Twenty years ago, we published “The False Dilemma Between Freedom and Equality” (2007), and—like many others before and since—we have sought to analyze this apparent dichotomy from various perspectives. Far from fading away, the dogma of this pair of opposites has grown stronger among right-wing libertarians, who today revel in an orgy of oversimplifications and political power. In a few years, they will be on the retreat, and we must help them pack their bags. So I’m going to revisit this topic once more, from a different angle.
There is a spectrum of different forms of freedom ranging from freedom of conscience to social freedom. Although the individual does not exist without a society (he is defined by and for it), we can still consider the isolated individual, for example, on an island or in a prison. In that case, we could say, as communist existentialists like Sartre did, that humans are condemned to freedom. That individual may lack physical freedom, but their freedom of conscience, their intellectual freedom, does not depend so much on their physical condition. The guard or the man walking down a street outside the prison may lack this freedom to a greater degree than the prisoner.
Now, when we speak of the supposed dichotomy between freedom and equality, we cannot apply it to the individual, since equality or inequality is a social concept. In its most restricted sense, it is a group-based and comparative concept: I can say that I am no longer the same person I was twenty or forty years ago. I can compare myself to that idea of the individual self in its chronological evolution, but I cannot claim the social right of the teenager I once was to be equal to the adult I am now. Equality, equity, or their opposites only make sense in their social definition.
Talking about freedom of conscience is quite abstract, because, as we said before, there is no individual without a society. A man or a woman born in a desert without ever having seen another human being would be neither a man nor a woman but a humanoid. I believe that the concrete problem of freedom, like that of equality, occurs within society, and every society is a collective and historical phenomenon: as we noted in “The FaceNoBook Generation” (2012): “We inhabit the cities of the dead, and their ideas inhabit us every day.”
The idea that freedom is opposed to equality is the idea of the slaveholder, of the ruling class. That is to say, my freedom to accumulate power in a society must be unrestricted. My freedom to enslave others must be protected by the laws, by the constitution (Republic of Texas, 1836), and by the ideological dogmas of a civilization, such as the right to unlimited private property, even though my freedom to accumulate money, private property, and social power destroys the freedom of others (the majority) to exercise the same freedom and claim their right to private property and accumulation.
This paradox is justified by two fundamental dogmas. The first emerged in the 17th century with John Locke and was confirmed a century later by Adam Smith and, above all, by his fanatical followers: (1) “my greed, my selfishness is good for others.” A modern dogma that, at any point in human history, would have been considered a true sorite (σωρός).
The second dogma is Darwinian: (2) the freedom of the rich, the powerful, the slave-owning master is the product of natural selection: the most intelligent, the hardest workers have an unlimited right to privatize everything (that is, to accumulate available or created private property). The winner takes it all.
History proves that this is not what happens in reality. Geniuses are usually poor. Psychopaths are usually rich. No matter how hard someone outside the financial sector works, they will never be rich, much less able to “compete freely” with those who invest their entire lives in the stock markets or big business, always protected by (their) governments, whether dictatorships or liberal democracies.
Here is another fundamental paradox: economic freedom carries, within itself, the seeds of its own destruction: the greater the unrestricted freedom of those who, through inheritance, their own merits, corruption, or simply because they love money, are able to accumulate even a fraction more than the rest, the less freedom there is for the rest. This difference, however small, will trigger an unstoppable spiral of disparity in social power. For the simple reason that whoever holds some economic and financial power can buy other forms of power, such as the media and political systems, which will facilitate even greater accumulation in their businesses.
In other words, little by little they will begin to privatize a power that will yield them even more power, all to the detriment of others like them who arrived thirty minutes late, or of others who do not even seek to burn their lives trying to become millionaires, but who exist in one of the other human dimensions with their own skills—such as mechanics, scientists, artists, teachers, priests, athletes, union leaders… The list of human wealth in professions and skills is long, but only those whose vocation and passion is money are the ones who will buy (privatize) the power of contemporary societies.
The so-called Darwinian freedom of “free competition” does not aim to preserve freedom of competition, but rather to eliminate it. This is proven not only by the reality of monopolistic processes and the myth of the “success story of the corporation that started in a garage,” but by an even clearer example. We see that example every day in real competitions—from soccer, tennis, and chess to any athletic discipline. Fairness in competition is based on ensuring equality through strict rules. That is, the goal is to measure the skill of a team or an individual by eliminating any environmental advantage.
In the capitalist business world, accumulation does not follow a quadratic equation (y=ax2+ax+c, where c would be inherited wealth) but an exponential equation y=ex. This is the case, for example, with Elon Musk. A hardworking construction worker would need 40 million years to achieve what the heir to apartheid and CIA operative has achieved in just a few years—all based on his effort and intelligence, like Donald Trump and his family.
It is impossible to separate freedom from equality, because without social freedom there is no equality, and without equality there is no social freedom. Those who claim that imposing limits on economic freedom (on the freedom of accumulation) to restore equality or equity is characteristic of dictatorships are the same people who practice or defend a contemporary version of the slave-owning dogma
(who also considered themselves the protectors of freedom, democracy, and civilization) through the dictatorship of capital, the monopoly of social power, unrestricted privatization, and the elimination of true free economic competition.
Jorge Majfud, March 2026
