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Creative Warriors vs. Status-quo Courtiers
A while back on the Yellow Brick Road I came up with a way to divide up the humans in modern society. I called it “Three Peoples”.
The idea is that there are three kinds of people.
There are “People of the Subordinate Self. Call them slaves, serfs, workers, clients, marginalized, oppressed: these are people that do not experience ‘agency.’”
There are “People of the Responsible Self. Call them commoners, citizens, middling sorts, “deplorables”… These are people that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.”
Then there are “People of the Creative Self. These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary.”
But now I want to divide the People of the .Creative Self into two parts. This is because I think that creative people come in two kinds: real creatives risking everything to create something new, and fake creatives, cosplaying creativity.
Let us call the true creatives: Warriors; and let us call the fake creatives: Courtiers.
Now, in the good old days, the Warriors were really warriors, leaders of armies and conquests: Alexander the Great, that led his Macedonians into Persia and western India. The Courtiers, especially in the courts of the absolute monarchs, wore silk breeches and conspired with and against each other for place and position in the Court of the King.
Today? I think the Warriors are best understood as living and working in the business and especially the tech start-up culture. The Courtiers are best understood as living and working in the administrative state: outside the market economy, in bureaucracy, administration, regulation, education, and the vast Grant Industrial Complex that lives off government grants. Or they are cosplaying as artists or revolutionaries.
The Warriors are men in the arena, trying out new ideas that may change the world. The Courtiers are people in the system working to keep the regime going and prevent change although they tell us that they want Hope and Change.
This really crystallized for me when reading about Marc Andreessen’s visit to the Biden White House in 2024 to discuss AI. The Biden people had a Plan. They said:
We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups.
That’s when the tech lords, previously aligning Democrat, realized: “Yep, we’re for Trump.”
You see, in today’s Warrior culture you know that a new technological revolution cannot be “two or three large companies” directed by political regulation and control. For the tech lords that is not how the world works. But for the Courtier set, control and stability (for them) is the name of the game, and they know no other.
Exactly: ships passing in the night.
And AI is the new battlefront between the two cultures: start-up vs. stability. On the one hand you have Elon Musk talking about data centers in space. On the other hand you have local communities — and our environmentalist friends — rising up against the disruption of a data center in their community.
This is nothing new. Back in the late 18th century it was hand-loom weavers — machine wreckers — rising up against the disruption of machine textile industry. Then it was the Duke of Wellington worrying about the disruption of railways encouraging the poor to move about. Then it was workers rebelling against the steel industry in the late 19th century. Did you know that steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s dad was a hand loom weaver? Then it was buggy-whip makers losing their jobs to the auto industry. Then it was auto workers losing their jobs to the computerized factory. And now, probably, it is bureaucrats and administrators losing their jobs to AI.
Notice how AI is the complete realization of the startup culture. You have a good idea; you tell AI to make you an app; and you are in business next week.
The point is that, every time, the partisans of stability get overwhelmed by the new technology. And by the way, in the process of The Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, real per-capita income has increased by 20 times. That’s 3,000 percent! In two centuries. There’s never been anything like it.
Six technological revolutions in 300 years. There’s never been anything like it. And maybe, in the AI revolution or the next-but-one, we will blow the place up. Now do you see why Elon Musk wants to make humans interplanetary?
The story of the last 300 years is the story of business Warriors reinventing the world every generation. And the story of the last 300 years is the story of Courtiers trying to control the political process to get or maintain power and maintain stability.
I’m with the Warriors.
| Thu, 12 Nov 2026 03:46:03 GMT |
Why Democrats are Planning Hearings, Impeachments, Etc.
The mainstream media are announcing that Democrats plan lots of hearings, investigations, and impeachments of Trump and his administration in the months to come.
This is not new. President Roosevelt invented the game for modern players in 1933, when he went after Harding and Coolidge and Hoover’s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Amity Shlaes:
Roosevelt relished lawfare and often chose tax court as his battlefield… The president sent others to jail over taxes — the publisher Moses Annenberg is an example — but concentrated most of his firepower on Mellon.
Well, Mellon was a banker, a “malefactor of great wealth”, or at least an “economic royalist.” Wikipedia:
Mellon was diagnosed with cancer in November 1936.[113] His health declined in 1937, and he died on August 26, 1937… Months after Mellon’s death, the Board of Tax Appeals handed down a ruling exonerating Mellon of all tax fraud charges.[115]
And now our Democratic friends are planning a veritable orgy of investigations, “to probe alleged self-enrichment, financial conflicts of interest, and business dealings involving President Donald Trump and his family… Elon Musk’s leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)”, and the impeachment of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
But why? It’s pretty simple, really.
There is no politics without an enemy — Curtis Yarvin.
Politics is the mere continuation of war by other means — my distortion of Clausewitz.
In other words, if you are in politics you are someone that likes to fight the enemy.
Now, it is my belief that Republicans don’t do the investigations and hearings and impeachment thing too much, and I think there are two reasons for this.
Politics is not really a religion for Republicans; we don’t expect politics to change the world. But Democrats have a religious belief that, with the correct politics, they can create a perfect world of peace and justice.
Republicans don’t get the backing of the media echo chamber that Democrats enjoy.
Also, we don’t get any cooperation from The Blob, as Democrats did from Deputy FBI Director Mark Felt in the Nixon investigations, and from all kinds of IC creatures in the Trump Russia investigations.
About religion. Even Google AI in a “comparison of leftist revolution and christian eschatology” agrees that:
Leftist revolutionary theory (specifically classical Marxism and its derivatives) and Christian eschatology share striking structural and psychological parallels, despite their fundamentally different views on the supernatural.
Both frameworks offer a grand historical narrative that moves from an original paradise, through a period of suffering and conflict, to an ultimate, irreversible state of universal justice.
The difference is that the left’s religion is mixed with politics, even though in the US constitution the First Amendment states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…
The reason for the separation of Church and State is that our Founders lived in the aftermath of brutal religious wars, most notably the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648 in Central Europe.
But the cults and the crazies are always with us, as in this article touching on the Zizians and AntiFa. And the whole lefty culture of protest and activism is really nothing more than a secularized religion devoted to the overthrow of the oppressors. Think of your average peaceful protest as a secular religious service.
The problem for our Democratic friends is that the average American is not a member of their secular church, and they don’t see the need to purge the nation of evil oppressors, except for billionaires and big corporations.
Also, I would say that, back in the 1970s, Americans sorta believed that the attack on Nixon was on the up-and-up. A lot fewer people believe that the attacks on Trump were on the up-and-up.
To be continued, at least for the next two years.
| Wed, 11 Nov 2026 01:10:53 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Communism is a hammer that we use to destroy the enemy — Mao Zedong
The economic is the distinction between useful and harmful — Carl Schmitt
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: The left experienced as a Great Reaction, a lurch back from the modern to the primitive
