It’s interesting to try to figure out how the Amentan hair caste thing started, and why it’s so widespread. After all, colors are culturally constructed, and it doesn’t really make sense that multiple independent cultures would come up with it out of thin air. I think that its widespread nature is strong evidence for a common cultural ancestor- or for an actual biological basis for hair color correlation with skill.

The hypothesis that there’s a common cultural ancestor for the hair color thing doesn’t explain why the hair color thing developed at all. There’s no reason for all of the manual-labor-doing people to be grey-haired, after all, unless there’s something that links manual labor with grey hair initially. I would also expect that the different countries would have begun to develop different caste systems if it was all just culture.

So the simplest explanation is that hair color correlates biologically with skill.

The next interesting aspect of this is that, probably, society doesn’t really start out with all of these castes. If we’re assuming a reasonably Earth-like progression, probably the Amentan societies started out doing hunting and gathering. But then they settled down and did agriculture. After this, or maybe before, the people who wanted power/were good at administration/whatever, who had blue-haired genes, started to stratify power and amass large grain storages (or whatever). That was the first split. The blue-haireds ran things and the farming class was composed of people of various hair colors.

So then after that they needed people to keep track of everyday stuff. These people were predominantly yellow-gened. And then after that, maybe a significant while after that, the greens - most of whom were part of the proto-yellows - started to do art in order to contribute to religion and adulation of the blues.

And so on and so forth. I think that it’s likely that the oranges emerged from the yellows, and that the purples emerged rather late from the proto-greys. It’s also possible that different societies had different castes emerge at different times.

I also think that the reds emerged extremely early, since the idea of pollution seems very well-ingrained (though it could be one of those Victorian Era type things that everyone thinks is really super old but which totally isn’t). Moreover, if either the biological basis or the proto-society hypotheses are true, then the reds must have emerged early; waste and human refuse have been around since the beginning, after all.

Running with the “biological basis” thing, it’s possible that the proto-reds have an unusually high tolerance for disgusting things, and that perhaps this was initially correlated with criminality or something, explaining their low status.

Now I want to make a caste-hbd rp, except that I’m fairly sure that that’s within the Amentan Overton Window.

@luminousalicorn Does this check out?

Disclaimer: this is all based on this and some light Tumblr osmosis, I very possibly have gotten a lot of things very wrong.

- I don’t think you need anything extra to explain why reds are low-status, the fact that they have to touch dirt and are therefore associated with dirt in a society that’s neurotic about cleanliness is enough. Just look at the historical precedent. I think reds probably started out as the losers in the increasing inequality of early agricultural society, who ended up doing the most unpleasant and low-status jobs because that’s usually the role low-status people end up in.

- I think there may be significant neurotype differences between Amenta humans and Homo sapiens. The extreme aversion to dirt and elegant rigid social structure characterized by at-a-glance class legibility both read autism-ish to me. Amenta humans have lower sexual dimorphism than Homo sapiens, live twice as long, and have different breeding patterns, all of which suggests different evolutionary pressures. I think the average Amenta neurotype may be autistic-adjacent by Homo sapiens standards.

- The whole thing looks like the result of a selective breeding program by some ruling class who wanted their slaves color-coded for easy branding. It would explain a lot if Amenta humanity was once a slave race. Or maybe they did it to themselves by their sheer desire for easy class legibility. I wonder if originally hair color only very loosely correlated with caste, and the present arrangement started out as that thing reactionary movements do where they invent an idealized past that never actually existed and then seek to recreate it. Just have somebody invent the meme that different castes being visually indistinct is a kind of degeneracy and in the proper ideal social order of the ancestors you could tell caste just by looking at somebody, and a few millennia of social pressure and assortative mating might make it real, hardening caste lines from something like feudal classes to something like racial lines in the process. The process might have originally started as a reaction against increasing class mobility by conservatives during Amenta world’s equivalent of the Axial Age (some ancient Amentan analog of Julius Evola may have a lot to answer for).

- Orange and red are similar colors, and the messiness of real hominid features will probably make them even easier to confuse than an abstract color-wheel comparison would suggest. Having your empath caste look similar to your untouchable caste seems awkward. It seems interesting to consider the possibility they’re actually related though. High empathy and being less fussy about dirt might both be helpful in animal domestication, and animal tending would plausibly have been considered a dirty job in early farming communities.

