I would like to take this opportunity to address a particularly pernicious argument I've been hearing more of lately. Like a plague it has lingered throughout American society, infecting one innocent mind after another. It is the "Level Playing Field" assertion. Proponents – more often than not rich, white and male – maintain that, in the modern Representative Democracy where we live out our lives, anyone with the talents and the drive to succeed can do so, reaping the rewards of peace, prosperity, and happiness, and that, by implication, anyone who is unsuccessful is either unwilling or incapable of achieving them.
If it were possible to kill an idea, this one would be the first on the executioner's block, as it is so naive and patently absurd as to be dismissible out of hand. Moreover, I have come to the conclusion that it not only is the product of an infantile intellect, but also of a frigid, frozen moral disposition.
However, as it has persisted in people's minds, I will point out this assertion's fatal flaws right here, and right now.
To begin with, the history of human civilization is replete with examples of injustice, to the point of near ubiquity. Life in the Ancient World was nasty, brutish and short. The Medieval Era was not much better. The Enlightenment and Renaissance featured religious wars which devastated the Old World, while the subsequent Era of Colonialism completely depopulated the Western Hemisphere. The Modern Era has seen one genocide after another, as well as two World Wars which together killed more people than any single act of nature ever has. All of which brings us to the present day.
So the question I would ask people who think they live in Paradise on Earth is: when did all of this change? What specific year saw this Earth, or any nation thereupon, change from a hideous cesspool of intolerance and criminality, into a "level playing field"? Because if no one can throw a number out there, then the argument that this transition occurred at all is completely moot.
To provide an analogy: the grass is green. For as long as Mankind has walked this Earth, it has remained so. If someone were to tell me one day that the grass had in fact turned blue, they would need to provide some form of proof that this had happened since the last time I had walked outside. If they were to then demand that I instead provide proof that the grass was still green, I would immediately dismiss them as a lunatic unworthy of debate, and move on with my life.
The point I'm demonstrating is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And the assertion that life anywhere upon this Earth is fair, equitable, or karmic owing to human institutions is as extraordinary a claim as I have ever heard.
So please, if you are reading this diatribe, and are ever in my company, please do not drag out this tired, worn-out, nonsensical attempt at argumentative reasoning, as I and anyone within earshot will instantly lose whatever respect we may have had for you.
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