I see your point and it's a line of reasoning I am familiar with, it is basically the underlying moral of the age of enlightenment.

However the problem with rationality is that it is entirely detached from its own subjects. It has no authoring force, it cannot influence anything beyond the singular motives of its agent.

The reason why we regard rationality to be such a convincing and universal thing is because it makes us into our own advocates, and no one can convince us better than ourselves.

It's like the Lacanian mistress; A man gets married, cheats on his wife with a mistress, falls in love, and leaves his wife for the new girl. Upon doing this, he realises that he is miserable, because he did not understand what he truly wanted. The mistress was never someone he desired intimately, but rather from afar. By removing this distance between them, he effectively ruined the relationship.

Rationality is that distance, the worst thing you can do to a person is to give them precisely what they want, because their wants are grounded in assumption.

And this is what colonialism and imperialism did to Europe, it gave every king, aristocrat and noble precisely what they wanted, and turns out that the dire consequences of this is a complete disillusionment with the world.

That's why the Boers could commit atrocities in South Africa, why Columbus could have his mercenaries burn and behead the children of Hispaniola, why the French settlers in Indochina could throw natives into furnaces for their own amusement.

Because the relationship between everything and nothing is a circular one. When you have everything then you may as well have nothing, because you are robbed of all purpose and motive.

You have psychologists and historians trying to point the finger at some cause or other, saying it's pathology or religion or ideology or power, but the answer is so much more simple and yet so much more difficult.

Which is that we are in fact defined by our material conditions, and when such conditions no longer condition us, when we break free of its challenge, boundary and intrigue, when we become demystified to ourselves, when we have no capacity for growth, little more than barbarity remains. As we conquer the world, the only struggle we may find is in destroying it.

Because without being able to strive, we lose our evolutionary imperative. This is the only source of reason to begin with. We were nurtured by cold weather, disease, hunger, blisters, wounds, droughts and floods.

When we are plucked out of this condition, and thrown into some postmodern vacuum of whim and impulse, then we are simply out of our depth. We have not any capacity to understand this.

And what the failings of the liberals was, and indeed the success of the Marxists, of the Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Angola, Mozambique and the many other worker's republics, was to impose limits upon themselves.

This is why philosophers exist, why they have an evolutionary purpose, because once upon a time nature imposed itself upon us in the most oppressive circumstance. It rewarded our inquiry, whim, impulse and lack of convention. It rewarded when we tested boundaries and sought invention.

But we are no longer inventing fires, or wheels, or tools, instead this inventiveness fell into a libertarian vacuum, and suddenly we had inquisitors inventing breast rippers, and physicists inventing atomic bombs.

The last thing we should do is to abandon coercion, we are a coerced species, we thrive under coercion and boundaries. In fact we cannot escape such a thing. Imagine a truly noncoercive environment, where we live by the mantra of "Your freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of my nose." then we'd live in an absolute dystopia.

Because where exactly does my nose begin? And where does your hand end? Without any codified authority, you are in fact always guilty and always innocent at the same time, depending on whether I can reason such a thing.

All it does is trade hard power for soft power, wherein the rumour, the lie, the gossip and the whisper become the weapons of tomorrow.

Where the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, and everyone is trapped in a miserable brokerage of prosecution and defense, as all things that daylight touches becomes the world's largest court room, where everyone plays the parts of judge, jury, executioner and accused.

The key to resolving this lies precisely in setting up strict and codified boundaries, and developing hardline principles that permit people to find a safe coexistence. Where people know precisely where their nose ends and where their hand begins. Where you can rest easily because authority and its imposition is perfectly corporeal.

You know how this animal behaves, what angers it, what pacifies it, what feeds it and what starves it. This is the only way in which to run a state, and it is not a matter of reason, but rather clarity.

You don't have to rationally accept how things work, you simply need to know that they work in a specific way, and then you can live your life within its allotted boundaries, and tend it like a garden.

And that's why egalitarianism and materialism are not wholly contradictory, because it recognises the principles of our universe. How it is codified, and absolute, how it is unyielding and imposing.

How whether you think it is just or not, the sun will burn you to a cinder if you fly too close. And that's fine, because you don't need to fly. You can manage well enough with your feet on the ground.

EDIT:

In fact, there is an old joke about how Stalin would not only send corrupt politicians to the firing squad, but then also shoot the firing squad too. And this is the closest we can come to any real comprehensive freedom. Authority exists for as long as we have the power to turn mountains into cities, but, by robbing it of individual agency, wherein no one is larger than the code they live by, we can find an emancipatory condition.

By making authority a burden to the individual, we also make it the virtue of the state. Our true purpose was never to free ourselves, but rather to find this virtue. We are not happy when we are free, but we are happy when we are fulfilled.