So unlike the technological change, the resistance to social change comes first and foremost from below, from a great number of people who feel that the change threatens their own social status and respectability they currently have (or think they have) - no matter how inferior by some abstract standards. True, that resistance is often instigated and manipulated by elites and their reactionary stooges who stand to lose from the proposed change even more, but their machinations find many willing executioners from below. -----------
Blake writes:
I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals, And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.