- I remember reading somewhere that early Chinese states had problems keeping the peasants from running away into the wilderness, beyond the reach of the state. I get the impression this was a common reaction to oppressive state power historically. In the Americas escaped black slaves would run away beyond the frontiers of European control and form their own communities or assimilate into indigenous communities. Even today “get a cabin in the woods” is associated with radical escape from state society. Early states were often basically experienced by their subjects as glorified thieves, you lost little by running away, and the world had big swathes of habitable territory that weren’t under the control of a state until pretty recently in history. In Amenta rigid caste systems likely went hand in hand with state power; bureaucracies like their easy legibility, and a complicated rigid caste system is just the kind of thing that works better in big communities. I expect there would have been a persistent trickle of low caste people deciding to opt out by voting with their feet. That would probably have meant mostly purples (generic peasants were purple) and reds. Especially reds. Early state society would offer reds basically nothing but poverty, humiliation, and violent oppression. Red Island sounds utopian in the context of the modern world, where there basically are no frontiers anymore, but in many historical contexts it would have been quite feasible.

- Where do nomadic hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads fit into this? I’d assume ancestral hunter-gatherers would have been caste-less with an even mix of colors or mostly one color with the others rare random variation (the ancestral color was probably purple, or maybe grey - warrior and hunter have a fair amount of overlap - or maybe in ancestral hunter-gatherers it varied with ecological context, people in groups that got most of their calories from plants being mostly purple, people in groups that got most of their calories from big game being mostly grey). The thing I observed in the previous two paragraphs makes things more interesting though; a lot of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads might be descended from settled agriculturalists who ran away from the expansion of state power and the caste system. Especially, if you go with my idea of animal tenders having originally been a low-status red-orange caste, pastoral nomads might be descended from them. Imagine how terrifying red-orange haired Mongol/Hun analogs would have been to settled people on this world! I have to admit I really like that idea! The way color-caste works in pastoral nomads is more than a matter of curiosity about some minor corner of the worldbuilding, because pastoral nomads often militarily defeated and subjugated settled farmers, so the way color-caste works in pastoral nomads is going to matter to the way it works in state societies. Then again, maybe Amenta never domesticated the horse or anything equivalent, and pastoral nomads remained peripheral nuisances to states, never making the transition from “small rapscallion of a skeleton” to “FUCKMOUNTAIN DEATHMONSTER.”

- I don’t think statistical aptitude differences alone would explain how universal and stable the color-caste system seems to be, unless maybe they were very big. The issue with that explanation is that technological and social changes tend to change the meaning of being good at something.

Actually, I want to talk about that last point at length. Let’s map the history of Earth societies onto Amenta color-castes, based on my offhand historical knowledge, assuming that color correlates with aptitudes and assuming that we start with a system resembling the “canon” one with demographics and roles adjusted for an early state society (blue = nobles, grey = warriors, yellow = artisans, green = scribes and priests, orange = concubines and priests, purple = farmers, reds = untouchables):

- Egypt starts with a blue sacred king and a powerful green and orange priesthood. It develops conservatively, but I think there’d probably be a shift of power toward the grey caste over time. There are probably a lot of grey/blue late Pharaohs. Later in history, it comes under the domination of foreign societies which may have caste systems that developed much less conservatively.

- I don’t know too much about early Mesopotamia, but the color-caste system plausibly gets a big shake-up with the Gutian invasion, because the Gutians sound like the kind of group that might not share it.

- The Indus Valley civilization might have the same sort of basic arrangement as Egypt. The Aryans were semi-nomads who probably lack or have a different color-caste system. Possibly post-conquest they make their own new caste system, with themselves as the top caste ruling over the mostly purple pre-Aryan peasantry. The historical period maybe maps to at first domination by the grey Kshatriyas, then a soft take-over by the green Brahmins.

