We like to think of ourselves as unique individuals, yet we are part of a collective. We acknowledge laws regulating the world, but we also like to think of ourselves inherently free. Man-made laws are collective agreements, while natural laws are fundamentally statistical patterns. We may personally agree with man-made laws, but we consider that our obedience is voluntary. In contrast, it is irrelevant whether we agree with the law of gravitation. Yet even that law is a statistical pattern, to which there could be exceptions in exotic situations.

While a human body might not be exempt from gravitation, it could well be an “outlier” in other patterns, such as disease and mortality rates. If actuarial statistics predict that you will live to a certain age, that is merely an average within a large sample. Even medical prognoses are statistical: any outcome predicted is a probability that draws on data from a crowd of others in similar circumstances. The individuals in that crowd may have varying actual fates, within natural limits, with the majority concentrated in a narrow band. It is merely probable that you will end up as typical. You will die of something, sometime. But it is far more feasible to predict the future of an average than of an individual.

Freedom and individuality are politically charged bywords. The “free” society is one in which government does not unduly interfere in the lives of citizens. Yet individuals in any collective are constrained by its ground rules, spoken or unspoken. In the modern globalist world, one of the constraints for the entire human community is that more than half of the world’s resources belong to a few dozen individuals. Born into this world, statistically speaking your prospects are already pretty limited. You may rise above some of your fellows, but the chance of rising to the ranks of the ultra-rich are about as great as your chance of breaking the law of gravitation.

Equality is another contemporary catchword, by which is meant equality of rights before the law. People are very sensitive these days to unequal treatment because of race, ethnicity, or gender. That’s a legitimate concern, of course, but to what extent does it distract us from the hyper inequality of wealth? It seems we are confused by numbers. We correctly want to protect the rights of minorities. What gets left out of the picture is the abuse of rights by the small minority who hoard the chips. Imagine you ante into a poker game with seven billion other players. In the name of fairness, you want the cards dealt fairly. But a few dozen players seated at this world table each have several million times more chips than the rest. You realize that these are the previous winnings of very experienced players, against whom you hardly stand a chance. How did this come about as the entry point to the game? What does fair play even mean in such a situation and why would you care to play?

Unlike the statistics for mortality, extreme outliers in the world economy lie vastly off the median. They have the means to control the game, which makes a mockery of another popular byword: democracy. It may be highly gratifying to have merely average wealth, but the extremely unequal distribution means that most people in the world are doomed to poverty. With little choice in the matter, they are as bound by statistics as by gravity.