This is a Test of the Emergent BS

We as a society decided quite some time ago that we were uncomfortable with notions like socio-economic classes, hereditary castes, feudal arrangements, and other systems for separating people into non-equal categories.  America was founded in the name of equality, with a system of government known as democracy, and since the beginning, phrases like "all men are created equal" have continued to be our touchstone, despite the inherently misogynistic and theocentric qualities they contain, now that we're gradually coming on board with the idea that women are actually people, and that all non-Christians might not in fact be infidels born into damnation (which is so horrific that killing them, in order to save their souls, is the socially responsible thing to do).  We want to believe all people come into the world with a fair shake, that nobody is inherently better than anyone else, and that we are not only equal in value, but also possess a positive quantity of value, rather than just all being equally worthless.

Here's the problem.  Believing all of these things, we do a piss-poor job of actually making them true.  Instead, we simply find ways to make ourselves think they're true, and then blithely turn out backs on that reality, humming a happy tone loudly enough to drown out the screams of the people we've convinced ourselves aren't actually being murdered.

We want people to be equal, so what's our solution?  Capitalism - the most thoroughly un-egalitarian social system short of outright fascist dictatorship.  Mind you, it's ostensible opposite, communism, is the second-worst system at ensuring equality; placing any sort of Party in charge of ensuring the fair distribution of resources to the ostensibly-equal masses clearly doesn't result in Party members getting an equal share, at least not more than occasionally.  But even that's better than having everyone start out with an equal chance at poverty, and allowing a handful of people to earn wealth and comfort and power and prestige, all while a number of other people just as talented and deserving fail, largely due to all manner of random factors.  Our system has a lot of ways to help people succeed, and a lot of other ways to make sure they have very little chance to do so - we want people to be educated, but we refuse to send someone back to college on the taxpayers' dime after they've flunked out three times, and clearly they're not going to be able to afford their own tuition at this point.  So if you were sick the day you took the SATs and couldn't qualify for a grant scholarship, then some random bacterium has cost you your entire future, and now the path your life takes is set in stone, because society has all sorts of rules in place which limit your ability to correct for that sort of unfortunate circumstances, all because we're terrified of the idea that someone - who we claim to regard as our equal - is going to "freeload" at our expense.

We as a nation are not even close to equal; we are unequal in a staggeringly vast number of ways, and while the potential gulf between the highest point and the lowest might be slightly less severe than in some war-torn third-world nation, it's still pretty damn big.  Bernie Madoff got rich by swindling huge numbers of people out of their life savings, and is now cooling his heels in a comfortable minimum-security prison; meanwhile, hormonally belligerent black teenagers get shot dead in the streets by paranoid, trigger-happy, and possibly racist cops, just because they were brandishing a water pistol that wasn't a bright enough shade of blue to be obvious as a toy, given the poor lighting conditions.  Without speculating on how much of the difference between these situations lies in race, how much in money, how much in the difference between street cops and sentencing juries, and so forth, my point is simply this - they are different.  Madoff and his fellow financial wizards in their more-than-your-education-costing suits, whether their money-management schemes fraudulent or completely legitimate, simply occupy a different stratum of civilization than foul-mouthed and reflexively hostile "gutter trash" who would commit willingly commit murder over a nice pair of shoes.  If members of these two groups were magically transformed into each other, resulting in a silver-tongued "ghetto punk" with a high-class accent and a rich white man who swears at police while flashing gang signs, then the former investment banker would probably end up plea-bargaining his way into a shorter jail sentence even while his other half rapidly destroys his entire social circle and squanders 90% of his liquid assets - and they'd still probably never meet exactly in the middle of the gulf that had long separated them.

