The Negative Results of Class Societies
There have been deeply negative results of class societies from the beginning.
One such result is the degradation of the lives of the great majority of the population to a sub-human, oppressed status. For the pharaohs and the court nobles, the priests and the intellectuals to have a relatively luxurious existence (compared to that of their poor farmer ancestors), it was necessary that the great majority of the population lead terrible lives under heavy oppression, under all the brutal conditions of slavery.
Another negative aspect of the development of civilization under class societies was the systematic distortion and concealment of reality that took place, especially concealment of the real nature of humans. The actual nature of humans is much more obvious when you’re living in the woods as a free hunter and food gatherer. You have a much better picture of what you’re really like—a free, independent spirit. You have a much better grasp of what goes on [happens] in reality then than you do living the miserable life of a slave, a serf, or a wage worker.
By the time we became wage workers, the distortions of reality, the concealments of reality had proceeded for a long, long time. The pseudo-reality, the falsehoods that had been sold to us had, by then, a certain hoary tradition to them.
A third negative result of the development of class societies was the substitution of oppression, conflict, and destructive war for intelligence and cooperation in relationships among humans and among populations of humans.
From page 467 of “The Working Class,
the World, and RC,” in The Benign Reality