Swami Vivekananda and Sudra Jagaran or the Awakening of the masses - His visions for a future world order - Part 7

Now let us see what Swamiji has to say w.r.t the different rule. In a letter to Mary Hale he writes:

Human society is in turn governed by the four castes — the priests, the soldiers, the traders, and the labourers. Each state has its glories as well as its defects. When the priest (Brahmin) rules, there is a tremendous exclusiveness on hereditary grounds; the persons of the priests and their descendants are hemmed in with all sorts of safeguards — none but they have any knowledge — none but they have the right to impart that knowledge. Its glory is that at this period is laid the foundation of sciences. The priests cultivate the mind, for through the mind they govern.
The military (Kshatriya) rule is tyrannical and cruel, but they are not exclusive; and during that period arts and social culture attain their height. The commercial (Vaishya) rule comes next. It is awful in its silent crushing and blood-sucking power. Its advantage is, as the trader himself goes everywhere, he is a good disseminator of ideas collected during the two previous states. They are still less exclusive than the military, but culture begins to decay.
Last will come the labourer (Shudra) rule. Its advantages will be the distribution of physical comforts — its disadvantages, (perhaps) the lowering of culture. There will be a great distribution of ordinary education, but extraordinary geniuses will be less and less. 

Historically we have seen rapid periods of growth of spiritual wisdom during the priestly rule, growth and dissemination of art, culture, literature and other ideas under various Empires who patronized them, and blood thirsty commercialization in the last few decades with the proliferation of numerous consumer goods and gadgets to make life simpler and easier and comfortable but in effect make the social relationships more complex and convoluted. We have seen how greed dominates and a privileged few enjoy material benefits while others are satisfied with crumbs, with uncertain life and jobs. Those at the bottom of the pyramid are probably the worst off and the gap or the divide between the haves and have nots go on increasing at a rapid rate. This is certainly not an ideal situation. When we take a macro view we see the business cycles, the greed and commercial exploitation adversely impact people and societies in many countries and encourage exploitation. When we take a micro view we see periods of boom and bust, esp. great depression and the housing bubble affect individuals to a lot more extent than probably even war fares or entitlement based exploitation of Brahmins would have done. So even though Vaishya rule has made people richer, has disseminated ideas quickly and has increased communication significantly through development of technologies, at the same time it has made competition the very basis of the undertakings of an individual, and has made people and societies selfish and self seeking. “Greed is good” is the mantra of the age. There is very little trust between corporations and the common masses.

Now Swamiji talks about Sudra rule being the last way of elevating masses. He predicted that India shall rise from the quarters of the so called lowest of the low, the meanest of the means, the hard working labour classes. Why did not that happen earlier? Swamiji has an answer to that as well, “Though themselves the reservoir of all powers, the subject masses, creating an eternal distance between one another, have been deprived of all their legitimate rights; and they will remain so as long as this sort of relation continues.” The masses were and perhaps still are susceptible to be governed easily through the policies of either appeasement or divide and conquer, because they are never united in either ideology or purpose, a fact that is well appreciated by politicians of the present age. They are afraid of some groups that show a semblance of unity, like the Muslims who can rally for the sake of religion, but are largely condescending about others who fail to identify any such purpose. Thus in India Sudras are perpetually deprived because they themselves are hopelessly divided, indulge in petty jealousies and cannot subscribe to a common ideology.

However things do change. Even the starkest of powers collapse and the hopelessly divided can also identify with a common purpose. Such a common purpose is curved out by a natural law of justice.