What Is the Importance of Social Inequality?

Michael Laitman
2 min read3 days ago

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Nature made everyone unequal. No one is equal to another, so at every moment, as external circumstances change, each person sees opportunities to rise or exploit the situation according to their egoistic desires, which prioritize self-benefit over everything else.

The reason for such inequality is to advance society’s evolution according to people’s individual desires. For a certain period of time, such evolution unfolds according to egoistic desires, but eventually, when humanity overcomes the egoistic desire during a process of correcting our desires from egoistic to altruistic, inequality actually helps people complement one another as society enters into balance with nature’s laws.

We can see an example of this complementarity in the human body. For instance, a person’s arm and leg are not equal. They serve different functions, and it is positive that they are not equal.

Inequality in human society, however, reveals itself in a negative light when there are diligent people who exploit stragglers for their individual benefit. The difference between the complementarity of parts in a human body and the negative inequality that appears in human society is that our egoistic programming makes us compete with each other, each trying to gain the upper hand over others.

The significance of inequality in human society is that it provides us with the ability to develop in relation to others, and each person’s status can change. Supposedly everyone is equal at the time of birth, and then more and more differences surface the more we grow up, including the social status of the parents, the social strata each one finds themselves in, and what each one respectively owns.

Analyses and examinations of our unequal social state will continue developing until our future and final stage of evolution. Essentially, we each host an egoistic nature that wishes to exploit everything and everyone possible for the sake of personal benefit. Such a nature in a social setting pits us up in competition with each other, and such competition will continue rolling out until the end of our evolutionary development. Ultimately, it lets each person expand their capacity to receive and enjoy from others. Accordingly, when we end up positively connecting to each other, we then each discover our egoistic desire as a negative force within a positively-connected social environment that promotes mutual consideration and complementarity. Then, our values will shift from wishing to exploit others for the sake of personal benefit to wishing to exploit our own nature for the benefit of others and human society as a whole.

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Michael Laitman

PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah. MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics. Founder and president of Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education & Research Institute.