The letter E is a powerful prefix. When E is attached to words in the English language, it’s not quite like Un, or De, which are forms of negation. E connotates a motion or activity of casting out something to the point of depletion. To this end, it often acts to create a pseudo-verb of sorts. A work. For example, maciation itself means thin, but emaciated means a work has been done to make their leanness become visible in a visceral way. Life itself is being cast out of the body, physically visible on the skin like a fleshy Shroud of Turin. If we take the word Theus for God in many languages, adding En-forms Enthusiastic - that being moved towards something as if God himself was pushing you, radiating out for all to see - they are enthusiastic, that is, eager with a divine will. The E prefix thus has something of a shadow, a dark implication. That after the casting out is complete, the subject will be left empty. After en-thus comes de-theus - the ancient Germanic word we now know as death.
Every E prefix ends in a De or Un or some such.
Equality, thus, should be self E-vident. It is to cast out quality to the point of exhaustion, being left with something that lacks it. Here, the letter E is doing the work of atomization. Any distinction will be burned up, shine bright, and then be lost - until we’re all little blank protons.
Today, the left has many forms of equality - each with the end-state being a lack of quality in its respective sphere. Equality of Opportunity, equality of nations, etc. This sounds great on paper. The world would be a marvelous place if we all had the lives of the richest people and the benefits of the wisest of elders. But reality does not provide the means for leftists to achieve these goals. So utopian vision blurs, and decays. Rather than all having the best quality of lives, equality ends up producing universal mediocrity, and eventually as the system fails to achieve its goals, universal poverty. There is a reason why the left doesn’t have words like empoverish, because they can’t cast out poverty. Instead we get words like empower, which curiously results in the loss of power for all.
Ultimately, equality of opportunity ends up means nobody should have the benefit of elders or parents. Equality of nations means everyone should live in a ghetto. The act of equating generally does not mean bringing the worse off up to the best. It almost always ends up eliminating the good to bring everyone down to the worst. Rather than Leftward, the motion is downward.
To those ends, there is one particular form of equality that is particularly destructive - the equality of love.
Again, on its face, like so many leftward leaning starting points, it sounds all fine and good. If two people love each other, why shouldn’t their love be equal to anyone else in that experience. But in practice, this means emptying out all love to a purely transactional experience, with all values set to nill. It means eliminating and qualitative differences - which means nobody should have children, because same sex couples can’t. Nobody should trust a spouse, because the hurt can’t.
The popularity of this equality of loves plays on two weaknesses in the English speaking world. First, that we tend to use the word Love very broadly. Other languages like Greek have many words for very specific experiences of love, like Agape for unconditional love, or Eros for romantic love. Second, as romantic love is the most basic and bestial of love, all love is reduced to the reproductive act - emptied of any reproductive qualities.
Do note, that in any other language, this reduction places romantic love above all others unequally - creating a philosophical contradiction that English doesn’t have. Incidentally, this is why attempts to reinterpret holy scripture’s definition of love tends to be limited to only the English and Germanic speaking nations. LGBTQ movements find great difficulty taking root in other languages because the language doesn’t allow for this world view. For instance, the Greek Bible never even has the word eros used in it. Thus for the time being, until the language changed, this particular form of equality finds great difficulty taking root outside the Anglo and Germanic spheres.
However, even though we lack these words, we inherently understand the different kinds of love between friends, romantic partners, parents, and neighbors. We sense something is wrong when all these loves are reduced to beastial romance. These things are natural, and the left is thus left to insinuation for all such kinds of loves to push their narrative. Yet we see clearly what their equality of love results in: everything is eros for them. They cast out brotherly and familiar love, the higher forms.
Most of us are aware of how the left has subverted our culture in the areas of entertainment, identity, and many experiences. However, love has been seemingly ignored by people of a rightward persuasion. We see terminally online trads wanting masculine Christianity, and pagans wanting a return to war bands and such. Love gets passed aside in those circles as sounding inherently effeminate - few ask if this isn’t because their only experience of love is beastial and primitive - I think we must learn to see this as a sure sign of a bombing run by the left. We need to rebuild these higher forms of love before we even entertain making romance a noble thing. I think we should ask what once stood there. Like so many topics the left has obliterated the history of, we must reach into the past to understand the correct, hierarchical view of love. What the ancients called: The Ordos Amoris. The Hierarchy of Loves.
