It would be interesting to know how much social stratification is due to the changing state of technology and widespread use as it occurred over the last hundred and fifty years or so.
‘Stratification’ at both ends of the extremes amounts to economic disparity with abject poverty and zero resources or opportunities on one end versus unimaginable wealth, some of which is used to wield political power through all the influence money can buy or be used to set up entrapment schemes that ultimately control people in positions of power through various types of coercion. At what point did the general Western population become aware and begin acquiescing to the idea machines would eventually replace significant numbers of humans in the work force?
Like everything humans have the ability to corrupt and exploit, technology can be used for good or bad, constructive or destructive purposes. How beneficial is technology to civilized humanity if it creates excessive wealth for a tiny few that by default eliminates living wage jobs for half the population or more, essentially rendering those lives meaningless as far as making any meaningful contribution while they have no power to even help themselves without becoming criminals of various sorts? Technology made it possible for some to sit in air conditioned comfort with polished shoes and state cars at the ready, while giving orders to private or government armed guards that keep one or more of the countless millions from entering various private, corporate, and government palaces after they’ve been victimized or excluded by “the system” that’s run by a collective that’s psychopathic in nature at the top echelons where the most successful sport deceptively genuine smiles while mercilessly exploiting the powerless and unfortunate.
Private and or military forces are also used to keep would-be thieves off government and privatized lands where natural resources, along with the diversity of life itself, represent the earth’s true wealth to conscious life forms that are dependent on the planet’s self-sustaining and self-regulating ecosystem(s). Possibly our human intellects could be considered part of the earth’s wealth if only we could learn “not to use” our psychological and otherwise ingenuity to impose various types of willful destruction on innocent people and the earth’s life regenerating systems.
More or less depending on specifics, technology made it possible for one person and a machine to produce the same amount goods that one hundred humans were capable of producing without machines in the same amount of time. It’s easy to understand how profit margins grew as more efficient machines increased the fruits of human labor - meaning that everyone could have worked less and still maintained the same consumer lifestyle “if” profits were distributed proportionately throughout the economic hierarchy.
What had been a fifty hour work week to feed a family would theoretically be reduced to 1/100th of that which would be a 1/2 hour per week for each employee to produce the same amount of goods as before machines were available.
The intoxicating affects of grabbing wealth and power are too much for typical humans to resist, especially when oppressive exploitation was made the acceptable norm through various propaganda and indoctrination campaigns that simultaneously reinforced wealth accumulation as measures of status and success - appealing to our competitive and egotistical natures, often with no concern for ethics, morals or the numerous laws that are routinely ignored by a ruling class that goes unpunished.
Humans have literally allowed ourselves and each other to be brainwashed with advertisements that include subliminal and overt messages embedded into the establishment’s “entertainment and news presentations” - quite literally ‘programming’ the audience with various moral and materialistic consumer standards and double standards that include “acceptable” falsehoods often recognized as politically correct nonsense. Humans are great at being hypocrites and not holding themselves accountable. Those are two things we’re good at, while hypocracy has become second nature for the ruling elites and their willing or unwitting minions, along with anyone else that can get away with passing off irrational nonsense as “reason and logic” to manipulate and exploit the public. For Western governments and the establishment’s media industry, censorship and propaganda combined amount a very profitable dark art used to suck wealth and power from what became a generally unaware, apathetic and complacent public due to our own prior “success” that is now being undone.
After WWII a growing middle class enjoyed modern consumer luxuries, giving the majority no reason to complain about social stratification as long as they remained comfortable with their personal finances while ‘keeping up with the Jones’. Life was good for the majority, as most are natural born followers easily indoctrinated through manipulation techniques they thought were only used in movies. The majority of the middle class had no reason to question anything as they were living in what they believed, due to propaganda, was the “land of the free and the home of the brave” - the greatest country that ever existed. And while the USA and human race both have great potential, that potential has been thwarted by the immorally ambitious whose “success” as they defined it, was only possible by oppressing and exploiting the world’s population and nature itself.
Numbers of middle class workers supported their families by manufacturing televisions that ultimately helped brainwash and indoctrinate generation after generation of children, including their own - literally programming them with everything they needed to know, and do, and buy - in order to be content and happy according to the mesmerizing sights and sounds coming out of their television. While television could have been used as an educational platform to increase awareness and understanding on the most important issues, there was no incentive for the establishment to cause anyone to question the system while the status quo and momentum behind it was increasing the relative wealth and power of those who already had the most. Materialistic consumerism worked well for the middle class majority in the overall scheme until obtaining modern luxuries became more difficult as the ruling class, in spite of productivity gains, began retaining a greater percent of business profits for themselves which eventually came at the expense of workers and their families. Status conscious ruling elites and the wealthiest industrialists competed amongst themselves as well as with the public while the wealthiest continued increasing their own take from the overall system, including by lobbying for tax laws that also benefitted the wealthy at the expense of the general public.
There is no free lunch - someone always pays. One person’s gain always comes at the expense of someone or something else, including at the expense of nature in various ways. As sure as the earth’s resources are finite, one person or group having rights to exploit specific resources, by default eliminates that exact opportunity for all others. If the momentum behind NWO Globalist Fascist “Great Reset” Surveillance Police State isn’t stopped, eventually we’ll all be living in a completely controlled system where the elites control how much of what is produced and how it gets distributed to whom. They’re already doing it while decades of their excessively exploitative policies are causing a controlled demolition of the US led Western economy. As the percentage of all wealth produced increasingly went to those at the top echelons of the political-economic system, the working class, by default, was handed lower status and less opportunities. A growing percent of today’s work force have no real opportunities. Less jobs paying living wages means more people will be doing without or they’re forced to work more hours, or two jobs if available in order to maintain their prior levels of materialistic consumption and the status that comes with it.
As productivity increased with use of computers and robotics over the last fifty years, there was far more going on than just decreasing the percent of profits going to workers. On top of everything else the collective Western ruling establishment, has over time, increasingly become more openly psychopathic. They’re so comfortable with the methods of manipulation and exploitation they use, they’re committing blatant war and financial crimes of the highest order, domestically and in foreign lands, right out in the open where anyone can see “if” they’re not afraid to consider facts that are routinely censored out of the Western establishment’s falsified presentations.