Peasants are Fine

On peasantry: they are indeed venal, ugly, jealous, and stupid mutants. And that has to be fine, because the alternative is to kill 95% of the population.
Consider the obverse: Gnon hasn't killed them already. So, yes, that's fine.

It's pretty weird that it's fine. It really is fine, though. Perhaps put some effort into making the peasants less peasant-y, but that's a long, long-term goal. In the present, it's fine.

A proper civic order explains to the peasants, in detail, why being a peasant is fine. Of course, if I knew why that was, I wouldn't have to use weird indirect proofs like [they ain't dead] to demonstrate it. I would be able to use the details directly. The peasantry has some divine function; they don't exist merely to make the aristocratic 5% look better by comparison. Damned if I know what that function is, but I'm not a light-side pope so even if I did know it wouldn't make a difference.

Concealing a problem makes it worse. If you tell the peasants they're fine because they're not peasants, that makes them even more peasant-y. Gross. Super gross.

By contrast, telling the peasants that being a peasant is fine for the real reasons means that when the peasant discovers (belatedly, to their horror) that they're a peasant, they also discover they're fine and the horror abates. 

E.g. some hostile country starts bombarding your peasants with slurs in an attempt to destroy morale. Probably accurate ones; it's hardly difficult to slur a peasant. Get it right half the time even if you guess at random. Except your peasants are all like, "Yeah, we know? It's fine though." Wrecked. "We already said that, dumbass. lol" Think about how much it's going to sting when you turn their propaganda back on them verbatim and their own peasants can't refute it - but they think it's not fine.