Caste, Then Now and Forever

Declasse though it may be to mention, it is impossible to ignore that America has a caste system. Caste, of course, more or less just means categories on a hierarchy, although the American caste system is less a pyramid and more a pyramid-ish tree, with branches sprouting in three dimensions. Where do millionaires stand relative to celebrities? What about celebrity millionaires? People with pretensions of intellectual grandeur call that sort of questioning intersectionality. You can tell that the sort of people who tell you about such a term are very thoughtful.

Caste in America is also fluid, as people are able to move up and down categories depending on their circumstances. This is peculiar relative to the more rigid and overt caste systems of yore. Jennifer Lawrence and Justin Bieber are to examples of famous individuals moving up in caste, and Harvey Weinstein is an example of the opposite.

Thinking of the drive to "equalize", I can't help but suspect that no one has really thought that much about how total social equality would work. Would we all be celebrities, recognized by everyone that we pass on the streets? Or would we all be friendless nobodies? Given the atomizing trends of urbanization, and the sort of people who fall prey to the glow of city life (ignoring the filth readily apparent upon close inspection), the latter seems far more likely than the former. Needless to say, there is a social discrepancy between the famous and the mundane, such that privileges are conferred in one direction and clearly this sort of thing is an anathema to our drive to totally obliterate distinctions and uniqueness.

A handful of sentences in and I've already thought about this way more than your average liberal arts student. Or professor. Anyways, I can't help but suspect that fashionable equality is a sort of inbred abomination of a fever dream and a child's tantrum. A half baked cry of Pay attention to me!