What is the source of class distinction?

What is the source of class distinction?

The very first class distinction was between mortal and immortal; between human and superhuman. For the primitives it was often the dead who held power. Primitives were “securely immersed in his particular cultural ideology, which was in essence an ideology of life, of how to continue on and on to triumph over death.” Power was and is the basic category of being for which sapiens have fundamental respect.

The primitives recognized a spiritual cosmology wherein power emanated from the “pool of ancestors and spirits”. In the modern world power emanates from technology and money.

The infant recognizes the source of power quickly; power becomes the basic category of being. If one does not get this location of power one will have little opportunity to get anything else correct. Without power one quickly declined in vitality leading to death. The primitives were quick to recognize a hierarchy of power. With power the other basic category was ‘danger.

Since the eighteenth century the great minds have formed this question, ‘what is the source of inequality?’ and have sought the answer. Rousseau asked why humanity had gradually fallen from a primitive state of innocence into the conflicts of classes and states. Marx capitalized (a pun perhaps?) on Rousseau’s idea to remind us that humanity did not all start out as exploited peons. Today this class and state differential is more abundantly clear.

It has been deduced that power and coercion are not the only culprits here, it is that wo/man harbors an “enemy within”; perhaps the “slave is somehow in love with his own chains”.

Rousseau offered this answer “The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say ‘this is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.”

The salient question became ‘not when’ but ‘why’ it happened?

Primitive man recognized differences in talent, strength, and merit and easily deferred to these characteristics. Why—because such characteristics served well the needs of the tribe or community. Certain individuals showed ability for defying death and others wished to share in that immunity.

We see here that he “carries within himself the bondage that he needs in order to continue to live…we are born in need of authority and we even create out of freedom, a prison…This insight is the fruit of the outcome of modern psychoanalysis…it penetrates to the heart of the human condition and to the principle dynamic of the emergence of historical inequality…primitive religion starts the first class distinction…That is, the individual gives over the aegis of his own life and death to the spirit worlds; he is already a second-class citizen.”

“The first class distinction, then, was between mortal and immortal, between feeble human powers and special superhuman beings.”

Quotes from Escape from Evil by Ernest Becker

Is anyone else finding these really annoying now?

yes.

anthropology:
class distinctions arise from the specialization of labor made possible by agriculture and the food surplus it provides. Ergo: AGRICULTURE.

Who needs agriculture, it's f*cking stupid. We can just get food from grocery stores.

When I was a kid we learned that class distinction happens because of the inherent superiority of the wealthy. Then the communists started taking over.

And that's when things got bad.

Originally posted by Lord Lucien
Who needs agriculture, it's f*cking stupid. We can just get food from grocery stores.

Amen brother/sister. Also let's get rid of these darned cows. We can get our milk from the market, who needs cows they just dump smelly stuff all over the place.

Biological in-group/out-group tendencies mixed with the natural schema forming and classification powers of the human brain.

Originally posted by coberst
Amen brother/sister. Also let's get rid of these darned cows. We can get our milk from the market, who needs cows they just dump smelly stuff all over the place.

Excellent idea, let's just synthesize all (not really all of them) the components of milk and combine them with water so we never have to milk a cow again.

While we're at it, let's grow our beef in a lab. (This was actually done with some success, already.)

On top of that, let's geneticelly engineer bacteria or a single cell algae that can recapture green house gases.

HOOORAY FOR TECHNOLOGY!

Frak that. Let's re-engineer ourselves to not need food.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Frak that. Let's re-engineer ourselves to not need food.

But that isn't as "close" to reality as what I put in my post. All of mine either happened or are in the works.

But yours is MUCH better. ✅

Originally posted by dadudemon
But that isn't as "close" to reality as what I put in my post. All of mine either happened or are in the works.

But yours is MUCH better. ✅

It was on my mind. I've been doing research for a not quite hard science story, reducing the weight of food to be carried is very useful. Getting rid of it is pretty much impossible but probably wouldn't be all that hard to reduce it.

What would the major theoretical difficulty be with eliminating food?

we know what ratios of nutrient type to body weight people need...

It seems to me that it is more of a problem with mechanics or miniaturization of technology, or even some form of nutrient delivery system.

But like, a shot that A) Gave us our daily nutrients in a time release form B) Prevented to secretion of stomach acid/basically shut down the digestive system C) reduced the neurological feeling of hunger.

These aren't even just lab ideas. AFAIK, with the possible exception of B, all of those are available to some degree on the market anyways.

Originally posted by inimalist
What would the major theoretical difficulty be with eliminating food?

Thermodynamics?

Reducing it would be easy (the theoretical minimum should be around 450g/day plus air and water if you gave nothing but the requirements for life) but until we invent magic it would be impossible to eliminate food.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Thermodynamics?

Reducing it would be easy (the theoretical minimum should be around 450g/day plus air and water if you gave nothing but the requirements for life) but until we invent magic it would be impossible to eliminate food.

you mean food as "energy source" rather than food as "physical materials from organisms which are prepared" then?

Well, we could change the biology entirely.

Make it to where cells don't need to divide by adjusting their self repair mechanisms and divide mechnisms...growth mechanisms, etc.

Change how energy is produced in the system.

Change the tolerance to heat on the low and high end.

Make it to where we don't lose moisture at all.

Eliminate toxin production. Everything could be useable by something.

We'd still probably need to put outside sources of food in our bodies. Maybe call it material, instead of food.

We can do all of this with nano-technology. Teehee.

And if we can figure out how to digitize our brains, double teehee.

originally, labor division and private property gave rise to it.

Originally posted by 753
originally, labor division and private property gave rise to it.

Isn't private property, as we would recognize the term, relatively recent? Division of labor seems sufficient anyway.

"I am a soldier and you are a farmer."

Instant creation of class distinction right there.

I was thinking of early private property as the power to exclude others (within the same society) from access to and use of land (or other natural resources) within one's political control, which I believe is an older phenomenon. though such property could be held by an upper class collectively instead of by individual members.

yes, labor division is enough for it.

both phenomena are related to the emergence of agriculture as someone else has mentioned, though many agricultural societies remained largely egalitarian.

'Twas interesting how quickly wealthy neighborhoods appeared after the founding of the original North American colonies. No time wasted separating the rich from the poor.