The Impact of Social Stratification

We’re all human. None of us have a say in what circumstances we are born. Pretty much any other characteristic by which people can be defined produces some form of social stratification. Thinking about it boggles the mind. I’ve grown up with the ideas of caste and class, and tried to understand how anyone can willingly accept being “put in their place” by the people around them. In the end, I think it all comes down to the perception of power, the ways in which circumstances can be used to dominate society.

It is fair to say that society, like reality itself, is created and sustained by our participation. Society is an unspoken contract, and one that is sort of worked out on the fly and passed down in its present, imperfect form through each generation. We pride ourselves on the progress we have made, but honestly it seems that whatever progress we have made has been in spite of ourselves. But, how can we address it critically and sensibly?

It is so easy to point the finger of blame, or to rationalize human behavior, but I’m still asking myself, “Why does anyone put up with this?” There are certain things, things we have created, that make us desperately unequal. Consider the tendency of formal organizations to create authority, or formal systems to create wealth, or formal status or merit to create prestige.

These are useful things, but they need to be paired with responsibility, integrity, and humility. Look at the way that groups are formed on the basis of common identity or purpose, but create trends of positive and negative discrimination, and the guidelines for institutionalizing them as caste or class. Think of the many ways that individuals who have gained a privileged place in society have acted to protect their privilege by limiting opportunities, controlling resources, creating surplus labor forced to compete for reduced wages.

The fact is that any system or organization can be leveraged to create power, in one of many forms. Money is economic power. Prestige is social power. Authority is political power. This is power we all have, but depending on where we are in the system, that power is either channeled away from us, or right into our hands, and it happens because we allow it to happen. The problem is that social stratification dramatically shifts the balance and flow of power. The more concentrated the power structure becomes, the more severe the inequalities of society.

The ultimate danger is not revolution, however. The more extreme the imbalance is, the more coercive the power structure becomes, the more controlling it becomes. The real danger is not that people will fight the system. The real danger is that they will simply abandon it. They will try to escape their miserable lives through drugs and debauchery, they will turn to crime and simply take what they require, or they will quietly, desperately, take their own lives.

Paying the Price

As true as it is that some people are incapable of valuing things they have not paid the price for, the fact is that free money is never free. There is terrible cost for being on the public dole, that is immediately evident when you walk into a welfare community. Being on public assistance or living on a reservation, the cost of that free income or housing is having to live in poverty. It provides just enough to survive but not enough to advance. While many assistance programs include job training and placement programs, the jobs one can qualify for rarely provide better incomes.

Taken in the context of the way people on state or federal assistance are forced to jump through hoops just to get food, clothing, housing or basic medical services, it is hard to imagine a more discouraging or disheartening life style. People who are subjected to this tend to have little appreciation for the system that provides for them (the rest of society for the most part) because the system has no appreciation for them. Part of this comes from having someone else decide which of their needs deserve to be met, or what sort of help they deserve to get.

To simply exist in the world requires more time and resources than an individual can provide for themselves. It simply is not possible to advance if you can not start out on an even footing with the rest of the world, and people in poverty rarely do. The best most impoverished families can do is to work twice as hard as everyone else for half as much in the hope of giving their children the opportunities they never had. No one can choose what family, race, community, culture or nation to be born into, or the advantages and disadvantages that they have as an accident of birth.

It’s human nature to say that “no child shall be left behind” but in reality some children get born with one hell of a head start. Just knowing you got dealt a bad hand in life is enough to make you pretty unhappy, but when you also realize that the deck was stacked against you that unhappiness can become something much uglier. Poverty is the direct consequence of the creation and accumulation of wealth. Poverty is symptom of a disease that infects civilization, and until civilization can overcome this disease it will continue to be sick and just a bit deranged.

It is natural to assume that the disease is greed, but let’s be honest, its only human to want more than we need. The problem is that some people are ruthless enough to simply take whatever they want; a certain pair of continents come to mind as examples. I would also like to point out that, while there are semantic differences between “criminals” and “rebels” the defining characteristic of any society’s ne’er-do-wells is that they are usually people who, feeling that they are not properly represented or established in society, do not respect the establishments of society.

