Everything Not Forbidden is Compulsory

The perversions of the egalitarian ideal that began with the French Revolution and have been so plentiful in the twentieth century are not accidents of history or produced by technical errors in implementation. Something more inevitable is at work. People who are free to behave differently from one another in the important affairs of daily life inevitably generate the social and economic inequalities that egalitarianism seeks to suppress...

To reduce inequality of conditions, the state must impose greater and greater uniformity... Egalitarian tyrannies, whether the Jacobite or Leninist variety are worse than inhumane. They are inhuman.

The same atmosphere prevails on a smaller scale wherever 'equality' comes to serve as the basis for a diffuse moral outlook. Consider the many small tyrannies in America's contemporary universities where it has become objectionable to say that some people are superior to other people in any way that is relevant to life in society. Nor is this outlook confined to judgements about people. In art, literature, ethics and cultural norms, differences are not to be judged. Such relativism has become the moral high ground for many modern commentators on life and culture...

...The moral outlook that has become associated with equality has spawned a vocabulary of its own. Discrimination, once a useful word with a praiseworthy meaning, is now almost always used in a pejorative sense. Racism, sexism, ageism, elitism – all are common parlance, and their meanings continue to spread, blotting up more and more semantic territory...

...The ideology of equality has stunted the range of moral dialogue to triviality. In daily life conversations, the lessons taught in public schools, the kind of screenplays or newspaper features that people choose to write – the moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and – above all – truth.

The Bell Curve. R J Herrnstein & Charles Murray, The Free Press 1994 (pp532-533)