There is something deeply wrong with a world that makes people feel they have to earn the right to be treated as human.
I have never understood monarchy. I respect history, and I understand how power structures evolve over centuries, but at its core, the idea that one human being is inherently worth more than another simply because of the family they were born into has never sat right with me. You can bow to a crown. I will not bow to a person. Wealth, hard work, talent, achievement, all of these can set people apart, and I have no problem with that. If someone worked hard and built something remarkable, good for them. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the idea that some people arrive in this world already superior, already deserving of deference, already above the rest of us by birthright of bloodline. That logic has never made sense to me.
The same goes for the caste system. I find it especially difficult to reconcile with the profound spiritual traditions that come from India, a culture that has given the world some of its most beautiful and universal teachings about the soul, about connection, about the divine in all living things. How do you hold both of those ideas at once? How do you teach that every being carries sacred light, and then tell certain people they were born beneath others? The contradiction is not just philosophical. It is cruel.
Religion is a similar story. I respect all faiths.
I believe in spirituality, in the search for meaning, in the impulse to connect with something larger than ourselves. But the moment a religion becomes a justification for ranking human beings, for deciding whose life matters more, it has lost the plot entirely. No spiritual tradition worth following teaches that. Religion, at its best, is a tool for becoming a better human being, not a ranking system for deciding who counts as one.
And that brings me to the heart of what I want to say.
We are not all born equal in the sense of identical. We arrive with different bodies, different abilities, different circumstances. Some of us are born into poverty, some into illness, some into countries where opportunity is genuinely scarce. That inequality is real, and pretending otherwise helps no one. But there is a difference between inequality of circumstance and the denial of basic humanity. Every person born into this world deserves, without condition, without performance, without having to prove anything, to be treated as fully human. That is not a privilege to be earned. It is a birthright.
What troubles me most is the world we are currently bringing children into. A child should not have to earn its place in the human family. A child should not have to perform, conform, or compete just to be respected. Before choosing to bring a life into this world, that feels like the most important commitment a parent can make: that this child will be welcomed, not evaluated. That their humanity will be assumed from the first breath, not granted later as a reward for fitting in.
Freedom, real freedom, is the freedom to be who you are. Not who your caste says you should be. Not who your bloodline permits you to be. Not who your religion grades you as worthy of being. Just who you are, fully and without apology.
That is not a radical idea. It is, or should be, the most basic one.
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