Brutalities are there all over the place. There are specific kinds of Brutalities emerging from the imbalance of power–––between men and women, between the white race and the black race, between the dominant stories of whiteness and people of color, between the human and the different than human species of otter, of whale, of the Monarch Butterfly, between the private commodification of stuff to the shared commons of air and light, between the increasing wealth inequality of the 1% and the rest of us.

Inequality—-How do we understand inequality? Sometimes I think that the world is going more and more towards a two caste society, the very rich and the very poor, that the very rich are no longer connected by any thread at all to the very poor; they have erected enough walls and fences and invisible barriers to be able to stay in their places without ever seeing the rest of us. We are moving towards a deeper caste system than we already are in: noblemen and noblewomen, the small kings and queens of the different regions of the medieval times in Europe, and the large, immense, poor peasant class. Is this the future we are hurtling towards? What does it mean, this rising inequality, especially in relation to climate chaos?

According to the brilliant economic historian, Walter Scheidel, in his well-researched book, The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017), inequality has been around for a long time, ever since humans have first organized themselves.

In terms of the present moment, if we ask ourselves the question, “How many billionaires does it take to match the net worth of half of the world’s population?”, the answers are varied, according to time and place.

In 2015, the richest sixty-two persons on the planet owned as much private net wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion people. If they decided to go on a field trip together, they would comfortably fit into a large coach. The previous year, eighty-five billionaires were needed to clear that threshold, calling perhaps for a more commodious double-decker bus. And not so long ago, in 2010, no fewer than 388 of them had to pool their resources to offset the assets of the global other half, a turnout that would have required a small convoy of vehicles or filled up a typical Boeing 777 or Airbus 340. (1)

Furthermore, “the richest 1 percent of the world’s households now hold a little more than half of global private net wealth. Inclusion of the assets that some of them conceal in offshore accounts would skew the distribution even further….The wealthiest twenty Americans currently own as much as the bottom half of their country’s households taken together, and the top 1 percent of incomes account for about a fifth of the national total.” (1). What is striking is that “The largest American fortune currently equals about 1 million times the average annual household income, a multiple twenty times larger than it was in 1982.” (2) These figures were back in 2015. How do we even absorb this knowledge? Not surprisingly, inequality has arisen dramatically in the rest of the world as well, in Europe, in China, in India.

In terms of the top 1%, we are now matching 1929 inequalities. We have caught up with, or more accurately, gone down to some of the wealth inequality in 1929 in terms of the top 1% in terms of income inequality. In other ways, such as asset ownership, we are even worse off in terms of inequality than in 1929. There is even more concentration of inequality in the ownership of assets. Scheidel says: “Two thousand years ago, the largest Roman private fortunes equaled about 1.5 million times the average annual per capita income in the empire, roughly the same ratio as for Bill Gates and the average American today.” (4) It is the deepening of this kind of raw inequality, which leads to inability to deal with climate chaos in a clear, lucid-eyed manner.

What kind of society do we want to live in? How do we want to live in it? We need to have an idea of a “great” society that has lessening inequality as one of its embedded goals in everything we do, whether it is more access to quality education, from the pre-K to post-graduate levels, whether it is increasing access to green power for all, for inexpensive electricity for the one billion people on the earth who do not have access to it. It is, indeed, a kind of tremendous violence to have such an unequal society.

Scheidel’s deep, historical research is not for the faint-hearted. It reveals the complex, layered grids of inequality from early pre-hominid mammals to our current state. He argues, pretty convincingly, that violence is what flattens inequality. Scheidel’s analysis centers around what he calls “The four Horsemen of Leveling“. He explains that “Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics.” (6-9) These include World War I, World War II, and the brief post-WWII hiatus in increasing inequality; in fact, this period of time was a kind of unique time of flattening inequality. The drastic shift towards our more recent increasing inequality began in nascent form in 1973 or 1976 in the United States (405)

Here we are in the middle of a world-wide pandemic, a near depression, with the richest president we have probably ever had, who acts like a despotic, ill-bred, mean-tempered emperor, who has little awareness of the world beyond himself and his own psychological, political, and economic needs. It is no wonder that the pandemic does not fit into the political landscape as we know it.

The key question is: Are there ways that the pandemic and the solutions to the pandemic can be imagined to be a scaffold of equity? Equity in terms of all-around access to what we all need to survive, whether it is health care, education, food, energy, climate.