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I. Caste Systems are Natural …
Caste arises naturally. Occasional outliers notwithstanding, humans are born with limited talents and limited time to develop skills to optimize their lives. Because we cannot all do everything expertly, we specialize. But some specialties require training and practice from an early age. How do children come to specialize in things that need to be specialized in from childhood, especially things that are unpleasant, but which somebody must do lest everybody suffer?
For as long as anyone can remember, in as many places as one can name, the answer has always been caste, in one form or another. Humans organize their societies into castes for the same reasons that bees do: efficiency. We overlay our caste systems with theology and science (or pseudoscience), but at the end of the day, if specialization from childhood did not confer a survival advantage on societies that practice it, I believe the practice would go away.
I use “caste” here generally to refer to any socially significant categorization, born of efficiency and perpetuated by our selfish genes, including the genes for making and inheriting arbitrary memes. If division into categories is optimally efficient, then to the extent possible, our genes will dispose us to accept what a caste system demands, including our own unworthiness, or others’ unworthiness, of membership in a…