- China maybe starts out as a rather violent necrachy ruled by blue medium-kings with a powerful green-dominated priesthood (greens are the artists, I think, which fits with shamanic mediums) and a powerful grey caste of charioteers. The Zhou probably have a basically similar social structure to the Shang, so relative stability so far. The Warring States Period probably sees at first a shift of power to the grey caste. I remember reading a paper once that suggested China’s early bureaucratization was because its ancient feudal warrior nobility basically killed itself off through high-intensity warfare during the Warring States Period, and this is a plausible fate for greys; they are a demographically fragile caste since they’re at high risk of dying young by violence. So, the greys drive themselves below replacement rate reproduction and dwindle, and the state shifts into the hands of green bureaucrats and starts to recruit purples to keep the wars going. Late Warring States probably has grey kings with powerful green bureaucracies and purple mass armies. Qin Shi Huangdi is probably a grey, I guess, I don’t know his background. Liu Bang might be a grey or a purple. The meritocratic Confucian examination system probably creates a mixed mostly green and purple bureaucracy. The various nomad conquest dynasties are whatever color steppe nomads are (grey? purple? red-orange? mix?). The Hongwu Emperor is probably a purple. So basically by the Ming the caste system is radically transformed from what it was in the Shang.

- Japan starts with a blue sacred king and a powerful orange and green priesthood. Over time the blues, greens, and oranges lose power to the grey samurai, culminating in the grey-dominated Shogunate, in which the blue sacred king is retained as a symbolic figurehead while the grey Shogun actually runs the country.

You get the idea. Even if you assume aptitude differences, the fortunes of the different castes are going to fluctuate a lot over thousands of years, because technological and social changes are going to change the social value of being good at something. For instance, you may have noticed a general pattern where the locus of state power shifts from religion to military power; that’s a pattern I’ve noticed in real history, and I suspect it had something to do with increasing cosmopolitanism and social complexity, horse domestication, and the invention of the chariot. By the same token, the social value of greys is vulnerable to being undermined by any innovation that makes the things they’re good at less important in war.

I don’t know, maybe the kind of stuff I’m talking about happened and I just haven’t read about it. That’s very possible. I get the impression the color-caste system is supposed to be ... pretty homogenous worldwide in terms of its basic structure though. I think some post I saw mentioned there having been a big (global?) empire that fell at some point, so maybe that explains it. Though I think that’d at least leave a fairly strong awareness that things used to be very different in a lot of places, unless the empire lasted a really long time or was quite totalitarian.

I wonder if neurotype differences might explain a lot though. “Extreme fear of contamination and elegant rigid social structures with social class legible at a glance” has more than a whiff of the right-wing authoritarian personality type to me. Maybe Amenta humans are just a lot more submissive than Homo sapiens.

*whispers* “bullying” is what we call it when kids treat each other the way adults treat kids

I mean, I kinda see what you’re saying but like, if an adult had treated me the way other kids did it would’ve been called abuse not just “the way adults treat kids.”

(I don’t really know how to express how angry the way kids are treated makes me but non-abusive adults don’t treat kids the way bullies do. I’m not saying that that treatment is necessarily better just different.)

I’m not trying to dismiss the experiences of anyone who’s a victim of bullying from fellow young people. but I think it’s worth acknowledging the hypocrisy of the fact that dynamics that are problematized among age peers are normalized across generational lines. adults berate and belittle kids, use fear and strength to control them, hit them, talk over them, gaslight and victim-blame them, mock their interests, target them for their identities, embarrass them for their flaws and failures, use their insecurities as pressure points…and most of it never gets called abusive.

Yeah no I totally get what you’re saying, and I agree with the principle I just disagree with the comparison. I understand you didn’t mean to sound dismissive but as someone who was bullied for most of my life it /feels/ dismissive.

I also think it’s worth mentioning that bullying is absolutely not taken even remotely seriously. so I would disagree that it’s hypocritical, because I think some of the things you described are frankly probably more likely to be taken seriously than bullying.

