Euphemisms in Development
Equity is a
right. Equality is the platform on which
it is achieved. Neither occur in
development.
In a democratic
world, we want to say that we aim for equality of opportunity. In an idealized world, equality of
opportunity presupposes that a person or collective does not experience
barriers to power for reasons of, say, sex, creed, colour, religion, or race. Once in power, or at minimum having power over
yourself (ves), you experience that thing called equity.
Well, dream on
utopia. A universal set of standards and
institutions that represent and defend your personal interests or those of your
chosen collective? The development
industry offers up only the hand-in-hand sisters of public education and capital
economy and democracy. You know,
micro-credit schemes, primary schools, and international observers for
elections. You can either make money or
not. You can go to school or not. You can vote for your government and majority
wins or not.
Sorry, but it is
an endgame. No choice but
uniformity. No choice but a single
integrated system. Don’t like it? The industry offers up the narcotic that as
an individual you can be as different as you like. Just be sure to go to school and get a job and
vote. The only place for action,
however, is in the latter. You do not
decide what is taught, how your money works, or how you govern yourself (ves). If you do try to decide for yourself, you and
you collectively are asking for trouble. Just ask Ghadaffi. Or aboriginal peoples pretty much anywhere. Has anybody lately seen an economy based on
the principles of the common good?
My proposition
is based on at least several premises.
One is that public education, in setting standards, teaches us first to
conform to broader standards and then measures our success by our ability to
mirror those standards which we do not personally own. Through public education, we become
specialists with narrow streams of knowledge.
First we buy into a broad social standard and give up our selves. We then only claim to know what we have been
taught in education institutions; our non-institutional knowledge, such as
methods for good husbandry, have no value.
The public education process neutralizes our individuality, defeating the
practice of who each of us are and what we might be capable of knowing and
acting upon outside the realm of those standards.
A second premise
is related to employment, for which any sense of equality must be subject to
the rules of a given economic system; for all intents and purposes we now have
only one recognized economy, call it capitalist, its tentacles having reached
into the remotest corners of the planet.
There are those who are employed, who produce, earn and consume, and there
are those who lose their homes and ways of life for hydro electric dams,
expanded suburbs, corporate farms, mines, the trees in a forest… the list is
endless.
You are either
in this triad game of public education, jobs, and democracy, or you are
not. Winners. Losers.
Plenty of lost souls in between.
But neither public education nor wage earning jobs nor democracy level
the playing field. On the contrary. They are the playing field. And you are either in the game, or out. If you have gotten into the game, you
necessarily behave according to established sets of rules. Sorry, but when you paid the price of
admission to the game, you left behind long ago your uniqueness and your principles
of equality and equity.
Sameness and standards have nothing in common
with the unbearable lightness of being.
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