There’s been considerable demand in the Manosphere for a replacement to Vox Day’s famous Alpha-Omega sociosexual ranking system. While that system has been incredibly insightful, predictive and influential, the fact that its primary metric is sexual success is a limitation in as sexually screwball a society as the West has become. I myself qualify as both a Delta (by behavioral traits) and Omega (by sexual success). Therefore, I’ve come up with a political/economic ranking system. (Personality ranking systems already exist in quantity.)
The Four Medieval Archetypes:
Most people start off as Pawns with neither much success nor naturally caring about our fellow man. It’s the natural state of the human soul. The defining characteristic of Pawns is their willingness to trade their limited resources for the protection and patronage of the successful. The direct implication here is they let their motivations be defined by others or the needs of the moment; they don’t need much in the way of abstract morality.
As people gain experience and opportunities, shifting right tends to happen more quickly than shifting up. The Merchant is the “self-made man”. He’s confident enough to take risks, willing to be unpopular and defines his own path rather than accepting a preconceived one. He is not necessarily wealthy or working sales.
Like Pawns, Kings are less concerned with doing right than with gaining power. The difference is they’ve reached the point where they are the ones calling the shots in society. Kings and Pawns seek each other out the former need minions and the latter want a share of the King’s success.
Knights also have society-directing power but are less interested in using it for selfish gain. They tend to be driven either by ideology or by correcting wrongs committed against them earlier in life or in warding off threats to general society. Knights find kinship with Merchants who, being independent, are always nervous about being robbed by Kings. In fact, the most common form of Knight, impartial law enforcement, is often directly funded by Merchants.
Pawns do not automatically graduate to Kings and Merchants don’t always graduate to
I’ve tried hard to not have any category be designated as the “bad” category because any ranking system like this works best when people honestly self-identify into the correct categories. Anybody wishing a morality ranking system should check out Christianity and give up.
Where Do You Fit?
The dominance axis is easy. It’s a question of how much ability you have to influence those around you. A fat bank account helps, too. Supervisors, business owners, pundits and church leaders are all fairly dominant whereas work that involves little social contact or impact on society are not.
The selfish-social axis is harder. Maslow’s hierarchy provides a “current” pushing one rightward but one’s worldview and natural abilities also play large roles. Indicative questions:
Do I view life as a zero-sum game?
Can I provide for myself during hard times?
Do I have strong in-group preferences?
Would I continue working if I won the lottery?
Don’t be too quick to self-identify as a Merchant. Being a Pawn is safe, effective and rewarding with minimal effort. All that most people want from life is knowing that they and their families will be provided for.
Women never reach the Knight category. That’s a near-impossible level of mental abstraction and independence for them.
Implications/Predictions
Kings favor aggression and constant, low-level violence, much like the sexual Alpha and for a similar reason: maintaining one’s success becomes its own job. Women being natural Pawns, are attracted first to Kings and then to Pawns. Successful Merchants can score women in a stable society but their independent lives can become liabilities if wifey can frivorce them during the inevitable low points.
Identity politics are the bread and butter of the King/Pawn setup. Clear definitions of loyalties and a lack of (acted-upon) selfish counter-interests make it a very strong setup. The price, however, is slavery and lack of imagination. The Merchant/Knight setup maximizes freedom and innovation at the price of solidarity. The KP setup is extremely hostile towards the MK setup because given the chance, Kings will harm people who aren’t personally loyal to them before they harm people who are. If they don’t have a strong protector then many will make a point of doing so. MKs aren’t naturally hostile in return–your life, your choice, they might say–but not being stupid, they realize that strong Kings are existential threats. This is typically what gives rise to Knights in the first place.
A possible reason so many Americans were able to be duped into supporting weaponized immigration is because the Baby Boomers contained an unusually high percentage of Merchants. Lacking the strong in-group preferences of Pawns, supporting immigration for the emotional hit of virtue-signaling was an easy mistake, especially since the perpetrators of modern immigration had a stranglehold on news media at the time to prevent feedback.
Many Merchants today wish they were Pawns but can’t find a King offering them a tolerable deal. A typical example is an alt-Righter who refers to Donald Trump as “the God-Emperor”. I don’t think they mean it ironically; I think they mean it as, they hope the current President sweeps all their troubles away and brings them the success, safety and (frankly) continued existence that the Left tries so hard to exterminate.
You made some good points, but if I may offer my opinion, I think it could be expanded further.
The game of chess, and a deck of cards, could both serve as a foundation for the names of the archetypes.
For example, ‘Knights’ could be broken down into ‘White Knights’, and ‘Black Knights’.
You could add ‘Bishops’, as men who are Christians, or inclined towards morality.
Rooks? Queens? Jacks? Aces? Jokers? All are open to definitions and development.
I didn’t choose the Social Dominance and Independence axes randomly. Our society is not merely in a tailspin; it is converting from concepts of right & wrong to concepts of victory & defeat, from reliance upon principles to reliance upon warlords. So many Knights have sold out the trust put in them by Merchants that increasingly, the way to survive is (perceived to be) practicing identity politics for the sake of grabbing slices of taxpayer pie. God forbid what will happen once the economic collapse hits and there’s no more tax revenue, only the political equivalent of street gangs with no concept of shared humanity.
Vox’s sociosexual ranking was valuable because it was describing something for which we didn’t have the language: the differentiation between sexual haves, have-nots and sellouts. Similarly, I chose a ranking that will be useful as the One World government forms and independent men are once again perceived as existential threats by The Powers That Be. The power struggles, motivations and relationships will be, I hope, easily describable by these archetypes.
converting from concepts of right & wrong to concepts of victory & defeat, from reliance upon principles to reliance upon warlords.
…….
Survival is it’s own morality, and right vs wrong is a luxury for when your survival isn’t threatened, and nothing says your survival is threatened like the ecconmic reality of the last What? Near on 50 years coupled with becoming a racial minority in the land of your fore fathers
To misquote Stalin, one threat to your survival is justifiable self-defense. One million threats to your survival is democracy.