Blog 1 Freedom -vs- Equality

There will always be a long standing conflict between those that have equality and those that have freedom. I personally think that freedom and equality are two things that can coexist, but not to the extremes that everyone would like them to be. There are conflicts that always arise between the two when you try to have them both. So you would have to ask yourself what is more important to you and then you would have to go from there. To really understand the conflict between them; you really have to look at the two extremes of both freedom and equality.

People that have all the freedom they need don’t have as much freedom as they think. Humans are animals and we do find ways of governing ourselves; even if it is through a fight to see who is a stronger person. By doing this they have unknowingly caused inequality within the group. The persons that end up in the governing body will have more power than those that are not. They might take more for themselves and their families, because they are the leader or part of the ones in power. If they don’t like someone in their group; they can have that person picked on, removed from the group, or just ignored within the group. This takes away from the equal treatment that everyone else had once shared.

Then you have the next extreme of everyone being equal; which is slightly impossible because someone will always be in power. As I said before, we are animals and we will find ways to govern ourselves. The best way to look at an extreme like this is to give you an example of this extreme; and the best examples that everyone knows are Russia and China. These people are “equal”, but they have no real freedoms. They are told how they are to run their lives, how many children to have, how much they are going to get to eat, etc. Having a government that tells you how to do all these things would be the only way to keep the equality that one would desire.

So now I am back to the beginning question; what happens? Usually there is a fight between the two groups. Both sides believe that their way of thinking is correct and that no one else is right. We have actually seen this conflict many times in our history and it won’t be our last. World War II is (sort of) an example of these two sides conflicting. Adolf Hitler wanted the world to be full of his Aryan, making everyone equal and the Allied powers were opposed to this and wanted freedoms. This is only one example of many. There is the Revolutionary War, Vietnam, the Crusades, and many numerous wars in Africa between the tribes. This is a conflict that usually has bloody ends because no one is willing to compromise. That is what happens when these two values, freedom and equality, collide.