My Three Peoples vs. Yarvin's Three Layers

It was pretty exciting to read part one of Curtis Yarvin's "Clear Pill" a month ago. He has a three peoples theory just like I do. Here is how he describes it.

As Orwell wrote, all societies have three human layers. We may call ours gentry, commoners, and clients. The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

He inspired me to catalogue all the three layer systems that I knew about, thus:

Author	Top	Middle	Bottom	Relig/Culture/ Political
George Orwell	Inner Party	Outer Party	Proles	Political
Karl Marx	Bourgeoisie	Communists	Proletarians	Political
Auguste Comte	Positive	Metaphysical	Theological	Cultural
New Left	Racists, etc.	Activists	Victims	Political
Woke Left	White oppressors	Allies	Members of oppressed groups	Political
Charles Murray	Belmont	Everybody Else	Fishtown	Cultural
Curtis Yarvin	Gentry	Commoners	Clients	Political
J.R.R. Tolkien	Elves	Hobbits	Dwarves	Cultural
Joel Kotkin	Clerisy	Yeomanry	Serfs	Political
Z-Man, Z-man	Cloud People	Dirt People	[lower classes]	Political
Dennis Price	Cloud People	Dirt People	[dependents]	Political
David Goodhart	Anywheres	Somewheres	[Inbetweeners]	Political
John Derbyshire	Ice People	??	Sun People	Political
Vikings	Earls	Peasants	Thralls (slaves)	Political
Hammurabi	Superiors/ Propertied	Commoners/ freed men	Slaves	Political
Christopher Chantrill	Creatives	Responsibles	Subordinates	Cultural
Christopher Chantrill	Ruling Class	Middle Class	Little Darlings	Political
Christopher Chantrill	Hero (sacrificial or ego)	One God	Many Gods	Religious

When Yarvin gets into part two of the "Clear Pill," he sets forth what I think is the key to understanding our liberal friends in the educated liberal gentry. Yarvin says that the ruling class obtains the support of the gentry class by playing "thymotic anthems" to the gentry, where "thymos is somewhere between ambition, honor, and vanity."

Update 2/3/20: See also Yarvin's latest on pistos (loyalty) and thymos (ambition) in a later piece.

And it's not just anthems, but cold hard cash delivered to supporters. You are ambitious? Easiest way forward is to help the ruling class with one of its projects. You want honor? Well so do we all, but the short way to get it is to help the ruling class. You are vain? Of course not. But if you were it sure would help if you joined the ruling class and made out that you were helping fundamentally transforming America from its shameful past of racist sexist homophobia and bending the arc of history towards justice.

My maxim that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice" is supposed to poke a hole in the above conceit. Because the point is that everything any ruling class does is force. Of course it is, because otherwise it would happen on its own. And so everything a ruling class does amounts to injustice. And so all the gentry in the ruling class's officer corps are conceited creeps promoting injustice.

I've been having a lot of fun with Yarvin's three layers in the past couple of weeks, and the only problem is that I'm not happy with "clients." I converted "clients" into "victims" in a piece for The American Thinker over the weekend, but that was really about "fake victims" or gentry people -- such as feminists and gays -- defining themselves as victims in order to beat up on the commoners. But identifying the "clients" as "victims" doesn't quite do it because, after all, most of the lower class are not victims; they are just dependent. So I think the best word for the lower class is "subordinates."

So I'd define Yarvin's three layers as: gentry, commoners, and subordinates.

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious, and interested in power; the commoners are suburbanites, moderately skilled and competent; the subordinates are dependent and tribal, candidates for victimhood.

 But how does Yarvin's layers intersect with my Three Peoples theory? When I think about it, I reckon that my three sectors do not exactly match his but rather overlap.

I think that my People of the Creative Self is the top end of Yarvin's gentry layer, who I expect, see themselves as more responsible than creative. There are, for a start, a lot more people that think of themselves as "creative" than are really creative, in the sense of Nietzsche's "free spirits" or Bronze Age Pervert's "pirates." If we think of the educated liberal Subaru-driving gentry, we would expect most of them to experience themselves as responsible citizens, concerned about justice issues, rather than as creative free spirits.

I think that my People of the Responsible Self overlaps the low end of Yarvin's gentry layer and the top half of his commoner layer. We see that in the Trump phenomenon. In my view, the enthusiastic "white working class" are clearly commoners, but barely responsibles. Trump supporters clearly see President Trump as protecting people like them. On the other hand, Trump has clearly driven away educated gentry women from the Republican Party, for he clearly offends their sense of honor and vanity.

I think that my People of the Subordinate Self tracks pretty well what Yarvin calls clients. The point about subordinates, clients, proles, victims, whatever, is that they expect to be protected at a closer level than the nation state. Since they are not really literate, they conduct their lives at the person-to-person level. They really need to have personal contact with some leader or patron to whom they owe fealty. The bureaucratic welfare state is not the ideal way to socialize such people.

One way of understanding the Three Peoples, or three layers, is through belonging. Creatives and gentry clearly feel they belong to something higher and better than nation states. Their world is clearly supranational, although not quite global. Responsibles and definitely commoners are nationalists, they identify with and belong to the nation state. The reason for Trump and Boris and the other national populists is that they have exploited a hole in the world view of the oh-so-sophisticated suprnationalists in the gentry.

The thing about the subordinates and clients and proles is that they cannot relate to being nation-state citizens. They need a loyalty closer to home. However, I would say that they are suspended part way between sub-national tribalism and nationalism. For the left found out long ago that their working-class supporters identified themselves as German workers, and British workers, and never identified with "workers of the world unite."

Notice how clients, victims, and my Little Darlings track. In all cases we are talking about how the ruling class or their gentry supporters enlist the subordinates into their political battalions -- in return for free stuff -- where the subordinates in their ranks-and-files are to be the shock troops of the ruling class's power project. And the whole point is to use the clients and victims to keep the commoners from getting any ideas above their station.