Why would anyone come up with the Functionist caste system?
Dear Caste Castigator,
As many ideas do—be they dangerous or benign—it began as innocent curiosity. Every generation inevitably asks itself the same question: “What is my purpose? For what reason was I created? What part do I have to play, in our society?” Our alt-modes are important to us, and throughout history, many have looked to our forms for the answer. “Why do I turn into this, and not that? If I was designed this way, then what for?” And as we find that our own bodies have precious few answers to give us, we turn to those around us: “Why are there more cars than particle accelerators?” At the dawn of our civilisation, even my siblings wondered about these mysteries.
It was during the rise of Nova Prime, in response to the war of the Primes, that these philosophical questions morphed into the ideology of Functionism. Nova Prime decided that the tribes had gone astray—that each had their own divine purpose to fulfill, which they had forsaken. He recruited twelve bots—one from each of the original tribes, excepting Onyx's—who formed a council to comprehend and expand this list of functions, forming the first Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy.
Having arrived at what they believed to be a complete set of categories, they thus set out to fit the planet’s population into these categories. At its basis, this meant that Solus’ followers were assigned to work in the forges; Alpha Trion’s followers to the archives; the Darklanders to the barracks. Few at the time considered this societal structure to be asserted unnaturally. Rather, it was seen as codifying the existing cultures of the tribes, unifying them in its view of Cybertron as a single people collectively working to a divine mandate. The dissenting voice of the Beasts was easy to disregard, given their defeat at the Citadel of Light, and most abandoned Nova’s society to live in the wilderness.
As the Golden Age continued, the Taxonomy grew more and more complicated. The original set of castes was expanded, coinciding with the introduction of ratioism: the more unique your alternate mode, the more important you were believed to be. Castes believed to be “important for society” were heavily subdivided into hyperspecialized classes, allowing the Prime and his followers to be seen as blessed. Meanwhile, laborers remained in larger, more generalized castes, where they were treated as interchangeable.
Naturally there were objections to this—but with the weapons held by the newly-formed military classes, the rebellion was halted in its tracks, and society was forced to accept the caste system wholly, even as it grew ever more byzantine and oppressive.
It may be surprising, given his later reputation, but Nominus rose to become Prime mostly on the back of his promises to loosen the caste system. This was supposedly implemented through the introduction of the intellectual classes—those who were judged to be valuable for their minds, not their alt modes. This was a huge development at the time, bordering on heresy... but in truth, this progress proved to be a fantasy.
