In any large group, people divide out into smaller groups from distinctions between values they believe.
Even though they share certain values across their group, smaller and more specific values arise from differences in status, power, purpose, and appearance.
No matter how much anyone tries to equalize everyone’s power, it’s uneven because people will always have uneven purposes directed toward different things. Over time, they’ll always subordinate themselves to others and form an informal hierarchy toward the purpose they want, with the leadership of that hierarchy arising through appearing to the majority to be the most competent at those purposes.
In a perfect society, this hierarchy would be motivated by love that promoted good purposes and valued effective interaction beyond the familiar culture of the local group. But, throughout history, people near the top have tended to abuse the hierarchy to exert even more power on their group. Further, any attempts to relate across groups are often met by hostility, typically from an unforgiving attitude over something that happened in the past.
People find shared interest over relatively unimportant things. It protects them from cultural “outsiders” who could threaten their power, but also operates as the beginning of meaning inside a group.
We typically inherit our social class from our family. While we didn’t earn it, we can certainly change it with our decisions.
Divisions
Social classes always arise through how much power each person sees compared to those around them, even when there’s zero discrimination about race, gender, attitude, or anything else. Most of this expresses itself through the availability of money, but can also arise through military force.
Depending on the definition of each class and economic freedoms of the group, there’s a “soft” statistical range of three major classes:
- Underclass – 40-94%
- Middle class – 5-50%
- Upper class – usually <1%, but can sometimes be up to 10-15%
Historically, the middle class has been a comparatively small support system for the middle class, but modern society has shifted the middle class to represent a large, near-majority of society through endless specializations.
Underclass
There’s always a class with very little power to do much. They could be poor, young, unimportant, or simply new to the group.
As they encounter power, they have very little experience or wisdom in managing it. Thus, they quickly waste it instead of stockpiling it. Usually, the power they have is proportionally close to or less than the power they need merely to keep surviving.
Generally, in a large group, the lower class is too preoccupied with surviving to concern themselves with the other groups. However, they do imagine it’s not particularly fair that they don’t have as much power as the other groups.
Parents of the lower class tend to raise their children to not ask questions that could get them in trouble, as well as teach them how to avoid suffering the worst of the rules that would absolutely decimate them.
Thus, barring a virtuous belief against it or the unlikely person willing to take on risks to change the situation, they have a vague desire for equality and for the rest of the group to meet their needs.
Middle Class
While the middle class uses their power as they create it, they have the means to stockpile some of it. Thus, they can survive a particularly difficult season but wouldn’t be able to survive indefinitely.
The markers of the middle class are very clear compared to the underclass:
- They’re often married, and often while young.
- They have children, and typically 3 or more of them.
- They own a home.
Most of the middle class concerns itself with climbing into the upper class or maintaining their way of life (e.g., suburban living), and many of them stockpile their power to those desired ends. While very few will attain the upper class, many will try.
Parents of the middle class tend to raise their children to out-succeed them and potentially climb to the upper class if at all possible (often for self-interested reasons), especially if that parent came from a lower class.
Except for love towards other people, they’re not that concerned with the lower class, and many of them are too busy conforming to the cultural requirements for climbing the social ladder to care about too much else.
The middle class has always been a large-scale stabilizer for society at large. The upper class is so wealthy that most of their effort is toward power games, and the underclass is poor enough that they can’t plan for the future.
Upper Class
At any time, the upper class only uses a small fraction of the power they possess to meet their needs. The rest is managed, conserved, and magnified by middle-class people.
The upper class has four major concerns:
- They worry about losing their influence within their small group.
- They’re concerned with losing power from any other upper-class people who are trying to compete for the position.
- They must maintain a public image of virtue to prevent the lower and middle classes from growing too dissatisfied with the situation.
- They must ally with the rest of the upper class to prevent the other classes from taking away their privileges.
The upper class never has to worry about what they require. Often, they’ll spend absurd amounts of money to show their power. This lifestyle is an intentional insurance policy to scare anyone from considering attacking them.
While they may appear to live a life of comfort and sophistication, they’re in a constant battle with other people to keep their power. They work hard to tweak their image, so their titles and forms of power maintenance constantly change (e.g., aristocracy, executive class, political beltway).
Parents of the upper class have the most varied approach of the three. Many of them train their children to honor the culture and avoid shaming their public image, but some will raise their children to inherit their power, while others will try to prevent competition against their offspring.
Morality is weakest among the upper class, since they’re more able to draw from money or influence to avoid or mitigate direct consequences for what they do.
