “Ordinary times” are when the sorting feels invisible, because it’s been aestheticized as merit or tradition.
As a novelist steeped in the early 20th century’s disillusionment - after industrial slaughter, amid mass propaganda, on the doorstep of technocratic social engineering - Huxley treats egalitarian language with suspicion. Not because he’s cheering inequality, but because he’s allergic to the self-congratulation that accompanies grand ideals. The sentence is built to provoke the reader into an uncomfortable question: if equality is the creed, why does sanity, in the social sense, require pretending we don’t believe it?
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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