“As for “equality of opportunities,” there can be no such thing anyhow, really speaking. By producing men and women different both in degree and in quality of intelligence, sensitiveness and willpower, different in character and temperament, Nature herself gives them the most unequal opportunities of fulfilling their aspirations, whatever these might be. An over-emotional and rather weak person can, for instance, neither conceive the same ideal of happiness nor have equal chances of reaching it in life, as one who is born with a more balanced nature and a stronger will. That is obvious. And add to that the characteristics that differentiate one race of men from another, and the absurdity of the very notion of “human equality” becomes even more striking. What our contemporaries mean when they speak of “equality of opportunities” is the fact that, in modern society—so they say—any man or woman stands, more and more, as many chances as his or her neighbour of holding the position and doing the job for which he or she is naturally fitted. But that too is only partly true. For, more and more, the world of today—the world dominated by grand-scale industry and mass-production—can offer only jobs in which the best of the worker’s self plays little or no part if he or she be anything more than a merely clever and materially efficient person. The hereditary craftsman, who could find the best expression for what is conveniently called his “soul” in his daily weaving, carpet-making, enamel work, etc., even the tiller of the soil, in personal contact with Mother Earth and the Sun and the seasons, is becoming more and more a figure of the past. There are less and less opportunities, also, for the sincere seeker of truth—speaker or writer—who refuses to become the expounder of broadly accepted ideas, products of mass-conditioning, for which he or she does not stand; for the seeker of beauty who refuses to bend his or her art to the demands of liberal popular taste which he or she knows to be bad taste. Such people have to waste much of their time doing inefficiently—and grudgingly—some job for which they are not fitted, in order to live, before they can devote the rest of it to what the Hindus would call their sadhana—the work for which their deeper nature has appointed them: their life’s dedication. The idea of modern division of labour, condensed in the oft-quoted sentence “the right man in the right place,” boils down, in practice, to the fact that any man—any one of the dull, indiscriminate millions—can be “conditioned” to occupy any place, while the best of human beings, the only ones who still justify the existence of the more and more degenerate species, are allowed no place at all. Progress….”
-Savitri Devi
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