The fractal nature of it is truly remarkable. When you zoom out, you see what was essentially one people split along religious borders with India and Pakistan. Zoom in, and you see finer and finer levels of cultural discrimination.
> The fractal nature of it is truly remarkable. When you zoom out, you see what was essentially one people split along religious borders with India and Pakistan. Zoom in, and you see finer and finer levels of cultural discrimination.
Yup. One of the most fundamental parts of the human experience is that everything is relative.
So, when someone wants to feel better, or even objectively have it better, the easiest way to do it is to make sure there is someone else having it worse nearby.
And doing that all the time based off fuzzy, changeable things like merit is a lot of work. Or even worse, something that someone has to do all the time or maintain, like results or wealth.
Both for the downtrodden trying to improve their station, and the ones ‘on top’ trying to keep them down.
Much more stable to systematize it, and use things like permanent labels on entire family lines, eh? And bonus points if you can do it in a fine grained enough way, that essentially everyone has someone lower than them to shit on.
Then all anyone has to do is exist, and push the buttons provided for them. Easy peasy.
