Status and Conformity [antikvár]

The Social OrderIn his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann described the social world of a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium, basing his fictional setting on his own observations of an institution in which his wife was a patient. What struck Mann especially was the sanatorium's rigid hierarchy of social status, in which each incoming patient was classified quickly according to his level of importance. The system of stratification had nothing to do with money, talent, occupation, age or social background. It was dictated by the severity of illness. The patients who were nearest death were the aristocrats, while the milder cases were held to be socially inferiornot only by their fellow patients but even by themselves. Sometimes the mild cases got to feeling so worthless that they exaggerated their illnesses, adding a few tenths of a degree to their daily temperature readings in the hope that they would be able to gain admittance to the aristocracy.It is easy to marvel at the strange values of a group that would confer honor on the basis of ill health. Yet the truth is that the patients in Mann's sanatorium in Switzerland were yielding to a universal impulse. For the mere fact of living together in groups causes people to sort one another out and assign more prestige and importance to some than to others. In every society throughout history individuals have been classified into categories that rate them as being inferior or superior to one another. One consequence of this process, which sociologists call social stratification, is that there has never been a society that was genuinely egalitarian. Inequality is as old as man. Most societies are stratified in a manner that resembles a ladder, with those people who are the most powerful and held in the highest esteem occupying the top rung, those who matter leastaccording to the society's standardsat the bottom, and all the rest ranged in order on the various rungs in between.The criteria by which people are arrayed up and down the ladder may vary greatly from culture to culture, or even within a culture. These criteria may include occupation, religion, race, wealth, knowledge, age,7