C.S. Lewis, in his overview of the history of the concept, wrote the following:
St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ordinate affections or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. ~ C.S. Lewis
The Ordos Amores is, therefore, a fundamentally subjective structure placed upon a wild brute of a mind: That of a child. Build a child a correct structure, and he will learn to value things appropriately. Build a poor structure, or none at all, and you end up like Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, endlessly screaming “I want it now!” at the mildest of matters.
The Ordos Amoris is also important for another reason: It is one of the few areas where pagan philosophers and Christian theologians agree. Even in Plato’s day, religion tended to be very actions based. Love between gods and men were very beastial and lacked much higher loves. The Romans were more concerned that you perform religious rites correctly than with a dedicated heart. The gods didn’t care if you hated them when you performed the rites, only that the rites were perfect. Pagan philosophers like Plato found this to be greatly in error, and so did Christian theologians later. They agreed that one must love their God, not just perform the rites correctly. That a rightly ordered love of Deus would result in the heart offering correctly ordered love to their family. A family with correctly ordered love would bless their community, and a community with correctly ordered love could more greatly bless the stranger.
To take an example out of the Christian Bible, most of you are familiar with the Parable of the Good Sheppard. You’ve likely heard far right criticism of this as being weak - of placing the love of the foreigner above that of yourself. But this is a very twisted view. The story takes place on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho - places the Good Samaritan are not native to. Did the Good Samaritan take the inured man to his own country? Did he open his borders or have telescopic philanthropy? No. He took the injured man to an inn of his own people, he paid the injured man’s kin to take care of their own. He was teaching this people the correct order of love. His only responsibility was ensuring the man safely got to a house of healing. It was not his job to empty the coffers of Samaria or break down Samaria’s borders to care for Judah’s poor. It was his moral responsibility to take care of a man in their own country and teach their people the correct order. An once taught, he left for his own responsibilities. He greatly cared for the man, and offered his own personal resources for this man’s benefit. But he did not destroy his house or kin for their sake. He had the correct ordering of love.
In fact, you may not know this, but this parable of Jesus is actually playing off a story in the Old Testament, found in 2 Chronicles 28. In that chapter, Judah’s army is beaten and robbed and enslaved - like the man left in the same state on the road. Israel did little to help their own defeated army, but another Good Samaritan, the prophet Oded, encouraged Samaria’s army to help these beaten men. They gave them food and water, clothing, and balms for healing. However, and this is important, he explicitly said to them not to bring them into Samaria. Samaria should not be sacrificed for the benefit of these defeated men. Rather, get them donkeys and send them back to Jerusalem with what they need to take care of themselves. Oded knew the correct order of love. We have a moral responsibility to take care of those in need, but not a moral responsibility to destroy ourselves for the benefit o the foreigner. In this era where we have lost the order of love, many fail to understand this balance. It’s either total self destruction for the benefit of strangers, or total isolation to ourselves. The order of love is to take care of strangers where you are, but not to sacrifice your community.
Love must be ordered. God first, then family, then community and kin, then strangers and enemies. The world wants you to either only love enemies and hate friends, or only love friends and hate enemies. But the man with correct order in his loves knows family comes first, because a well kept family is in a better position to help their kin and community. A well kept community is in a better position to help strangers than atomized individuals. This is the order, and it blesses everyone when it is correctly ordered.
A great example of this in recent history would be Nayib Bukele, who was not afraid to first show the world his healthy family. From that, he became a rather successful Mayor. Twice. After his successful mayorship over Nuevo Cuscatlán, and later San Salvador, the people began to reflect this ordered love in the community, so he moved on to the presidency, and enabled that ordered love to reflect nationally. In the span of a few short years, El Salvador went from one of the worst countries in the New World, to more or less being the safest and a growing star of Latin America. These things move very quickly once the order is in place, and you can actually redeem an entire people out of their misery in just a few short years.
Consider yourself first, and expand from that.
Further Reading:
https://circeinstitute.org/blog/blog-ladder-love/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratification_of_emotional_life_(Scheler)#:~:text=However%20quite%20unlike%20many%20of,Logic%20of%20the%20Heart%E2%80%9D).
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-2387-0_3
If only foreign aid really was what it says it is. While it is true that philanthropic organisations assist communities by, for example, involving them in building wells or a medical center, by and large the big bucks are used to bribe local officials and/or for arms dealing. In the light of which, hand-wringing about the plight of refugees stands exposed as the fraud that it is.