Letters: Extractive societies

I couldn't agree more with T N Ninan's column "The frenemy of the people" (Weekend Ruminations, June 20) but perhaps the answer why we collectively allow it all to happen lies in Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. I quote here from Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers on extractive societies:

"Although the leisure classes took without rendering any productive service in return, they did so with the full approval of the community... the winning of wealth by force - came to be honorific and dignified."

"The lower classes are not at swords' point with the upper; they are bound up with them by the intangible but steely bonds of common attitudes. The workers do not seek to displace their managers; they seek to emulate them. They themselves acquiesce in the general judgement that the work they do is somehow less 'dignified' than the work of their masters, and their goal is not to rid themselves of a superior class but to climb up to it."

Pooja Shah Mumbai

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