Another Thesis: 2022.

We live within an age wherein the poor oppress the wealthy. How? By force of envy. Only look upon the bygone eras. Up until the 1600's, class was thought synonymous with character, except within the subtlest of dramas Shakespeare wrote. Yet character was of the utmost weight, and class was secondary, though essential to that social order which required character, and character itself required social order.


In the centuries that followed, class and character became divorced from one another, and with decent reason. As the matter showed, the world was not without its share of noble-hearted peasants nor of wealthy bastards. Thus, the modern moral play was born as a response to the oppression of the noble poor by poor nobility, and audiences cheered for those whose wealth was in the spirit rather than in moneys, as the protagonists of such a quality upon the stage strove to ascend above the ruin of the slums, in opposition to the vile and perverse aristocrats who lorded over them.


The moral play succeeded, but it did so to the opposite extreme. The prior century was riddled with pretentious revolutionaries who equated wealth with evil and their poverty with virtue, to the point that any wealthy man's profession of the virtues was dismissed as clever lies for his convenience alone. Yet since the poor proved far less educated in morality than revolutionaries had imagined, (and since they proved harder to re-educate than revolutionaries hoped they would be,) virtue was forgotten altogether, left emaciated as a token of oppression.


So, today, we witness centuries of progress squandered on the base. Again, it is assumed, among the cleverest of academics, that one's character is *not* the product of one's choices but of class, and yet no longer is this "character" a central figure in the drama of one's life, for "class" is all that matters. So, we live again within the 1600's, but the word of virtue is no longer used for the oppression of the peasants; rather, virtue is herself oppressed, so that the peasants, drunk off of excuses, run amok and (are prepared to) kill the rich.


**[({R.G.)}]**


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