Well, in my above illustration, I wanted to exaggerate the effect of everyone in the world suddenly placing everyone else above themselves. So, the "equal" I was referring to in my example would be a result of everyone sacrificing their own needs for someone else. In effect, this would pretty much lead to everyone becoming equal to the people MOST in need, as opposed to the people most in need bringing themselves UP and becoming equal with the most powerful.

The key point I was trying to make is if that's ALL people did, and never attended to themselves.

Imagine you are a manager within a company. You are in charge and have power over other employees beneath you. However, you and all the other managers suddenly drop your leadership roles and start focussing on helping your employees. Instead of doing important strategic planning and business analysis to keep the business turning, the "managers" focus on only helping the employees with their daily admin work - they even agree to distribute their salary with their employees. To make things even worse, they share their company secrets with their competitors, and always over-provide to their customers. Whenever there is a customer complaint, they would drop everything and make sure the customer is completely satisfied.

How long would this company survive? Probably not very long...

So, a slightly long analogy xD, but if everyone did this, it would put a massive strain on the human race. There would be some pretty awesome displays of self-sacrifice and martyrdom towards the people in need, but pretty soon people would start dying off in huge numbers XD

Again sorry for the long-*** explanation! xD But you are right, we need to think about what we mean by "equal".

I think equal in terms of "selfish and selfless" as opposed to equal status is more beneficial to people at large. You have to equally help people as well as help yourself if you want to make a lasting contribution to society, right?