We have found roads crossing in both our "Pro Democracy Series" of essays and our "Problem with the Media" series of insights. Ones that are so crucial that we really think it needs to be recurrently said across all our work on a semi regular basis that when talking about self-development, that is focused on the self - that is the individual. While we are each infinite fractals of consciousness, both whole and part of the whole, and the little ego of your physical self on the chess board of the material world does have a place, we must also look at the structuring of the whole chessboard of society and where the self fits within that larger map. And a simple summary of that structuring, in terms of freedom, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the most free from Empire (which will be the subject of our next series) is all about how hierarchy is structured and distributed in terms of money and societal caste status. And as said before and well just keep saying, it is one that most benefits and continues to create an informed and educated middle class (and thus informed and educated voting electorate) as well as the poor to become part of said middle class. It's so about that, that we could call all of our essays and insights that touch on the societal and the political "the hierarchy files" and that is why we create these audio outputs - to help our fellow middle class become more informed and educated and self-developed.
The United States is a great country. But, if we are to be honest and not dark agents, we must also admit its a militarized empire built on sociopathic and psychopathic settler colonialism and genocide and the backs of slaves and it still has a long way to go for making up for that. Even into modern times spending the last century fueling coup's in South America, getting into quagmire and near endless stupid occupations of Muslim countries in the Middle East for oil and minerals, and is still very much continuing it to this day by giving money to the monsters of the Israeli Offense Force to genocide Palestinians. Empire is all about commodifying the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water through religious holy wars via colonialism. Essentially making money of what should not have money made off of it. Capital mixed with social, (Capitalism and Socialism) are the best two systems when intertwined and working in balance together. An element of private capital is the ownership of property while social is more for the public good and there's a saying that conservatives care more about property while liberals care more about people. This is why extreme regressive reactionaries short circuit at the sound of the word "socialism" when used with democracy, because they don't care about other people and democratic socialism uses the government to enact policies to help the middle class instead of just the ultra wealthy. The main downside of socialism without private capitalism is it starts turning into communism. The major downside of capitalism without any socialism is it assumes and requires a planet of infinite material resources to commodify and also that it heavily stratifies and amplifies caste status.
A social class or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of hierarchical social categories. Class society or class-based society is an organizing principle society in which ownership of property, means of production, and wealth is the determining factor of the distribution of power, in which those with more property and wealth are stratified higher in the society and those without access to the means of production and without wealth are stratified lower in the society. When psychopathic settler colonialism came to the new world of America in the late 1400's, it was discovered that Native Americans had no concept of private property and were unbribable. Because they had not yet had those aspects of the imperial operating system installed.
In an imperial influenced class society, which is pretty much the whole world now outside of indigenous peoples, it divides and separates its citizens, at least implicitly, into distinct social strata, commonly referred to as social classes or castes. Historically in the dark ages of the West this was a hierarchy of Gods, then monarchies or royalty (which were said through old school lies to have divine rights), then aristocracy, then clergy, then nobility or gentry, then the dirt poor consisting of labors or servants or homeless or beggars. The modernized version of this is broken out into the lower class, middle class, and upper class. Membership of a social class can for example be dependent on education, wealth, occupation, income, and of course family lineage. Regressive boogyman Karl Marx, who identified problems with Capitalism well but then proposed not very good solutions, defined class by one's relationship to the means of production (their relations of production). Classes in modern social mixed with capital society are that the proletariat work but do not own the means of production, and the bourgeoisie, those who invest and live off the surplus generated by the proletariat's operation of the means of production, do not need to work at all.
A caste is a fixed social group into which an individual is born within a particular system of social stratification: a caste system. Within such a system, individuals are expected to: marry exclusively within the same caste, follow lifestyles often linked to a particular occupation, hold a ritual status observed within a hierarchy, and interact with others based on cultural notions of exclusion, with certain castes considered as either more pure or more polluted than others. This is commonly seen in America within how the children of Indian immigrants are expected to marry. Which, like in India, is very conservative and class based. Because Hinduism expects Hindu's not only to marry other Hindu's but also ones at their similar or higher socioeconomic status, the American Indian girl from a Hindu family who is in medical school, is set up, in a kind of arranged marriage, even in the 2020's not the 1220's, with the Indian boy who is in law school, so the Indian doctor can marry an Indian lawyer. This is why most if not all Indians you know have married another Indian and why marrying one another is the norm, not the exception. And that brown Indian girl would get a ton of pressure from her family if she wanted to marry a black or white public school teacher. And we can say this as someone who did not marry within our race and did not have parents who said, "you must marry a white girl whose family is more rich than ours!"
