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South Park fans may remember the episode where Cartman and friends go for a sleepover with Kenny. Cartman is horrified that Kenny's family have no Nintendo and have nothing to eat but frozen waffles, and puzzled how Kenny's dad and his own grew up as best friends but then moved down and up the social scale respectively. Dad explains it by saying that people can be divided into ``gods'', who are bright, hard-working and deservedly successful, and ``clods'', who are stupid, lazy and deservedly poor. Clods don't just deserve to be poor, they are actually happier that way, since they could not cope with the responsibilities that prosperity brings. Cartman is satisfied with this explanation, and summarises it in his school homework, adding that the best soution would be to kill all the clods, then there would be no more poor people, and the world would be a better place.
Of course, Cartman's dad isn't trying to say this at all. In his rather Platonic philosophy, clods are still necessary to do the work that is unsuitable for gods - garbage collection, assembly-line work, shoe-shining and so forth. America's so-called meritocracy is built on this principle, not so different from the older English idea of ``a place for everyone, and everyone in his place.'' The big difference is that in America, ``anybody can be a millionaire, so everybody's got to try'' (The The). Those who don't try deserve what they get.
There is an interesting tension here between equality and inequality. The normal way to explain the phenomenon of an egalitarian society that has extremes of wealth and poverty normally found only in the Third World is to point out that equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome. All men are created equal, but do not apply their god-given talents equally. Gods and clods, in other words.
Of course being created equal does not mean an equality of talents, since some people are born more intelligent, healthy, good-looking and so on. They are also not, as we have seen, equally hard-working, and even when they are, do not possess equal business acumen (contrary to popular opinion, rewards in capitalist society are not in direct proportion to hard work; the principle of ``from each according to his ability, to each according to his work'' is called socialism). So what is this equality? It seems merely to amount to equality before the law, a principle which had been established in Britain long before the American colonies broke away. Equality of opportunity is a nice idea, but means little. A cripple has an equal opportunity to run a mile as a trained athlete, but that's no great compensation.