Throughout history, the aristocracy has dominated many forms of government. More money has always meant more power and control over the common man, who worked and toiled to gain a place in the aristocratic society. But what determined who was of the upper class and who wallowed in the working class? If you owned land, you probably owned people, chained to the land by debt. Those that owned the land were royalty, knights and dukes under the king, with a structured and high-class society with constant balls and extravagant affairs, while the poor worked the land. During the great class struggle of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: "We h ...view middle of the document...
For without inequality, there is no class; no manners and no beauty; and then people sink into public and private ugliness." With no separation of class in society, there could be no advancement of science, technology, and the arts. With everyone equal, everyone would have to do the same work to keep themselves alive. The human race would still be a prehistoric race of loners wandering the earth.But how far does one take "classes?" Even within a family, there are classes: the grandparents, parents and children. With these classes, too, there are classes: husband and wife, older siblings and younger siblings. In the animal world, classes dictate the behavior of many species. Wolves are divided into the strong and the weak. The other members of the pack pick on the "scapegoat", while the leader is revered for his strength and cunning, and the elderly command their own respect. Members of the pack perform rituals to prove their respect and loyalty to their leader, the same way a king's subjects bow before him.While all men may be intended to be equal, the parents that create that man determine just how "equal" he is. A poor man born in the U.S. can join the Peace Corps and work in a third world African country and be given the respect deserving of royalty, while in the U.S. he would be scrubbing toilets at McDonald's. Without classes, there would be no motivation, nothing for which to strive, and nothing for people to work at maintaining. People must preserve their status, by continuing to work and trying to improve. With no distinction between a millionaire software developer and the people that dust his computers, why would anyone get a higher education, when they'd be a member of the same class as a high school drop out? If there were no classes, wouldn't that same software developer have to mop floors and give the janitors a chance at programming? What kind of progress could be made if everyone was given equal status and opportunity, and the best of the best must be left with the rest?Equality in terms of how people are treated is a goal more feasibly achieved. In a world where history is a primary factor in how one group of people treat another, it seems nearly impossible to reach a state of equality in the human race. With this religious group slaughtering that religious group because of a territorial dispute begun hundreds of years earlier, or a religious fanatic group suicide bombing another, classes are meaningless in the eyes of the killer. The killer doesn't see a doctor and a garbage man, he sees his religious enemy. In Israel, there are everyday occurrences of stonings and shootings, provoked by an Arab walking down the wrong street into an Israeli neighborhood, or vice-versa. An IRA terrorist sprayed an elementary school with gunfire, because he was tired of living under English control in Ireland. The world is made up of thousands of different ethnic groups and religions, and hundreds of ethnic rivalries ...
