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.

The Best Way to Fit In? Don’t Stand Out

Grouping is an activity that comes instinctively and automatically to people. It is part of a filtering process that allows us to make sense of our universe. Anything can serve as criteria for grouping, but because this is a perceptual-interpretive process; differences and similarities in physical characteristics are the most prevalent. As we learn and grow, we also associate ideas and experiences with the items in our cognitive inventory. We give values to people, places and things based on personal experience, inherited attitudes and beliefs, and assumptions. Part of our ability to form instant impressions and make immediate judgments is based upon preconception — ideas we have formed previously.

Stereotyping is the result of reaching conclusions based on limited observation or information — often inaccurate or unreliable information. The thing that really differentiates the act of grouping people from the act of stereotyping is thinking. When grouping, you are engaged in a thinking process, perceiving and interpreting raw information, but when stereotyping you are simply calling up some predigested conclusion to save the time, effort and attention required to make an accurate and appropriate judgment. It is called “jumping to conclusions” and it is something we do so much that we rarely even notice it. What this means for social relations is disastrous. By assuming that we “know” what we are confronting when we encounter another human being, we actually fail to perceive that individual as a person. We not only take him or her for granted, we automatically dismiss them as being worthy of greater consideration.

The tendency to concentrate into isolated ethnic groups is a natural instinct for most people. It stems from the desire for a common identity or a desire to belong, and apparently the easiest way for a person to fit in is to not stand out. It is an almost universal aversion to being different. It is the differences between us that become the focus of conflict, as immature as it is. The ability to single a person out of a group gives the group power or justifies decisions that would otherwise be unjustifiable. There are no human traits that are immune to discrimination.

Height, weight, color, sex, intelligence, class, nationality, regionality, whatever it is that makes an individual unique can be used to shut them out of the group. Racial discrimination gets a lot of attention, but what about gender-identity discrimination? When a person who has female psychology and male anatomy acts normal (that is, dressing and acting feminine) and gets raped and or murdered, that is an example of extreme prejudice and discrimination.

The fact is, being different is enough to get a person killed. The reality is, civilization is founded on an impulse that encourages intolerance and breeds fear of individuality.

Each new generation is raised in an environment defined by lingering prejudice and emerging enlightenment, responding to the lingering injustices in positive and negative ways that inform the next generation’s prejudices. The victims are not just disadvantaged minorities isolated from “mainstream society” in ghettoes, or resentfully integrated into “suburbia.” Most of the people in the world struggle with poverty and discrimination because poverty and discrimination tend to be self-sustaining and mutually reinforcing. The thing most people overlook is the fact that the rich are a minority isolated from mainstream society — including the majority of individuals of their own race or ethnicity.

While this may sound like a discriminatory statement, minorities continue to struggle with the System mostly because it is not their System. The government and industry of the United States was created by a specific group with the specific purpose of supporting and promoting their own group. It is a privileged system and while it’s laid out on paper as ideals and laws, it is made real by people who do discriminate and are prejudiced — sometimes negatively, against people of other races or ethnic origins, but primarily positively toward their own race and ethnic group. It is perfectly reasonable to point out this selfishness on the part of the elite, and it is not entirely enviable, but it is human. A better system can only be created by people who hold less exclusive views of people.

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.