It is not necessary to be in poverty to be a criminal, or a terrorist, or what have you, but being in poverty puts you a lot closer to the fringe of society where you have more to gain by bucking the system than you do by participating in it. As long as there are people out there who have better prospects working against society, there will be people content to exploit or disrupt it. The parasitic element of our society is created by our own institutions, in the way they are organized, the way the operate, and the way they perpetuate imbalances in the status quo.

To see who is at fault, you simply look at who benefits from the status quo the most consistently. Crime and welfare have been accepted by those people as an acceptable operational reality of industry, economics and politics. The first question everyone needs to ask is, “who has the right to determine privilege?” Privilege is certainly not distributed based on who does the most work, or even who does the most important work. In both cases, the poor do. To understand how important the working poor are, try to imagine what would happen to civilization if they all stopped doing their jobs!

Granted, there are some very specialized fields that have great value, and the individuals who perform those functions are handsomely rewarded, but it does not always follow that a highly valued worker does the most important work. Any job can become “worthless” if enough people are skilled at doing it — that’s simple “supply and demand” and it applies to general labor or brain surgery. Teachers, who perform an essential social function, are valued proportionately to the perceived value or significance of the students they instruct.

Yes, other factors like tenure and experience apply, but a gifted grade-school teacher is easily overlooked in favor of a competent tenured professor at an elite university. Which brings up the second question everyone needs to ask, “who has the right to determine the value of my contribution to society?” The answer to both of the questions raised should be “Me.” Any other answer ought to show you what’s wrong with the system. Beyond the most basic necessities, “chasing the dollar” is a very unfulfilling way to spend life.

With so much emphasis on making money, particularly in business, it becomes too easy to lose sight of why we are working in the first place. Most people accept the argument that money is superior to barter, but both systems of exchange are dependent upon assigning a fair value to the production of goods and services. The value of the dollar fluctuates, and over the past hundred years has plummeted through inflation, but the cost of an hour’s work is still an hour spent working. The true value is in what is accomplished, and how hard it is to accomplish — and only the person doing the work knows that!

The day people stopped setting the value of their own work was the day that people lost their independence and freedom. When there is always someone else deciding the value of your work and your worth in the community, what assurance is there that the decision will be fair? Living is the only privilege we truly have, and we have the responsibility of making our own contribution to the world valuable. Anything that distorts or denies that is part of the problem. If you want more in life, you have to be more, you have to do more; you can’t just keep doing the same thing you have been doing all along.

You are going to have to do something you don’t want to do — because if you wanted to do it, you would have already tried. But, you can never know if you’ll like doing something until you try, and in some cases until you succeed. This is all common sense stuff, but it’s amazing how easy it is for people to avoid even thinking these simple thoughts when they need to, or taking it to heart. And really, all the good advice in the world is worthless if a person is not listening, and it can’t be used unless a person can take it upon themselves to use it.

Life really does not have a purpose if you don’t live your life on purpose. People really do a lot better in the world when they act like they have a good reason for being here. Blissful ignorance of the world is a handicap, however pleasant it might seem. An open mind should always be guarded by open eyes.

The Price of Admission

What is a society, what is it made up of and how does it work? The simple answer is, jobs. Society is all about jobs. Living in the wild, surviving on their own, human beings had no jobs. Their lives were defined by the tasks that needed to be done in order to be able to survive. A bunch of people living together and sharing their resources does a better job of surviving, and each person becomes primarily responsible for the task he or she is best suited to do.

A job is taking responsibility for a certain task, fulfilling a need of the group. I could keep breaking this down to simple ideas, but the point is, every job has specific requirements, certain things a person needs to be, have or do. For every job, there is a job candidate. Finding job candidates is a job in itself. Participation in society is not elective. The resources a human needs to survive are no longer freely available.

So, we seek out jobs in order to participate in the system, because we are forced to be dependent on the system. Strangely, we are not entitled to have a job. We can not just go out and do a job, even if it benefits society; to earn money, which is what entitles us to the benefits of society, we need to find someone who will give us a job. The amount of gate-keeping that exists in our society is almost mind boggling.

