Social Stratification in CasteSocieties

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Social Stratification in Caste-Societies

• Peasant mass
• Soldiers
• Urban middle classes artisans merchants
• Ceremonial managers priests servants
• Secular managers administrators servants
• Monarch court

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Caste-Society

• Position in an occupational group is hereditary,
  determined by birth
• Marriage is within castes
• Social status based on ascription, not on merit
  (i.e., open-class society)
• Caste societies are exploitative

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The Troubling Questions

• How could the underprivileged be made to accept
  their exploitation?
• Is it in the nature of the human species to be
  guided like will-less social insects?
• Why have there been no revolutions in Ancient
  Empires?

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Some Answers

• Before such stratification emerged, its features
  were not known.
• Once such stratification existed, following
  generations were born into them without choice.
• Masses had no viable voice- or exit-options.
• Masses had no knowledge and idea of alternative
  social orders.
• The reproductive power of socialization
• A given order is established in peoples feelings
  of guilt and shame through religion.
• People learn to consider the order as the divine
  order.
• Violating it, causes feelings of guilt.
• People are more easily indoctrinated by the
  belief in the divinity of a given order, the more
  existential the constraints that fuel peoples
  threat perceptions.

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The Price of Exploitative Orders

• Incentives to invest energy into creative and
  productive ideas are close to zero.
• The human potential remains largely unused.
• No further development.

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Emancipative Revolutions?

• Emancipative revolutions have not been carried by
  the most repressed social groups.
• Emancipative revolutions have been carried by
  social groupings whose members had some rights or
  resources to defend.

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