Introduction
Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs, like many of our greatest cultural heroes, is a man who achieved very little fame among the general public during his lifetime. Dr. Dreikurs died of cancer at the age of seventy-five less than a year ago. While he lived, he wrote many important books, which are likely to earn deserved recognition in the future.
Perhaps the most significant of these books, Social Equality: The Challenge of Today, was published after the Vienna-born doctor's death. In it, he argued the case that the idea of social equality, in spite of all the lip-service we give to the ideal of democracy, is actually almost foreign to the day-to-day thinking of the average American. Dr. Dreikurs arrived at this conclusion even though he was convinced that "we in the U.S. have gained more equality than any other people in the world.
"As an example, nowhere else have women gained rights approaching those of men to the same extent, nor elsewhere can children claim privileges that are granted them in America. Yet the possibility that every individual can have the same social status is abhorrent to many Americans."
On the surface, all Americans like to believe that they have been created equals, and they have the Declaration of Independence to back them up.
In many practical cases, however, that belief seems to rest on a rather flimsy foundation.
In reality, only those individuals who seize every opportunity open to them and develop their unique abilities and training can be sure of their value to society and their place within it. The concept of equality is thus watered down to a vague idea of "equal opportunity" - which equates with a guaranteed right to become unequal in the inevitable competition with one's fellows. In actuality, an "equal opportunity" doctrine does not bring people closer together; it sets them farther apart and in direct opposition to each other.
Nevertheless, Dreikurs' pragmatic approach led him to believe that the true direction of social evolution is toward a much more genuine equality. He argued that the existing inequality is against human nature, even though it has existed throughout the history of civilization as we know it.
Objective superiority, when you stop to think about it, is extremely difficult to define. As Dr.
Dreikurs said: "A person was born high or low, and this decided his status. If one was born high, as a member of the aristocracy, one had to be treated with reverence, irrespective of any personal qualities. If one was born low, one had to be humble. This was true until feudalism ended... Then came the superiority of money. Everybody was worth as much as his bank account. The Depression took care of that. High esteem for the rich is waning.
The same decline happened to masculine superiority. There are still some who believe in it, but their number is dwindling. We may well say that the traditionally inferior status of Negroes also is gone for good; they no longer accept white supremacy."
Summing up his arguments, Dreikurs said: "People are looking for a new yardstick to measure social status - and they have found one, at least for the moment: moral and intellectual superiority. Yet we may also assume that this form of newly won superiority will go the way of all the other transitory forms."