Pardon me for radically oversimplifying matters, but I believe the current debate on rationality vs. irrationality has its roots in the fundamentally contradictory nature of the human being...
Think of it this way; inequality exists in the world as we experience it daily, and one is either on the winning or losing end of the said inequality. It seems to be the case that when human beings are on the losing end, they clamour for equality, making all sorts of outrageous claims to universal truths exhorting the freedom and equality of all human beings as by nature or too self-evident to allow any further explanation.
Conversely, put a human being on the winning end of that inequality and see if he or she will willingly relinquish this priviledged position. There is no exhaustive answer, I admit, but there can be no denial of the fact that there will be human beings who will not stick to their formerly held convictions and cling to their new found benefit (and we're not talking about a mere recalcitrant few).
It may not be too unreasonable then to call our present-day situation the so-called marvel of the enlightenment project: it deals with human hypocrisy by providing
equality of opportunity to attain theoretically unlimited
inequality in terms of individual gain, thus putting our fucked-up psyches into what can only be described as a perpetual spin...
But we know that this is partially a hoax: prevailing conditions at the time of a person's birth ultimately have a grave impact on this equality of opportunity... but the theoretical counterargument remains the same: there are avenues to climb to the top, but it requires an extraordinary force, as someone once said.
So if you can't make it, I'm afraid you will have to just suck it.