Billie Eilish, pop priestess of the perpetually aggrieved, recently received a standing ovation from the Left for her economic wisdom: "If you're a billionaire, give your money away." Translation: "I have never created a job, balanced a budget, or read a P&L in my life, but I know exactly how to fix poverty, by confiscating the wealth of people who actually solved problems at scale." The applause was unanimous. The irony was total. And the underlying philosophy, equality at moral gunpoint, enforced by moral purity, is the same ancient serpent that has devoured every civilisation foolish enough to mistake "fairness" for freedom.
Steve Brule just drove a stake through its heart.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn said it best, and Brule quotes him like scripture: "Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free."
This is not a debate. It is a law of nature, as immutable as gravity.
Give ten people identical seeds, identical soil, identical sunlight. Some will grow prize-winning tomatoes. Some will kill the plant in a week.
Give ten startups identical seed capital. One becomes Tesla. Nine become cautionary tales.
Freedom produces inequality the way fire produces heat. The Left's solution? Smother the fire. The result? A cold, dark room where everyone shivers equally, except the apparatchiks who control the thermostat.
People of taste, those who value excellence, beauty, innovation, and the right to fail spectacularly, will always choose freedom. Why? Because the alternative is the wheelie-bin philosophy: drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator, then call it "justice." All equal at the bottom, marinating in shared mediocrity, with the stench of resentment as the national perfume.
The Left doesn't just want equality. It wants moral purity, the gnostic cheat code that lets them claim divine authority to enforce it. James Lindsay is right: this is heresy dressed as compassion. The trans activist who demands you affirm his "secret knowledge" of womanhood. The climate cultist who jets to Davos to lecture you about your carbon footprint. The BLM leader who buys mansions with donation money while calling you a white supremacist for noticing. All of them share the same playbook:
1.Claim the moral high ground (secret knowledge, sacred victimhood, or planetary sainthood).
2.Demand sacrifices from the unclean (your speech, your money, your children's sports).
3.Punish dissent as blasphemy (cancel, deplatform, sue, imprison).
This is not compassion. It is spiritual blackmail. And it works because most people would rather lie than lose their friends, jobs, or social media accounts.
Look at any society that chose equality over freedom. The results are always the same:
Venezuela: Once the richest country in Latin America. Now, doctors eat from garbage bins while the socialist elite fly to Miami for shopping sprees.
Soviet Union: "Equality" meant everyone waited in the same bread line, except the nomenklatura, who had their own stores.
California: DEI quotas in tech. Result? Companies flee to Texas. The "oppressed" get symbolic board seats. The state gets $68 billion budget deficits.
Equality doesn't lift the bottom. It sinks the top. And the middle drowns trying to stay afloat.
Brule's example of Alexis Black (formerly Kyle Grant Freeman) is chilling because it is predictable. An ex-con declares himself a woman, steals his victim's name, and uses his new "identity" to terrorise women in a locker room. The gym bans the women who complained. Why? Because equality now trumps safety, biology, and common sense. Moral purity demands it.
This is not an outlier. It is the endpoint. When equality becomes the highest good, predators become protected classes. When moral purity is the currency, truth becomes hate speech.
The Right, for all its flaws, still worships at the altar of individual excellence. It celebrates the entrepreneur who turns an idea into a billion-dollar company. The athlete who trains harder than anyone else. The parent who sacrifices everything to give their kid a better shot.
The Left celebrates the tantrum. The Right celebrates the triumph. The Left demands you kneel. The Right demands you stand — on your own two feet.
Every society must choose:
Freedom: Unequal outcomes, unlimited upside, and the right to fail.
Equality: Uniform misery, enforced by moral busybodies with the power to ruin your life.
People of taste — those who build, create, and aspire — will always choose freedom. They would rather live in a world where Elon Musk can launch rockets to Mars than one where everyone is equally grounded by government decree.
The wheelie-bin philosophers can keep their equality. We'll take the stars.