Culture & Society
They are a predatory people, seizing and adopting inventions and technologies from their conquests, although are unable to perfectly replicate them, resulting in crude inferior copies of the originals. For example, automotive vehicles created by the Gardier are far less reliable and sophisticated them those they seized and copied, ugly and not very powerful. Similarly, their use of the crystal technology is flawed, and poorly understood by the Scientists.
Service and Labor castes are not given access to education. Service is an honorable, if low-ranked member of the military classes, and are generally considered to work too hard to appreciate any luxuries. Individuals from the Labor caste come from a variety of sources. On source of Labor caste workers is captured civilians from occupied territories (such as Rien) who are forced to work for the Gardier. Thus, one definition of Labor is slaves. The rest of their society is deemed Labor, and subject to mass, forced relocation to work in Labor Pens regardless of familial ties or prior social status. Civilian laborers are deprived of all luxury goods, and eat bland, unseasoned food. Even dyed clothing is unavailable to all but the highest levels of Command. The majority of the people are impoverished and illiterate.
|
Read more about this topic: The Gardier
Famous quotes containing the words culture and/or society:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)