The Lowly Are Contemptible

For an ordinary person in the twenty-first century, trapped in today's vast social machine, there is little to do beyond becoming an ordinary cog. At most, you can be a cog set a little higher or a little lower. Becoming a core component is utterly impossible. And if he were to fall into primitive society by accident, he would probably contribute little beyond becoming another dish for the primitives. But what if he were to stumble into a half-feudal, half-slave society where the strong rule, a spiritual civilization that has abandoned technological progress and pursues the evolution of the self as its ultimate goal? What could a lower-ranked person, navigating among the strong, achieve?