Growing up there were the "jocks" and the "nerds". But when did they diverge?

It's almost as if the media, for at least 80 years, has been trying to divide people so they infight across little subcultural rifts instead of aligning with one another along ethnic lines to fight their common enemies...

But even without the deliberate magnification, there's been a split between "white collar" and "blue collar" for centuries. Everyone wants to believe that they have value and they know what they're familiar with. The man who works all day in the fields thinks how hard you work in the fields is the measure of a man's quality. The man who spends all day balancing books thinks your skill with numbers is the measure of a man's quality. The longer they're isolated from one another, the more set in their ways they'll become. Then multiply that by rural/urban and regional splits.

Within a town, church probably played a big role in getting men from both groups to interact and learn respect one another. That fell by the wayside. Everyone's isolated or in self-selected echo chambers now and we're judging one another with whatever our strongest attribute is as the only scale.