For this reason, the upper class isn’t too concerned with the lower and middle class until there’s a coup or revolution.
Migrating
Because of how people use power in each class, migrating back-and-forth across them often requires changes to habits. The culture propagates itself across generations as well: most parents of lower classes teach their children to not ask questions (since they might get in trouble), and most parents of higher classes give them an unnaturally privileged education.
Beyond the standard cultural adaptations like specific language and rituals, there are a few others.
Generally, higher classes have an attitude problem when they’re demoted, and lower classes have a self-respect problem when promoted. The way the person imagines their social status typically expresses itself in how people react to it.
Moving out of the lower class requires tons of discipline and restraint, as well as some luck and connections with others. The person must make wise decisions that give long-term benefits, then discover an opportunity they can seize with what they’ve been preparing.
When people move upwards in a social class, they must trust more power to others who will more reliably specialize in handling things like their assets, legal situation, and insurance. Unlike the cleverness required to subsist with little in a lower class, higher class people must be proficient with their social skills and make more friends.
Because of the difficulty of transitioning upward in social classes, most people don’t succeed at it. They often hit a “glass ceiling” at the top of their class. Sometimes, if they’re willing to take social risks that backfire tremendously, they’ll go down a social class!
Most people moving down a social class are permanent outsiders because they don’t have the intuition and creativity the lower classes had to develop to survive.
Unless someone is a cross-cultural missionary or raised in a different culture than their family, almost nobody ever voluntarily goes down a social class, but people always seem to want to climb that ladder.
Conflicts
There is an endless conflict over power between the classes:
- The upper class wants to keep their power.
- The middle class wants to become the upper class, and will often be ready to make dramatic social risks to that end.
- The underclass is concerned with survival, but would like a chance to become at least the middle class, but often without the required risks.
Someone in the upper class will frequently try to overthrow someone else in the upper class. To make this happen, they will engage in a large-scale conflict.
To recruit people for their purposes, upper-class people employ various methods:
- They’ll make agreements with other upper-class people to form an alliance.
- They’ll promise the middle class will become the upper class.
- They’ll promise that the lower class will have a more fair system, typically with a leftist angle.
Generally, they’ll also appeal to specific political values that are most fashionable among the public.
At the end of the conflict, though, nothing really changes except that a few upper-class people have changed roles. Often, if the new leadership was more evil, everyone loses some of their freedoms.
Application
We only make decisions as part of a social class as far as we identify with our situation. We can frequently appear as a different class, and there is sometimes wisdom in appearing to be a lower class than we are.
There’s no reason to feel shame for being in a particular social class, despite any insistence to the contrary. The only shame is if we’re immoral or unloving toward others we encounter.
There will always be poor people, and there will always be rich people. Those groups don’t really think about each other until it becomes political, or they have something to gain from them. While it may feel unfair, the cultural distinctions between poor and wealthy create the best possible social solutions.
The effort connected to the social classes depends heavily on how much wealth a society has. In poor societies, the people who work hardest are the lower class because they need every bit they have to survive, while the wealthy will splurge on luxuries. In wealthy societies, the people who work hardest are the middle class because they must exploit every advantage they can to outpace others’ wealth, while the poor will buy dumb things that fritter away any chance at acquiring wealth.
The underclass requires an attainable means to survive. But, beyond that, provoking the poor to be motivated to become independently middle-class is far more effective at fixing their mindset (and builds much more meaning) than giving more things to the poor beyond the basics.
Our greatest expression of ourselves comes through being middle-class. It gives us enough wealth to discover what we want to do, but not enough to corrupt us beyond moral redemption. With very little wealth, we never move beyond survival, and with too much wealth we start becoming antisocial.
A gigantic component of how fast and effectively civilization develops comes through how well the upper class treats the underclass. In a society where the underclass is all specialized with a low-entry role (e.g., rice farming), the upper class is more likely to treat them with some degree of respect, which means their ideas (and, by association, social risks) have a higher chance of equal treatment.
Since they’re concerned with their day-to-day activities like the underclass, but have enough power that they don’t need to rely as heavily on people wealthier than them, the middle class is the great stabilizer of civilization.
The healthiest society is where individuals in the classes constantly cycle up and down. This is a collective social product of many people living the good life at once.
The social expectations vary by each class. The underclass values honesty, and sometimes respect. The middle class values polite behavior, and sometimes honesty. The upper class values both respect and polite behavior.