This is an excerpt from the transcript of a class I gave in narrative psychology.

If there was only one thing in the entire universe, and we saw no difference; it was homogeneous — well, there would be no inequity.  But, it wouldn’t necessarily be positive then, because there would nothing really.  It would just be one thing, and since there’s one thing, you couldn’t compare it to anything.  And since you can’t compare it, you can’t measure it — and since you can’t measure it, you can’t evaluate it.  You don’t know whether it’s good or bad, it has no meaning.  It’s only when we sub-divide and have at least two things to measure between, that we can say, O.K. in measuring these two things, the fact that they are different is a good thing, or the fact that they are different is a bad thing.

Read the entire transcript here.