The Beautiful Lie of Equality: Why Some Lives Are Always Worth More Than Others

The phrase “all lives are created equal” is perhaps one of the most beautiful lies ever told. It adorns constitutions, is uttered in speeches, and acts as the moral backbone of modern liberal democracies. But history – brutal, honest, and unforgiving – says otherwise. It tells us through every scar left by colonialism, every bloodstained field of slavery, every cruel regime of apartheid, and every courtroom where injustice was handed down like policy, that lives are not and have never been equal. And the present offers little to disprove this. If anything, it reaffirms the painful truth: equality is an aspiration, not a reality.

We live in a world of hierarchies. Some are constructed through race, others through class, religion, nationality, gender, or belief systems. Sometimes it’s invisible, woven so deeply into the social fabric that it goes unnoticed—until someone dares to challenge it. Whether in ancient civilizations where emperors reigned by divine right, or modern empires disguised as democracies propped up by capital and corporate greed, there is always a group who is told they matter more. And a group who is told—explicitly or not—that they don’t.

Look around. Watch the way governments are structured, how cabinets are appointed, and how power is distributed. Ask who benefits from war, who profits from peace, and who disappears without explanation. Look at the genocides carried out with impunity, at ethnic cleansing disguised as counterterrorism, at entire nations turned into extraction sites for rare minerals and oil. Listen closely to the names of assassinated leaders who once dared to fight for their people—Lumumba, Sankara, Gaddafi. They weren’t perfect. But perfection was never the requirement. Obedience was.

Equality crumbles when lives are auctioned to the highest bidder. It dies when identities are erased, languages banned, traditions mocked, and futures stolen in the name of progress. It falters every time a child is born into a system that has already decided their worth—or lack thereof. And yet we insist on lying to ourselves. We keep repeating that all lives matter, even as the most vulnerable are reduced to statistics, to headlines, to footnotes in a report nobody reads.

And there are always those who claim to fight for the voiceless. Non-profits, politicians, consultants, and celebrities who parade their virtue with hashtags and photo ops. They speak loudly and do little. Their performance of care does not extend to material change. They fundraise, they publish op-eds, they posture—and nothing moves. Because for many, the appearance of activism is more profitable than its reality. They become heroes in rooms filled with applause, not in the streets filled with suffering.

So where does that leave us?

We were once told that change was slow, that progress comes in steps. But the truth is, for every inch we gain, power pushes us back a mile. The optimism in us wants to believe that today is better than yesterday. And in some ways—technologically, medically, maybe even socially—it is. But on the fundamental question of human worth, we cannot ignore that a disturbing regression is underway. Surveillance states rise under the guise of security. Refugees drown while borders harden. Elections are stolen not just with fraud, but with silence and suppression. And truth is distorted beyond recognition.

Still, there are glimmers of hope. There are countries and communities—though rare—that prioritize health care, education, dignity. Nations we’re often told to fear or mock, because they threaten a narrative that democracy as defined by the West is the only path. But democracy has become a marketing term, not a guarantee of justice. It destabilizes as much as it liberates. It imposes elections without ensuring equity, capitalism without conscience, and freedom without safety. And when that brand of democracy fails, we’re told it’s the fault of the people, not the system that failed them.

We must wrestle with this contradiction: that maybe all lives do matter, just not to the ones in charge. Maybe there is equality, just not in the systems designed to uphold it. Maybe humanity is capable of universal love and dignity—but not under the current structures that reward dominance, obedience, and illusion.

What then is our role?

We must understand that by the time a person reaches adulthood, their worldview may be so tightly bound by their environment that transformation is nearly impossible. Their beliefs, their biases, their acceptance of the hierarchy may be coded so deeply into them that they cannot see beyond their own entitlement. And so, real change does not begin with convincing the powerful to be kind. It begins with building power outside their reach. It begins with those who have been marginalized reclaiming their identity, their agency, their voice.

We do not change the world by waiting for the privileged to grow a conscience. We change it by refusing to accept their story as the only one. We write our own. We tell our truths, over and over, until the volume of our reality shatters the echo chamber of their lies.

And no, the road ahead will not be equal, either. There will still be voices too loud with too little to say. There will still be co-opters of causes, opportunists in revolution, and traitors in our midst. But we move forward anyway—not because we believe in a utopia, but because we refuse to settle for this dystopia.

The fight for equality is not a naïve one. It is a war waged with full knowledge that the odds are against us. That even if we win, the victory will be incomplete. But to fight anyway—that is the essence of what it means to be human.

Because in the end, equality may not be real—but our defiance of inequality is. And it is in that defiance that we reclaim our dignity.

Not because they gave it to us, but because we always had it.