They have privileges
and rights. They also have obligations and duties. Classes and castes
are functioning parts of an interdependent social whole which can
maintain balanced order only so long as each segment recognizes its
obligations and performs its duties.
Social balance therefore depended on class collaboration. Successful
collaboration, in its turn, is the outcome of a general acceptance of
class and caste and general willingness to go on living and functioning
in a class divided society.
A fifth collective goal of civilization has been expansion from the
nucleus outward, with final authority exercised by and from the nucleus.
At the outset of the survival struggle which led to the establishment of
one language, one religion, one law, one authority, one loyalty, each
among the many contestants had its own language, its own religion, its
own law, its own authority.
These rival forces were temporarily confederated against internal
disruption or foreign invasion. ("Liberty and union, now and forever,
one and inseparable.") In the course of the survival struggle, the
separate parts of which the civilization was composed began with the
local autonomy permitted by confederation, and ended up with one among
the many contestants donning the imperial purple and establishing itself
as the master and supreme dictator--the Caesar or Pharoah of the
conquered, unified world.
Foreign territories conquered and brought by force of arms within this
imperium were subjects of a central authority which they never really
accepted.
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