I’m a nice democratic secularist. I believe in equal opportunity for all and accept axiomatically that all should have equal opportunity to succeed and to fail. But. I do question even my most basic assumptions and would like some help answering some of my own objections. Could all actually be happier with a strict class system where we all know our place in the world presuming that all had basic needs met?
The argument goes like this:
I was perfectly content as an impoverished student barely making ends meet. My little hovel of an apartment was just fine. I was happy.
I got married and graduated from med school. Now I have a nice big house, a computer, and so on. Quantitatively I have much more than I had back then. But I don’t feel it. It is my normative state. I’m happy now, but no more than before. I’d feel deprived if they were taken away.
Same with cars. I was perfectly happy rolling down my windows by hand. Now I’m used to power windows and I’d feel deprived if they were taken away.
Getting more doesn’t ever really change my level of happiness for other than a short time. It just becomes my new normative state. I’m content to have what I have at each step, but once I have more its removal is adversive, even if it is just putting me back to where I was before and was perfectly happy at. That sense of deprivation would be long lasting. I think that this is fairly typical human nature.
So in strict class system, I’d be born into knowing what my place was. Presuming that I had my basic needs met I’d have no hunger for “something better”. I would not experience that transitory happiness provoked by increasing my status or by gaining more, but neither would I be subject to the longer lasting sense of deprivation by incurred by losing that which I once had. The balance would be positive.
I do not like this conclusion because I believe in my axioms. Please argue me out of it.