It only takes two steps to lock a person at the bottom of society.
- Use fragmentation to erode macro-logical thinking ability.
- Use shame to erode participation.
What we call being “locked at the bottom” is not a problem caused by class stratification — it is a requirement of class stratification.
Class stratification typically flows from the top down. When the top is blocked, nothing flows down. At its core, it’s about resources becoming overly concentrated in certain places, and the further down you go, the more barren the resources become.
Therefore, those places where resources are concentrated need certain strategies to maintain their entrenched advantages — to ensure the stability of their resource control.
Once these strategies gain widespread traction, their effect becomes a locking effect.
Because the more resource-scarce a place is, the more precisely these strategies are studied and refined — and this applies to virtually every system in the world.
That’s why seemingly different systems evolve with apparently distinct institutions — but dig deeper and you’ll find they never stray from the same root. The hand hidden behind it all is always gripping the same thing.
And once the locking effect is achieved, these individuals enter a state of unawareness — even self-satisfaction. Like the group known as the Shudras: you cannot hand them food. It must be thrown to the ground before they dare crawl over and eat it.
Step One: Use Fragmentation to Erode Macro-Logical Thinking
The idea is to pull the individual’s thinking away from potentially broad macro-logic and sink it into trivial, microscopic concerns — to bind it to an endlessly fragmenting reality.
Consider the past 20 years: from the era of images, to the era of video, to full-on spectacle. Everything seems to be deconstructing something. It feels like people have gained some kind of convenience, some kind of liberation.
But in reality, under the flood of massive fragmented information, people have themselves become fragmented.
This critique — beginning with Amusing Ourselves to Death — is no longer a fresh topic. It has long since become the norm.
The power of fragmentation, however, lies not only in consuming the individual’s limited time. More importantly, it is quietly reshaping the individual’s cognitive structure — in a pleasurable way.
This reshaping has two distinct characteristics.
First, people can increasingly only absorb short, novel, fast-paced visual stimuli. They even become addicted to this constant on-demand pleasure — and so, this reshaping regresses the individual’s cognitive capacity to that of a child.
Second, it creates a natural barrier against macro-logical thinking. In other words, beneath the dazzling yet stimulating and pleasurable flood of fragments, the individual has largely lost the ability for macro-level reasoning. This loss effectively severs the path to critical thinking.
Macro-logical thinking ability refers to the capacity to view things from a holistic, systemic perspective — a framework-based skill, also called top-level structural thinking. Only by possessing this ability can an individual quickly grasp the essence of things and understand the underlying logic of how things operate.
Therefore, most truths are forever hidden within top-level structures, and fragmentation is the most powerful tool for dissolving an individual’s top-level structural thinking. This dissolution is achieved through endless pandering to human greed for pleasure — a slow boiling of the frog.
This model is currently the most resistance-proof model in existence — hence the saying: everyone gets what they want, and no one makes waves.
Step Two: Use Shame to Erode Participation
If Step One is about reducing comprehension ability, then Step Two is about emotional hostage-taking. And it is precisely because rational thinking ability — exploratory thinking ability — has been weakened that the emotional world becomes far more susceptible to being taken hostage, to being swept along.
Once the emotional world is led by the nose, the individual enters a state of being manipulated — placed onto a kind of preset track. As long as they remain on this track, they will move in whatever direction is required. It’s a bit like puppet theater.
One of the primary tools that achieves this effect is encoding participation-related behaviors with corresponding shame symbols.
Take the well-known example of slut-shaming: at its core, it is the humiliation of women. The purpose of this humiliation is to achieve a certain kind of control. The reason this shame dynamic gains a kind of universality is twofold: first, men as a group are the beneficiaries; second, it panders to the dark jealousy within certain women.
When it comes to eroding participation, the most powerful encoding works like this: once an individual enters into some form of participation, if that participation would expose their poverty or lack — then the participation itself becomes a source of shame.
For example: an individual refuses to attend certain gatherings, because attending would reveal their lack of the resources such gatherings require — and they would become a laughingstock.
Or consider this: a position is taken by someone with connections and resources, yet the individual who lost out cannot speak up — because speaking up exposes their powerlessness. Not only does it accomplish nothing, it invites mockery.
In reality, those who mock others are themselves among those being manipulated by these two forms of dissolution.
As information becomes increasingly fragmented, individual attention becomes fragmented too. This is not only a fragmentation of the information people focus on — it is, more deeply, the formation of countless insulators between individuals.
In other words, each individual develops their own unique focus tendencies, and individuals no longer need to establish any real connection or communication with one another — yet each feels they have achieved their own self-construction, even a sense of wholeness.
From this perspective, fragmentation not only dismantles macro-level capacity — it more profoundly achieves a kind of material individualization, differentiation, and isolation.
The encoding pathway of shame, in modern society, operates almost entirely in coordination with a certain form of differentiation. Any intent to break through the established fact of this differentiation — to disrupt the existing stratification framework — is immediately entered into the punishment sequence of shame.