It helps to understand the evils of leveling if you look at it in the context of the categorical imperative. Is leveling good in all times and all places? Would you will leveling for eternity? In other words, is the good of leveling a transcendent law?
Take yourself out of present-day America. Pretend you’re the presidente of Cuba, and say that North Korea has started making hostile threats to you over some disagreement about the basis of Marxism. You continue to insist that you have the correct interpretation until eventually Kim threatens to nuke you. Now, apply this idea of the good of leveling to this scenario. Leveling is essentially the elimination of the best to make it fair for the rest. You need to build a nuke otherwise Kim won’t take you or your interpretation of Marxism seriously. Is now a good time to give full reign to the policy that the best should be eliminated? Or would you instead conclude that the best should be facilitated (especially in the realm of nuclear science)?
If we in America reach a post-leveled, Brazilified condition we will have a new standard for what counts as “the best”, to be sure, yet what will it mean to be the best at that point? Best compared to previous generations? Certainly not. So if Kim’s son in the next generation starts waxing bellicose toward us, what will be the quality of our best scientists in the now Neo-Brazil? And if Kim Jr., with his policy of anti-leveling for decades, has now created a superweapon and threatens us with it, will our scientists be competent to create a matching if not better one? It’s brutal for some to hear, I know- South Americans, Africans, and Arabs aren’t exactly known for science (or anything else requiring brains for that matter) so I would have to determine that in this hypothetical future arms race, the country without the policy that leveling is good, would win.
You could also use a tamer symbol than nukes and imagine if 2100 America were to offer its best chess-player to play against 2100 Russia’s best chess-player. And after 80 years of us genetically synthesizing with third-world peoples, while they avoided them altogether, who do you think will have the neocortex to win that match?
So from this thought-experiment it’s obvious that the good of leveling is not a transcendent law, something that should be implemented in all times and places. The next question is Should it be implemented in any time or in any place? The elimination of the best, the elimination precisely of the most civilized, most rational spirits, seems like the negation of a transcendent law if anything. Indeed, wouldn’t it be saner to postulate that the policy of anti-leveling, more precisely, the facilitation of higher civilization, higher rationality, is a transcendent law for all times and all places?
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