We're always going to have divisions like this in society; for the most part, we want it that way.  There's an inherent human desire for justice, coupled with selfish egotism (manifested both in excesses of desire and in irrational fears of loss); we work actively to prevent society from reaching a point where every single person enjoys the exact same lifestyle, regardless of how hard they've worked or what they've sacrificed from themselves or how lucky they've been, So, if we're going to have different groups of people, then I say we should openly admit it.  I think I've said before in this blog, that although a hereditary caste system would be an atrocity, there's a great deal of logic to the idea of a qualificational caste system, in which something more complex than, but functionally similar to, your SAT scores or your IQ test or your Meyers-Briggs Personality Profile or a Which Career is Right For You quiz (mix and match aspects of these and a thousand similar configurations, until you think you've got something good enough to work for everyone), is used to explicitly label you as a member of a particular social grouping, and the rules of society are written to openly acknowledge these categories, without any pretense that every one is as good as all of the others.  Someone who's unambigously proven themselves to possess all of the qualities that society has agreed to regard as Good, while suffering absolutely no detectable level of any of the characteristics deemed Bad, gets the highest possible rank in this system, and is treated like an international dignitary, religious figurehead, captain of industry or the like; someone who entirely fails all of the test's qualifications (or refuses to take the test altogether) is proven to be little more than a frothing maniac, and certainly receives few privileges.

It's entirely possible we'll never draft a set of selection protocols sophisticated enough that they deserve to be used as this kind of test; the human equation might well be beyond any and all humans' ability to solve.  But I think that a few attempts ought to be made, in spite of such catastrophic examples of it going horribly wrong as are provided by the novel/movie Divergent, just as I believe we ought not to be scared away from spaceflight by the existence of a billion crappily-written sci-fi flicks, about killer aliens and black holes and the potential next Challenger explosion and so forth.  Socioengineering is a field of study just like any other; it's possible to do it completely wrong, producing the equivalent of a collapsing bridge or an exploding nuclear reactor, but it's also possible to do it right, providing transportation convenience and clean energy.  And since nobody talks about the latter outcome on the news, because Michael Bay never makes a movie about it, because we as a rule find happiness boring and don't devote much emphasis to thinking about it, we spend very little energy toward practical efforts at getting happier, but lots of time thinking about what horrors might result if we tried and failed.

My point (assuming, rather charitably, that I have one, and am not just rambling incoherently about what bothers me) is this.  "Caste system" is one of those terms that tends to reflexively scare one's audience away (and my audience at this point is down to about two people from a one-time maximum of five, so maybe I should quit gambling on these), but it doesn't necessarily describe something utterly anathematic, just something that's possible to do entirely wrong.  The creation of different categories of human being is an inherent psychological need we have, and we always get utterly repulsed by the systems that other cultures have come up with, but that repulsion doesn't extend to systems just as bad which we never perceive, whether because they don't exist, or just because we are partially or completely unaware of their existence.  Often times, we hate and reject a proposed utopian social design, because we simply mis-perceive it as being something horrific (this happened with the socialized-medicine struggle; whether you happen to agree with the exact specifics is one question, but the absurd panic about "death panels" demonstrates how utterly irrational people are in the consideration of such questions); just as often, though, we tolerate atrocities because they're easily disguised or concealed.  A lot of the world's systemic injustices are completely fixable, but in most cases, if you don't put a face on a problem, nobody will care.  And if you put the on the wrong place, the "right people" will care less, and may begin actively opposing your efforts - when your cause itself has not actually changed, you've just catastrophically mis-stepped in your efforts to advertise it.

So here's my attempt at putting a nice face on an enlightened "social caste" system.  Let's say that we as a nation openly acknowledged the need to have higher and lower classes of person, but then made ourselves feel better about that desire by re-emphasizing that even the lowest of those classes deserves food, shelter, clean water, clothing, and a few other minimal necessities (we'll leave out education and healthcare for now, since those are the two really big and really questionable ones that seem currently impossible to solve).  So once we'd decided that these were our country's priorites, how would we integrate them?  Simple: grant everyone their necessities for free, as an automatic entitlement, while tripling or quadrupling or so the price of all luxury goods.  Such a system would widen the gap between rich and poor, but it would also make poverty a lot more tolerable, and although it would hurt the rich a fair bit in material terms, it would soften the blow by explicitly acknowledging the perception they inevitably have, that they're just better than other people.  Under this system, struggling 18-year-olds in college probably couldn't afford the latest Xbox, let alone a car - but they'd also never have to worry about flunking out and ending up sleeping on the streets.  Some might be willing to endure that risk in order to have an Xbox, but the majority would probably realize that a guarantee of safety is worth more than the possibility of being able to afford some fun.  And for those who could afford the Xbox even at its vastly inflated price, think of what a status symbol it would become!

A system like this wouldn't fix everything that's wrong with our country by a long shot.  But it'd be a nice start.