Honestly, stratified, busy human society doesn’t, as a general rule, value individual people much at all, even among ‘their own,’ unless those people are somehow representative of the power structure (the stable of culture or entertainment pampered farm animals, political personalities, captains of industry, etc.). Those people matter because their glory is the system’s glory. Most human relationships in stratified societies, though, come down to three questions: can you get me wealth, will proximity to you give me status, or do I want to fuck you? If the answer to all three is no, you die. No one specifically does it, usually. It’s built into the system.

Don’t believe me? You see many ugly or unwealthy people in music, in television, in movies, or even writing books or in positions of significant authority in business or politics? In medicine? In academia? Why does our society institutionally murder its jobless, its homeless, its disabled? Why does it use up its poor laborers until they become sick and die? Because these people do not have the right answer to enough of the three aforementioned most important questions. It’s a game where you are constantly looking for someone to lean on or push down so that you don’t sink to the bottom and suffocate. And each time the system needs a reset, because it’s so poorly thought out even under its own rule set, because it doesn’t need to work well it just needs to maintain stasis, the privileged who sleepwalk through life because they have one or two of the questions right wonder what went so wrong and how things could get so chaotic. My friends, we are all in the Hunger Games, all the time, and this is desirable to power, which is why it is unlikely to change.

Pretty, rich, or lucratively exploitable. Pick one or more of these, or die.