@mpjgregoire@evan in more equal societies, consumption and status tends to be less important. So if everyone has enough, people don’t really want more in the first place.
I mean I'm sure the inverse is true: societies where status is less important should tend to have less inequality.
But on the other hand, I can think of groups where, as the material conditions are essentially equal, the struggle for little markers of status becomes intense, e.g., small children squabbling in the daycare, or (arguably) the proverb about academic politics.
@evan I'm surprised that 94% of people choose important or very important, and yet my claim that the important issue is deprivation rather than inequality didn't receive any real opposition.
I really liked the framing that equality isn't as important when everyone has enough. However, I don't think we're there, and inequality highlights that fact, so I think equality (or its lack) is very important.
@evan i know you prefer not to clarify what your questions mean and just like the debate and numbers, but i find it difficult to answer in a clear way when the questions are unclear. so i just pick one working response semi-randomly figuring that's good enough, and put my notes in the reply. :)
@evan you might mean "equality" in terms of equal access to needs and resources, something that doesn't exist but some folks strive for at least in part. or "equality before the law", the idea that everyone should be judged fairly in legal proceedings. but people interpret that sort of thing differently, too, with disagreement about whether non-equal circumstances are included in judging
@evan some folks think "equality" means you should ignore peoples' circumstances and judge them based on very narrow criteria, ignoring wider truths around them. others believe that "equality" requires paying attention to those larger truths.
which one is "equality"? if the former, then i'm not sure how to answer on this scale, it's not that it's "important" or "not important", but rather that it's "evil".
@evan others might say that "equality" is about equality of access to resources: that everyone has equal rights to live and thrive and allowing them to starve on the streets is not part of "equality"
others say that "equality" is "everyone has the equal opportunity to hopefully beg for a job so they can buy food and pay rent"
the first might be 'somewhat important', though i prefer 'equity' as a term maybe?
the latter, again, is evil so "important" or "not important" is not a useful answer
@evan it occurs to me this may be an autism spectrum thing. i find it very distressing to be asked to answer an unclear question and seek clarification, but you explicitly choose not to clarify the questions, which i find bewildering and try to compensate for by listing a bunch of possibilities you will neither confirm nor deny. :)
If you're really having a hard time with it, I guess the best thing for me to do is use a more exact language than English. I think the musical language Solresol best captures the essence of this question. I'm attaching a whistled version of the word which I hope clarifies the topic. Here is also a link to the Wikipedia article on Solresol if you need to learn the language really quickly.
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