HUMANS & SOCIETIES
How Did Inequality Begin in Societies?
Inequality is a broad concept that is thrown around quite a lot. There is inequality in wealth, social status, and opportunities, but do you know it all started almost 10,000 years back when humans started living together in societies for the first time? Whether it is the greed for money, power, or fame, we have never quite known how to treat everyone equally, but just how did this mindset get so ingrained?
Agricultural Revolution
The first agricultural revolution happened nearly 10,000 years ago and changed human lives forever. People moved from being hunters to farmers and settled down near rivers for the first time in history. This led to the birth of societies and economies.
How this led to inequality can be understood at two levels — global and local.
Globally, after the world began receding from the Ice Age, some regions in the middle east started seeing more droughts than the others. With herds of animals dying, hunting was no longer a dependable source of food. These regions, known today as the Fertile Crescent, became primed for agriculture. People started growing wheat and barley. This not only gave them more free time on hand since nobody had to spend days hunting but also provided them nutritious calories enough to survive and engage in additional tasks.
However, not everywhere on Earth conditions were similar. While people in the middle east started farming out of necessity, many other regions like Africa and Australia, having no such need continued hunting. As a result, societies in the Fertile Crescent and regions around it developed faster than the rest of the world still living for survival. This led to the first kind of inequality — some civilizations developing faster than the others due to sheer geographical luck.
For example, Europeans started using steel more than 1500 BC ago, but the metal made its way into Asia about ten centuries later. And the result? Europeans were the prime conquerers in early history due to more technical and human prowess.
To understand the next kind of inequality at the local level, let's zoom in on what was happening inside a society. As people started farming, over a course of decades societies started growing and prospering. But human greed has existed since forever, and even then, some people wanted to gain more resources than others. With some social and political clout, a few were able to bring themselves higher up in the chain of social status. This marked the beginning of how social inequality started. As children of these few people grew up, they were made to believe that since they have a higher social status and are richer, they deserve more food and money than others. Which made them obtain more resources. Which made them further believe they deserve more. And it goes on…till today, in a never-ending cycle.
Industrial Revolution
If the agricultural revolution sowed the seeds of social inequality, it was the industrial revolution that amplified it and worsened economic inequalities.
As slavery began to disappear, the labor market started to form. This development, while pushed us towards better human rights, also pushed us towards a for-profit society where profits flowed with innovation, machines, and globalization.
As a result, a new era started in which profits dictated lives, and a new market society started appearing. While earlier, experience was a source of incalculable pride, in the new society, everything had a price. If a warrior’s sword as a relic carried value that only perhaps the most deserving of sons would get after hard-won battles, now, it is a feeling anyone with the right size of pocket can buy.
By the new definition, whoever could maximize the gap between costs and revenue is successful and rich.
Human toil was replaced with machines, and factories were born where the workers were seldom destined to get rich. But the owners, their fate was different. The wealth gap kept on increasing, and the structure of market society stays dominant to date.
Summary
Inequality started when due to geographical advantages people of the Middle East and Europe started farming and formed civilizations more advanced than the rest of the world. This came purely by luck. However, inequality truly thrived after the Industrial Revolution when globalization and machines made their way in our lives and humans figured out a way to maximize profits. More often than not, this ensured that the poor remained poor and the rich got richer.
While innovation has certainly moved us forward as a society by making lives comfortable, a for-profit society has devastated the balance of nature in every sense. Humans abuse each other, abuse nature, and often turn a blind eye to matters that do not lead to profits.