Our job often defines our position in society, and our position in society determines the value of our participation and the opportunities available to us and our dependents. A person can bring something of unique value to a job, the characteristics of his or her job performance, but to the system it only matters that the job is adequately filled. To be specific, an individual can have a unique value to the people he or she works with or for, but as far as the system is concerned all of us are replaceable. That fact, when it is completely thought out, is unsettling.

The operative reality of society is that it is an ad hoc system. It is easiest to understand if perceived as a macro-organism, composed of individual parts that cohere into a pattern of activity that sustains itself. That pattern will change and grow, evolving or warping, according to that activity of its components, but the individual components are expendable, because the purpose of the organism is to ensure its own survival, not that of its constituents. To sustain itself, the system becomes geared toward the creation of components to replace those that are lost.

To sustain itself, it will even expend components in order to secure resources. It is a soldier’s job to die for his country if necessary to ensure the survival of his society. It is a soldier’s job to kill for his country, for the same reasons. Who gives someone this job? Who asks someone to do this job?

The jobs in a society are created by the needs and expectations of it’s members, so the answer to both questions is, we do. What we do in society tells it what we want it to do for us. What does society have to give in exchange for our willingness to kill or die? What can anyone gain that is worth that? A better place in society?

If society formed to make it easier for us to survive, why do we have to work so hard and sacrifice so much in order to survive in society? What have any of us gained? If society succeeded in fulfilling its purpose, those are questions we would not need to ask.

Opportunities in the US are not universal. Some opportunities are only available to those with certain advantages, and some of those advantages are unobtainable for some people. Because of the risks of military service, inequities in the circumstances that determine who serves become dangerous to the fabric of society. It can lead to classism and the stratification of society, and that reinforces and perpetuates inequality.

General attitudes held by individuals in every part of society can be responsible for determining who is given opportunities that prepare them for more important and less accessible opportunities. A parent’s decision that a child is too irresponsible to apply him or herself to music lessons are limiting the child’s life opportunities. A teacher’s belief that Asian students are better students can result in a neglectful attitude toward all the other students. For every choice we encounter, there are a billion possible influences that determine which options we will be choosing from. That eventually results in a world where people are forced to do the jobs they are allowed to do, rather than the jobs they are interested in doing.

It has resulted in a world where a minority of people own all the real property and the rest are tenants. It has resulted in a world where people have to work for someone else, because few individuals have enough resources to support themselves through their own work. At present, we are a nation of indentured, transient workers. It does not take much to turn a system that serves the people into a system that uses the people. It’s is another small step to a system that abuses people.

Ask yourself how you like the idea that your worth and significance as an individual is based only on your position in the system? It might not be the purpose of Sociology to ensure that the world is a system that respects the humanity of all individuals, but the only reason for us to participate in the world is because doing so ensures that all our needs are met. Any system that requires human participation without providing for the needs of all participants is inherently exploitive and inhuman.

Sociology’s purpose is to make us aware of the true character of our society, to show us how the system operates and to identify the cost in human lives. There are many areas in our society where human lives are spent, sacrificed to keep the system going, and we hear the cries of outraged witnesses, the friends and family and sometimes the horrified bystander, every day. It is not a Sociologist’s job to change the system. They are simply the individuals who are working out the information all of us need to be able to change the system ourselves. Only society can change society.

Having said that, I have to ask, can a social contract be inherited from generation to generation? If we are going to have rules we all have to live by, doesn’t it make more sense for all of us to have a say in what those rules are? Is that even possible when no one can possibly know all the rules, and a special education is required to even understand them?

In the game of life, we have sort of made up all the rules as we’ve gone along, but unlike any other game we cannot just quit and walk away if we don’t like the way the game is being played. I mean, seriously, killing ourselves is not an option, but it seems to be what we are doing, either way. The truth is that life is not a game, and we’re not all playing by the same rules. We are supposed to accept that life is not fair, that suffering is the price of admission, but the real reason life is not fair is because life is what we make it.