A speech on Does Social Status Matter?

Social status is like a degree of honor or prestige, a level of respect given to one’s position in society. This is mainly linked with the ability of an individual to live up to the standard principles created by the society or a group of people within the same society. Most of the time these statuses bring us differences among people and build a system of hierarchy. These kinds of domination are made just to fulfill the needs of certain political leaders.  

Any liberal citizen can tell that status is another way to divide this society, along with the other classifications like gender, religion, ethnicity, and social outlook. For sociologists, these categorizing matters a lot, so that it could return their access towards the resources, rights, and their power over the society. This is to maintain a strong social hierarchy. This could generally affect many individuals in terms of their economic, education, health care, political participation, employment opportunities may be even life expectancy.

It is typical human nature, though we say we don’t care about social status, in the end, we all truly do care. This status has a huge role in how people decide to behave and treat others from various social statuses. A status hierarchy depends mainly on what we possess, thus deciding the usage of valued benefits of different kinds like resources, good health care, social approval, better influences, and freedom. There are mainly two kinds of social status: Ascribed and Achieved status. 

Ascribed status: This kind of status is never chosen or earned by an individual, it is rather given to them at birth or assumed automatically later on. It is classified based on general aspects such as sex, gender, age, race, family background, and birth. 

Achieved status: This kind of status position is acquired by an individual based on merit and is earned or chosen. This completely depends on personal skills, efforts and abilities, achieved or selected through various matters like education, occupation, accomplishments, or even marital status and other factors if any. 

All these classifications were invented to maintain a good and healthy social structure. And a good social structure is to maintain positive social order by guiding, limiting, and organizing human nature and behavior. A few years back, though these were invented with a good cause, higher class people had taken advantage of these social statuses to rule over the normal middle-class people and lower class people harshly. More power, selfishness, greed, and superiority complexes have taken over and caused diverse attitudes between a large population. These days social status is never given much importance, even though it still exists; each generation has achieved in different fields, crossing through several kinds of social statuses. Nobody likes to be at the bottom of the social hierarchy and very few are willing to share at the top, these conflicts are very hard to resolve. So, giving them opportunities has always helped them in developing society, and doing so has also developed our nation.

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