To a certain degree, equality invites despotism, because in order to make all members of society equal, and then to maintain this equality for along period of time, it is necessary to equip the controlling institutions with exceptional power so they can stamp out any potential threat to equality in every sector of the society and any aspect of human life: to paraphrase a well-known sentence by one of Dostoyevsky’s characters, “We start with absolute equality and we end up with absolute despotism.” Some call it a paradox of equality: the more equality one wants to introduce, the more power one must have; the more power one has, the more one violates the principle of equality; the more one violates the principle of equality, the more one is in a position to make the world egalitarian.
Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.133
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