The caste system in Roshar operates without apology, which makes it useless as political critique.

What matters is the mechanism underneath — brown-eyed people aren't legally barred from power, but they're systematically excluded through something far more durable: the exhaustion of never being given the starting conditions to compete.

Kaladin's arc proves this. He's competent, brave, and tactically sharp — but none of it matters because he arrives to every conflict already depleted.

This is how modern credential-sorting functions. A person from a family of surgeons attends a better school not because they're smarter, but because their parent's credentials unlocked access. That child then outperforms peers from under-resourced schools, gets admitted to an elite university, and the system records this as merit.

Sanderson understands this — he shows us that Kaladin doesn't need oppressors to be kept down. He needs the default settings to stay untouched. That's the insight the work itself doesn't fully grasp: the most stable hierarchies aren't defended violently.