On Monday, a video from the Joe Rogan podcast was uploaded to YouTube featuring actor and comedian Bryan Callen. Although Rogan and Callen’s conversation was lengthy, one moment in particular stood out:
ROGAN: Free will, or the ability to do whatever you want, the, like — a freedom of expression, a freedom of pursuits breeds inequality. Because if you give people true total freedom, some people are gonna try harder than others …
CALLEN: Yeah, inequality’s not a bad thing … but remember, there’s a fundamental difference. What’s the difference between being an American and a Communist? An American believes in equality of opportunity. I’m not saying we have that, but that would be the goal. Then there is equality of outcome. The only way to have equality of outcome is to keep down the people that work harder, that are smarter, [that are] more talented. You’ve gotta make everybody equal. That’s, to me, a fundamental evil. That’s my problem with Marxism. What the f***, the only way to do that is with force. [There’s] no other way.
ROGAN: The problem is, it’s never worked.
CALLEN: No.
ROGAN: It’s never worked, and it almost always leads to, like, mass murder.
CALLEN: Right.
Here’s the full video (pertinent portion begins at the 3:23 mark) [LANGUAGE WARNING]:
The Daily Wire spoke with Callen to understand his perspective further. During our conversation, he elaborated on his statements regarding Marxism, as well as the social engineering of equality:
We need to be very conscious of the difference between equality of opportunity — which I support and we should all have — and equality of outcome because to ensure that all of us are equal at the end of the day, or that there is some kind of a ratio that has to be satisfied, the only way to do that is to somehow have a central governing authority, and a coercive authority. If you really want to extrapolate, there would need to be an authority that has the power to penalize anyone who disagrees with their ideology, and the only way I can see that happening is if that governing body either takes from those who produce more or keeps them from excelling above a sort of golden mean.
This seems to be what happened in China’s Cultural Revolution, and the Russian Communist Revolution. Certainly, extreme examples in North Korea, and in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, but as we all know also, that [equality] doesn’t happen. The people closest to the Party and the military are the ones who ultimately become the elite, and so it becomes an economy of influence, not of merit.
Callen concluded by noting his belief that “anybody who tries to socially engineer equality, which is the direction we seem to be moving in, is forcing an issue, and I don’t think it’s the way to go.”