This is also no more transparently seen in modernity than within the justice system. Which we'll be getting into soon, along with voting, in this series. Which is really a two tiered justice system. One that functions well for the wealthy and powerful - bourgeoisie and large corporations who can afford armies of lawyers vs the poor, often amplified by the over-policing of poor African Americans who must use public defenders. Or lawsuits by the ultra rich which are designed to drain the coffers of anyone who isn't wealthy.
John Grisham's 1995 novel The Rainmaker is about a young new lawyer, who just passed the bar exam, who takes on essentially his first case, and the case of a lifetime, against a large corrupt insurance company which is revealed during the trial that its internal company policy has been to blanketly deny all claims initially, playing the odds that the insured would not consult an attorney. The case is won by the new young lawyer, who sits only with his other legal helper who hasn't been able to pass the bar exam, across from the boardroom table from about half a dozen soulless long sold out corporate lawyers. The young guy is fighting for the small individual, lower in caste and socioeconomic status, vs the corporate lawyers who fight on behalf of the large company, made up of ultra rich criminals who have higher socioeconomic status. At the time of this writing, the Supreme Court is structured extremely conservative and regressive / reactionary. And the simple cheat code with them through nearly all the cases they take up, has been the corporation wins every time, and the little guy, a single member of the lower to upper middle class, gets screwed.
The long con attack on the American middle class has been by design to regress wealth and income inequality and continue to amplify class separation status back towards how it was in the dark ages. Thus hurting the self development of each individual. As a result, American tax policy, and that knock on effect across all of society, has been worse than any other developed country in the world in our lifetime, and the well-documented result has catalyzed a wide variety of social ills. This rupturing of working Americans’ economic and political power has not just produced anxiety and despair; it’s also caused Americans in the past to disengage from politics because they view the political system as hopelessly corrupt and only beholden to the godzillioars and the corporations that made them rich. Since your giant “conspirituality” realization should be that because power corrupts, at this point in the timeline, we simply have a bunch of greed from crooks at the top of the hierarchy, we are constantly boggled by those in the conspiracy world, or those on the spiritual path, who fall down into traps of cults, or nested cults based in religions of empire, or simply just become more regressive and reactionary in their politics which just end up helping the ultra rich and hurting the middle class, which they themselves are likely in the lower middle class to upper middle class strata of, and sometimes even toward the poverty line if they've struggled having a set career path. Thus only hurting themselves.
But we also know this is an imperial tactic in the war for your development and mind because the more amplified the wealth inequality the more it severely damages democracy and paves the way for totalitarian rule. In 2016, Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk published a paper in the Journal of Democracy showing how, in the era since the trickle down, golden shower, nightmare of neo-liberal for the rich (meaning extreme freedom for the rich) economy of the 1980's, many Americans within nested cults that lean conservative, meaning mainly valuing caste status above their own have devalue democracy. "In the United States, among all age cohorts, the share of citizens who believe that it would be better to have a 'strong leader' who does not have to 'bother with parliament and elections' has also risen over time: In 1995, 24 percent of respondents held this view; by 2011, that figure had increased to 32 percent." By the time the paper came out in 2016, almost 49% of Americans thought elites should make decisions, rather than "government." And the growing disillusionment with democracy is them being played like fiddles pushed toward solutions hatched by the dark agents of the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute.
If we want to continue recovering democracy, one major simple thing entails bringing back sensible tax policy, like we had for over 40 years post great depression to the 1980's, pushing both the top estate and top income tax marginal rates back above 50%, to end cutthroat capitalism for the poor and middle class and socialism for the rich. But empire doesn’t like that.