Humans have always suffered. Every generation before us has experienced hunger, disease, violence and death. But unlike the other animals on this planet, we think about our suffering, we don’t just experience it. We are conscious of our suffering, and that awareness demands answers. Why is the world this way? Why the pain and unfairness? What does it all mean?
For most of our history, religion provided the answers. Christianity explained that we live in a fallen world, but offered the hope of salvation. Buddhism explained that our suffering was caused by desire, which could be extinguished, leading to nirvana. Religious faith gave meaning the suffering we endure, and gave us strength to endure it.
Then came the scientific revolution. We traded our religious faith for progress. Science promised that reason could replace revelation, and for and time, it seemed to deliver. We cured many diseases, industry expanded, and life expectancies rose. But the twentieth century shattered that illusion. Two world wars, the Holocaust, communist atrocities and the atom bomb showed us that reason could lead us to annihilation. Instead of saving us, science nearly led to our demise.
The New Faith: Equality
Out of the ruins of faith and progress, humanity faced a moral void. We needed something to believe in, something that would make the horrors of the past unthinkable. We chose equality.
If we believed that all humans are the same, we told ourselves, then the hatred that drove the last century could never return. If there are no meaningful differences between people, then every injustice can be blamed on prejudice, and every problem can be fixed by fairness.
Equality became the moral centerpiece of the modern world. It was a secular commandment, a collective therapy and a psychological shield. It offered moral certainty in a disenchanted universe, and for a while it worked. The postwar world grew freer, wealthier and more peaceful than any before it.
However, we paid for that comfort with self-deception. We began to treat equality not as a moral aspiration, but as a description of reality. We told ourselves that no important differences exist between races and cultures. It was a soothing fiction, a way to pretend that suffering could be engineered away. Equality became the new mind-killer, a word so sacred that to question it was to invite social death.
The Idol of Diversity
When the creed of equality began to crack, it mutated into a new moral language: diversity. Where equality promised sameness, diversity promised redemption through difference. If equality had failed to unite us, diversity would save us by making our differences sacred.
But the logic was the same. It was denial disguised as virtue. We declared that all cultures were compatible with each other, that mass migration could never destroy bonds of social trust, and that human differences were only skin-deep. We called it inclusion, but it was really avoidance: the refusal to confront complexity.
To question these beliefs became heresy. To point out trade-offs or limits was branded hate. Our institutions demanded public faith in an increasingly implausible creed. The more reality intruded through social friction, stubborn inequality, and cultural fragmentation, the more hysterical our affirmations became. We shouted our values louder precisely because we no longer believed them.
The Return of Reality
False beliefs eventually produce real consequences. Policies built on denial fail in predictable ways. When governments assume that all groups will behave identically under identical conditions, they misdiagnose the causes of poverty, crime and educational gaps. When they assume that every culture is equally compatible, they underestimate the social and psychological stresses of mass migration. When they censor dissent in the name of inclusion, they drive entire populations towards resentment and revolt.
When the official story no longer matches lived experiences, people stop trusting the storytellers. That is the soil from which populism grows. It is a rebellion not only against elites but against unreality itself.
The populist backlash of the past decade is not merely political. It is metaphysical - a revolt of reality against ideology. People are not rejecting compassion or fairness. They are rejecting the lies that have been sold in compassion’s name.
Truth, Limits and Renewal
The moral power of equality and diversity came from noble intentions: to reduce cruelty and affirm human worth. However, noble intentions cannot override reality. When ideals collide with facts, one of two things happen. Either the ideal matures into realism, os the society collapses into denial.
For too long, we chose denial. We built our institutions on comforting fictions and called it moral progress. But every illusion has an expiration date. When people can no longer say what they see, when data must be rewritten to fit ideology, when citizens feel gaslit by their own governments, the social contract dissolves. A civilization that forbids truth cannot endure.
Beyond the Idols
Rejecting equality or diversity altogether would be another mistake. They both arose from noble impulses and the attempt to restrain cruelty and honor human dignity. The problem was never the ideal itself but our insistence on mistaking the ideal for reality.
We can still cherish human dignity without denying human difference. We can value diversity without worshipping it. We must create a mature ethic that accepts inequality as a fact of life but injustice as a moral problem - an ethic that distinguishes between what is and what ought to be, between description and duty.