day no. 16,542: men are not metric

"Of all the homestead laws, Almanzo thought that the most foolish was the law about a settler's age. Anybody knew that no two men were alike. You could measure clothe with a yardstick, or distance by miles, but you could not lump men together and measure them by any rule. Brains and character did not depend on anything but the man himself. Some men did not have the sense at sixty that some had at sixteen." — Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

Egalitarianism expects men to measure out the same. According to it, an ounce of one should equal on ounce of another. But we all know men whose hour of help on a Saturday would prove more helpful than others. Yet, egalitarianism labors to limit the exceptionally advanced and to promote the exceptionally incapable for the sake of making men like meters. But men are not metric. That said, they are also not like miles in that a mile must always be a certain, predictable, regulated distance in order to be a mile. Men can be measured that way with respect to Y chromosomes, but cannot be measured that way with respect to masculinity.

Judges 8:21

As the man is, so is his strength.

All men are male, but not all males are manly. All men are strong, but some are stronger than others. Some are smarter than others, taller than others, more assertive than others, more timid than others, etc... The measure of a man is like a lump of gold. Some have more dross to burn off than others and the refined amount weighs less than the one mined out. The fire tells you more about the man than the pick axe, but both tell you something about him.

All men share something or else we could not refer to them as "all men." All men must be similar in some respects just as much as they must be different in others. They are all men at the same time in the same way in ways that they are not all masculine at the same time in the same ways.