At times one feels compelled to venture out on thin ice. The term is used as metaphor to capture the hazard that attends to speaking the absurd, or on the other hand, speaking truth from which one’s fellows are conditioned to turn away. Equality is bedrock to the American experiment, to these United States. Argument is often made that in the time of the great controversy between our North and South, the legal right to own slaves, Lincoln’s overriding conviction was to maintain the Union intact. To serve that end a conception of a half slave and half free nation made no sense. Even Southerners agreed the notion was absurd, and they did insist upon holding their slaves.

Equality, every citizen’s voice counts, to be expressed by the ballot.  This is both tradition, practiced since the inception, the founding of our country, and is codified by law.  Every four years we conduct the election of the countries CEO, a process of interview if you will.

It is worth noting how much weight was given to having a voice, to the quasi-sacred nature of choice in the nomination acceptance speech delivered by the Democratic Party’s nominee Kamala Harris.

Ok, so here we come to thin ice. Granted every citizen is permitted to vote and every vote is to be counted. However, is the opinion of a militia-member that marched with a torch in the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally to receive as much freedom to spread hatred, as a you’d grant someone else advocating that all women’s choice with respect to healthcare be inviolate? So far no benchmark for that decision has been excavated from reason. What’s reasonable depends entirely upon who is doing the reasoning. Reason works well for math, but not for such disagreements.

As the ice already is quite thin – here is another view of equality, a view that holds weight. What does life itself require? If society is life-like, an organism, what does a healthy society demand?

Can you hear the ice beginning to crack?

It seems to me that the November election will surely be a contest of life and death.

Mutually refraining from injury, violence, and exploitation,
placing your will on par with the other’s:
in a certain, crude sense,
these practices
can become good manners
between individuals
when the right conditions are present

(namely, that the individuals have genuinely similar
quantities of force and measures of value,
and belong together within a single body).

But as soon as this principle is taken any further,
and maybe even
held to be the fundamental principle of society,
it immediately shows itself for what it is:
the will to negate life,
the principle of disintegration
and decay.

Here we must think things through thoroughly,
and ward off any sentimental weakness:
life itself
is essentially a process of appropriating,
injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker,
oppressing, being harsh,
imposing your own form, incorporating,
and at least, the very least,
exploiting,

– but what is the point of always using words
that have been stamped with slanderous intentions
from time immemorial?

Even a body
within which (as we presupposed earlier)
particular individuals treat each other as equal
(which happens in every healthy aristocracy):
if this body is living and not dying,
it will have to treat other bodies
in just those ways that the individuals it contains
refrain from treating each other.

It will have to be the embodiment of will to power,
it will want to grow, spread, grab, win dominance,

– not out of any morality or immorality,
But because it is alive, and because
life is precisely will to power.

“Exploitation”
does not belong
to a corrupted or imperfect,
primitive society:
it belongs to the essence of being alive
as a fundamental organic function;
it is a result of genuine will to power,
which is just the will of life.

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Norman, aphorism 259