Are we developing a caste system?

[charles brough]

Perhaps we are at least developing a more distinct class system. The middle class has been shrinking and the affluent class is becoming more affluent---and, I suggest, more class conscious.

 

Imagine you live in a house worth a million dollars pluss. Chances are, you do not drive your BMW or Mercedes anywhere but in upper class areas and avoid all poor areas. The only poor people you come in personal contact with are people trained to serve you. But you are still exposed to the trials and tribulations of the poor because you see them on your TV. You see their worst side on TV news clips---ones about gangs, child neglect, pedophiles, and drug-related crimes done by simple, non affluent people.

 

Perhaps you look at the TV and see an image of a long food line at some unemployment office or charity. In the line may be several obese minority women waddling along with their out-of-wedlock children. Instead of compassion, could it possibly be that you feel disdain? After all, why do these people overeat and have so many children? “Why should we support them: they are crowding us out of our own society!”

 

This is a sense of class superiority and it is growing among the affluent in our society---one that is not justified. This being our society, we are responsible for all its faults. We failed to educate these people properly, we created an age of “sexual freedom” so that their families came apart. We failed to deal effectively with birth control. We fight against aborting unwanted children. We dominate with an over tolerant, over-humanistic, or obsolete old moral system. We emphasized “freedom” and “tolerance” so much that immoral behavior became tolerated. We made “the pursuit of happiness” the common goal and set up a culture of materialism by making buying “stuff” the way to achieve it. The poor, however, are at a disadvantage. In their misery, many of them take to drugs and commit crimes. We stubbornly impose our religious and/or secular system on the way people believe and think even though, it is clearly not working. We shaped them this way and then use them as the scapegoat.

 

If you familiarize yourself with world history, and you find that the class system worsens when a society declines and it declines when what people's whole belief system grows old, and thus when it ceases to any longer work well.