Reducing Yarvin's Four Strata to Three Layers

Back in the day Curtis Yarvin had a nice sensible Three Layer theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. But now he has revised it into four strata, as follows:

Across human history we see four different ways of living. Let’s label these varieties of social existence cosmopolitan, traditional, deracinated, and ancestral. For variety, we’ll pair these adjectives with synonymous nouns which almost no one knows: armigers, yeomen, lazzari, and autochthons.

Only, then he goes and adds another stratum on the bottom end: the "human rubble of the old regime’s failed experiments." For human rubble, you could also substitute "white trash," which, according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash, has been a thing in the Anglo-American world for hundreds of years. Back in 1500, the Brits had a law to deal with "vagabonds and beggars." Nothing new on the human rubble front.

Now, by lazzari Yarvin refers to the "name for the Neapolitan underclass in the Bourbon era," and he includes the gang members in this classification. By saying that they are deracinated he means that they are uprooted -- uprooted yeoman that just need to be re-yeomanized. I don't think so. I agree that the lazzari are uprooted, but I don't agree that they were previously yeomen.

By autochthons Yarvin means pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, the "original inhabitants" of a place. They really cannot fit in today's society because they never learned to be bored, boring farmers sitting in one place watching the corn grow. Various commentators have noted that these pre-agricultural people tend to extinction when confronted by the modern world, as in native Americans, Australians aboriginals, and Amazon tribes.

Now I think that Yarvin has muddied the waters with his new strata. I like his armigers, or, as I would prefer, armigeri, just to make it sophisticated and Italian. But I think that yeomen is not a good fit. This is because I feel that to make it in the city you cannot be a yeoman right off the farm. You have to transform yourself into a bourgeois, a burgher, a townie. That's why I like Yarvin's Commoner from his Three Layer theory and my Responsible from my reductive Three Peoples theory. If you look at the heroes of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot novels, these agricultural yeomen had to transform themselves to make it in the new world of the nineteenth century. And they did.

See, I look at the lazzari, the autochthons, and the human rubble as "misfits." They do not fit in the modern world of the city, the employment at will, the hegemony of the market, the need to upgrade skills to keep yourself employable in the city economy. Moreover, they are people that do not really "get" how life operates in the city. They are Subordinate people that expect to live as a subordinate to someone who will make all the decisions and tell them what to do.

There are a ton of people that inhabit this Subordinate realm. The whole arc of labor unions, wage-hour laws, government pension systems and government health care are really manifestations of the fact that a lot of people don't want to be free burghers. They want to be taken care of. The only problem is that, as Yarvin says above, they tend to become "human rubble," the detritus from the latest wizard wheeze dei armigeri. I call them Little Darlings, because their descent is usually assisted by the armigeri enlisting them as special people in their political army, for their votes, and then abandoning them by the side of the road when they are no longer politically useful. As in white working class.

Now we like, with our modern conceit, to sneer at the old world of serfs and slaves. But you tell me what a corporate employee with life-time employment is, other than a serf. You tell me what a welfare recipient is, who goes to the government for money to live on, other than a slave. Oh yes, back in the day you could apply to become a slave to your local feudal lord. Slaves weren't all conquest slaves, or sold to the highest bidder in West African slave ports.

But I think it is nicer to call the misfits, the serfs, the slaves, as Subordinates. They are people that don't have the spirit, the chops, the cultural preparation to be Commoners in the city: not yet, maybe not ever. And that's OK

But let us at least admit that the lazzari, the autochthons, the "human rubble" are all "misfits," people that have not found a place in today's rapidly post-industrializing society.

And, by the way, suppose they never do find a place in today's society. Do we put them all on "reservations" where they can drink themselves to death? Or do we let them molder away in the countryside blacking out with OxyContin, like the white working class that is "dying of despair?"

Or do we make everyone go through post-industrial boot-camp? I mean, if it was copacetic to put a whole generation of young men through boot camp in World War II and then the GI Bill to beat the Nazis and make the kids into good Fifties factory workers and suburbanites, why not do it again?

Only, of course, I wouldn't trust i nostri amati armigeri to do it right. With their record, they would probably create a whole new category of "human rubble."