Played the casteless origin in DAO again. And now, I've realized a few things. I'll just kinda ramble, I can't think of how to say this all perfectly. I'll also be saying this like my dwarven noble Warden who's ludicrously progressive and thinks about as much about Orzammar society as Dorian does Tevinter society. I played both origins despite the dwarven noble being the canon one, I like seeing both dwarven origins if I'm going to play as a dwarf.
Dwarven religion says that the Proving is important because it's what the ancestors use to show their favor. If you win, the ancestors favored you. If you lose, the ancestors didn't. Therefor, you absolutely must have their favor to win. Okay, next part. Casteless can't fight in the proving because the ancestors hate them and won't favor them in the least, EVER. So what happens? A casteless wins 3 rounds. Wait, what? So let me get that straight. Ancestors determine who win a round in the proving, and casteless can't fight in them because the ancestors hate casteless, and yet here's a casteless winning. Did dwarves acknowledge that contradiction? No, they were too busy getting p!ssed off and slapping the casteless in chains rather than taking a sodding second to think about that contradiction or the implications of that contradiction. They just use double think to avoid thinking of the implications, and they don't even realize they're doing it. Not me. For me, it makes me realize there's 2 possibilities. Either the ancestors don't exist because they would not let a casteless get even close to winning, or the ancestors don't hate casteless and dislike how we treat them and used that casteless to try to show our ignorant and moronic people that they can favor a casteless after all. One or the other. They aren't real, or casteless are not nothing to the ancestors and the way we treat them is wrong. Either way we're using our religion to justify the way we treat casteless, even when you have to double think and break logic to do so. Makes me think that the real reason we don't let them fight in provings is that we're afraid that we might have to confront our stupidity after enough casteless win enough that we start to doubt and question what we've been made to think, we don't want to think that maybe we're wrong about this and have been for ages. Or maybe the ancestors fell for the disguise too, they're so stupid that a helmet is enough for our ancestors to grant you favor because they're just as fooled as living dwarves. Do dwarves really want that to be an implication either? I doubt it.
Oh, and here's another example of double think and confirmation bias. We tell casteless "you're not allowed to take any legitimate or legal jobs", leaving only illegitimate and illegal jobs as their only option for survival. We tell them they can't have legal jobs, and then when they do illegal jobs we tell them that this is why they can't be trusted with legal jobs because they proved that they really are criminals... What kind of screwed up logic lets you even do that?
"You can't do anything legal to support yourself because you're a dirty criminal casteless who only breaks the law."
*casteless does illegal work to be able to eat that day*
"You see, you really were just a dirty casteless criminal and all you did was vindicate us and prove us right. We can't give you real jobs because you're just criminals."
It's circular logic to the extreme. We make them do illegal work by making legal work illegal for them to do, and then use that as proof to say that casteless aren't worthy of real work because they always just break the law. What kind of jumped up nonsensical crap is this? We... Just... Gah! We dwarves must be dumbest sodding people in Thedas to make these logical fallacies and not even see the problem with it. It's not even just that we're bigoted, we're bigoted seemingly on purpose to the point of forcing the very situations that prove "us" right that casteless are worthless.
Say what you will about other societies, but no other society I know is this bloody stupid about a particular class. Tevinter's think of and treat slaves better than we do our casteless, at least they don't use ignorant double think and confirmation bias to convince themselves of it. The Assembly is very lucky my brother did what he did, because if they had made the mistake of making me king...? If they think my brother being on the throne makes him an extremist tyrant, they would have lost their minds if they supported me. I would have abolished casteless as a caste completely, removed it as a thing from the legal process altogether. You want to punish a dwarf, exile them to the surface and forbid them from returning (you don't need a casteless caste to do that). And if that exiled one has a child then that child can return, sins of the parent is a system that should NEVER be done. Hell, I might have even just got rid of the castes entirely. I put my betrayer of a brother on the throne because he's at least kinda on the same mindset as me about this, just not quite as "extreme" about it. Our people need to wake the hell up and stop being so willfully stupid, because our culture as it is right now and has been for ages is quite embarrassing. I don't have to be casteless to realize this stuff, I merely have to be "not-stupid"... Which is apparently something that 95% of the rest of the city can't bring themselves to be.
Wonder if Kal-Sharok managed to avoid shoving their heads up their own asses, unlike my city?
Retour en haut
. They have a self destructive noble system with huge gaps between the nobility and the people in-between.
