Besides the enforced caste system was it a dystopia?

I agree, but what I'm saying is that if things were allowed to carry on as they are they would be much worse than the book.

everything is a spook if you take it by itself and ignore consequences
even if this was true that most likely doesn't represent reality

Why? Don't you see how stupid and spooked the idea is?

Nope, progress is a meaningless idea invented in the 19th Century to get people to think that all their hard work is making the world better for their children. The idea that society has to change and this change is always good is dumb.

I don't think it does, but that's the universe the book is set in.

Its not spooked, I rely on other people to exist, and if they all died my life would be shitty and short.

Caring about survival of humanity after you'd be dead is spooked I guess though.

These types of posts were always stupid and unimpressive.

lmao people survived for tens of thousands of years with sticks and stones. save the pearl clutching faux-humanitarianism for your book club.

I'm not talking about the dumb alt-centrist liberal version of "progress" where change is always good, I mean progress as in advancing the population of our species for literal cosmological survival.

it's not. other people are the key to immortality. your thoughts and ideas live on in the lives of others. that is the ultimate egoism. preserving the future is egoism

You have a snowball's chance in hell of being remembered 100 years after you die, and even if you do the memory of you will be what someone else thinks of you, your ego ceases to exist once you die. Ramses isn't immortal because there's some ruined statutes of him and kids are forced to read a paragraph about him in school.