Recently I was introduced to the Indian caste system. No thanks. That is a designation you cannot escape as you are born into such a label for life. A label/status influencing every aspect of your life, from start to finish and beyond.
Sounds like slavery.
But you can elevate your class in the western world. Where class is measured largely by liquidity or wealth more generally.
I’ve lived in a society organized by class my entire life. And have come to learn there are many paths out of poverty (the so-called “lower class”) available to almost everyone.
Class systems are far from perfect. But if given a choice over being born into an upper caste family in India, or a lower class family in the western world, I’d go with Chicago over New Delhi any day.
Paul Fussell’s books on the North American class-system identifies that it is only possible to move 1-class-up per generation because children who grow-up among the next-class-up can be, work-in, live-in, & function-in, that 1-class-up culture.
I think he was using the coarse-grained working/middle/upper granularity, not the finer-grained lower-working, middle-working, upper-working, etc, levels…
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Those books are half a century old.