this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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A lot of people here are looking for a philosophical answer, but I personally think it’s really just a class issue. Most people in the US don’t like to hear it, but our class structure is practically a caste system.
People generally despise the people of other classes (or castes), above or below. This is reinforced by segregation and media. Ultra Rich > Rich > Upper Class > Middle Class > Lower Class > Welfare Class > Homeless. All these groups live in separate communities with specific media environments that vilify the “others”. These groups only ever interact in ways with clear hierarchy. This is only exacerbated with the death of third spaces.
Having been middle class and sliding down the ladder to the point of imminent homelessness, I’ve been struck by the fact that the distribution of assholes for each group is pretty much the same. Over and over again, I’ve seen nearly no contact between classes to dispel the images projected by each class’s respective media ecosystem.
This country is so fundamentally segregated and divided that I really don’t know how it can be changed. There is really no clean and fair way to actually inform people about the similarities between people.
I've lived on the streets, in a car, in a house with 10 people so we could cover rent, in slums and have crawled up to solidly middle class. I think it used to be easier to do that than it is now, like every year it gets more stratified with more slipping below average (meaning the mean) but also harder to dig out. Not impossible, but it was hard enough as person of able body and mind back then - I can't imagine how hard now.
At work in my department only one of us has never been very poor, I do think there is some social mobility but for each of us there must be hundreds who did the same things and it didn't work.
There’s certainly a strained mobility in the country. I said it was a “caste system” primarily because from my limited understanding of the Indian caste system. Where people are born into their caste and experience an entirely separate culture from the other castes. It’s possible that I misinterpreted what classism is and that’s a part of it as well.
one of the major traits of a caste system is that there's no mobility down or uup