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This blog contains effusive rhetoric and profligate diatribes. Read at your own risk.

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Caste the First Stone

The Hindu caste system tends to give most of us Americans (and members of other Western cultures influenced by American ideology) a serious case of the crawlies; we like to believe that we are free to define ourselves, and the idea of being born into a social stratum seriously ticks us off. As it should; being restricted to the circumstances of one's birth, with no opportunity to earn elevation, is a massive injustice that no right-thinking human being should stand for. However, a caste system is capable of existing without such hereditary assumptions. As a utopian philosopher, I have reason to believe that our society could benefit from an acknowledgment of the fact that people are different and don't deserve to all be treated exactly the same; what's kindness to one may be oppression to another. As long as a caste system gives one the freedom to choose which caste one occupies, even if it's not as simple as just saying "I'm an X now", so long as there's some sort of mobility possible to provide free choice, and account for the fact that people change over time, these castes could be nothing more than a series of guidelines for how people have chosen to define themselves.

There are some people who enjoy following orders, and others that like to lead and blaze trails, and still others that shun social entanglements altogether. None of these is a wrong way to live; they all deserve to be supported. This is only one of dozens of layers that a sufficiently advanced caste system would need to account for in order to begin to represent humanity's full diversity. Those who crave stability should be organized into hierarchies, while those who desire freedom of expression should be given a free range in which to work.

To put all this into motion, two things are required - access to accurate and complete information about the world's resources, including human ones; and sufficiently sophisticated tools for analyzing an individual's personality and preferences, so as to protect against both that individual's own biases and the possibility of administrative overbearance (I think that's a word). When we have the capacity to accurately understand ourselves, classify ourselves in a fashion that never underestimates our importance or restricts us from being anything we deserve to be, and also know how many people of each type there are and how many roles exist for them to fill, we can begin to create a system of actual justice where people are free to be what they were meant to be.

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