[lazide]

The beauty of casteism, and religious discrimination (and less so racism/sexism, though it is certainly possible) is the near fractal nature of the ability to discriminate against someone. After all, there are 3000 ‘main’ castes and 25,000 sub-castes. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India], and with religious discrimination you can always go into sectarianism/what guru to follow.

It’s the discrimination version of the world’s largest choose your own adventure book.

[tourmalinetaco]

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.

[red-iron-pine]

> 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.

In-group, Out-group Theory at play

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group

[lazide]

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.

[orlp]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3fAcxcxoZ8

[dartharva]

All discrimination is contextual and local. The number of groups has nothing to do with it.

[lazide]

So you say, but history has shown that if groups don’t exist to allow easy discrimination, they will be created to allow such discrimination.

So it’s a good sign of long, well established, and ingrained discrimination, eh? With associated infrastructure to make it easier to continue, and ‘fairer’ in that it allows almost everyone to have someone under them to take their own angst out on. (Except those ‘outside the system’ anyway, which historically were the Dalits, but now even they are in the system eh?)

[dartharva]

> So you say, but history has shown that if groups don’t exist to allow easy discrimination, they will be created to allow such discrimination.

Yes, that's what I am saying. In- and out-groups are made contextually in each unique situation.

> So it’s a good sign of long, well established, and ingrained discrimination, eh? With associated infrastructure to make it easier to continue, and ‘fairer’ in that it allows almost everyone to have someone under them to take their own angst out on. (Except those ‘outside the system’ anyway, which historically were the Dalits, but now even they are in the system eh?)

Can't understand what you're trying to say here.

[lazide]

Can’t understand, or refuse to understand?

Why create new groups when you have proven and well trod ones handy to choose from?

[TrapLord_Rhodo]

your thoughts seem to align closely with René Girard's theories on mimetic desire and scapegoating.