Bullying is never called abuse, it’s “kids will be kids” it’s “oh okay nice kids” it’s punishing the victim for daring to fight back, it’s putting the victim and their abuser in a room together so they can “talk it out”, it’s “oh they only want a reaction, just ignore them” on repeat three million times it’s every teacher you’ve ever had knowing exactly what goes on in their classroom and not taking it seriously enough to bother to put a stop to it, bullying the but of a million jokes on TV, or the origins story of countless “bad guys.”

ultimately, bullying’s just seen as a normal and expected secondary/high school experience, in exactly the same way that a lot of those behaviours are just seen as normal and expected parenting technique.

that’s…probably a good perspective for me to hear. because as a teacher I hear a lot about anti-bullying strategies and initiatives, and it’s usually from the same people trading tips about how to enforce control over kids in ways that sound remarkably similar to what those things are trying to stop. easy to forget there are so many people who are less hypocritical because they really don’t care about either problem.

This post made me kind of uncomfortable, and I’ve figured out why. This model implies that bullying is just kids using the social strategies that adult authority figures use on them. I think that biases people away from noticing a very important difference between the way adults inflict unpleasant experiences on other adults and on children and the way kids inflict unpleasant experiences on other kids.

It’s true that adults often subject kids to highly unpleasant experiences, but they usually do so instrumentally. A teacher will punish you for getting bad grades, or for breaking the rules, for instance. There’s a fairly straightforward cause and effect, and fairly obvious things you can do to appease the authority figure (you may not actually be able to do them, but at least there’s a clear instrumental aim). The closest mainstream adult hierarchical relationships come to bullying that I can think of is stereotypical drill instructor and PE teacher techniques, but even there there’s a clear instrumentality to it; the drill instructor doesn’t just yell at and degrade the recruits for the lulz, he’s working to establish dominance and modify their minds and behavior.

Abusive interactions I experienced from peers was something quite different. The descriptive term that comes to my mind for it is casual recreational sadism. Here’s the kind of stuff other kids in middle and high school would do to me:

- Take advantage of periods of forced proximity to trash-talk me at length to my face, and engage in spontaneous mockery.

- Deliberately lure large numbers of pigeons toward me by throwing scraps on the ground at lunch (I have a weird disgust/phobia thing about pigeons).

- Steal my things (pencils, pencil sharpeners etc.).

- Throw things (e.g. a kleenex box) at me, mark me with pencils, spit soda on me etc..

- Suggest other girls were interested in me sexually, or pretend to be sexually interested in me, which was hilarious because the idea that anyone would be attracted to me was clearly absurd.

- Trip me up or engage in low-key physical intimidation. I was relatively lucky here that stereotypical “let’s beat up the nerd lol!” stuff didn’t seem to be really a thing at my schools; there seemed to be a tacit understanding that physical bullying should be kept to a level low enough that it could be dismissed as no big deal, I’m guessing because it was one thing the administration would take seriously.

These things rarely seemed to be direct responses to “bad behavior” or attempts to achieve some instrumental aim. I’m sure there was an important dynamic of these things being considered OK because I was seen as weird and annoying and a bad person and therefore vaguely deserving of it, but there was no direct instrumental goal. Rather, these acts seemed to be a form of entertainment. It was simply amusing to hurt and humiliate me. I remember reading a self-defense site years back that talked about various motivations for violence, one of which was predatory violence, in which the violence itself is the goal (the guy wants to beat your ass in order to experience the pleasure of beating your ass). Teenage horizontal abuse as I experienced it was like that.

The moralistic logic to schoolyard bullying as I know it isn’t “if you do thing I don’t like, I will punish you” it’s “if you do things I don’t like, I will reclassify you as a social/moral untouchable, and then I will have moral and social license to hurt you whenever it amuses me.”

The best adult analogy to how schoolyard bullying works that I can think of isn’t parent/child and teacher/student relationships, it’s the relationship between online trolls and “lolcows.”

An adult who openly related to children this way would be considered weird and awful and creepy and more than a little pathetic and probably mentally ill, and would probably be kept away from children. I’m sure there are abusive adults who relate to children under their authority this way in their hearts (the psychological mechanisms that underlie casual recreational sadism don’t just magically disappear at 18), but I expect they usually disguise it under a veneer of instrumental punishment, because being too open in indulging their sadism would harm them socially.

Which kind of gets to the important thing here: I notice people started treating me radically better when I left high school, and I think a big part of that is casual recreational sadism is much less socially acceptable in the adult world. There’s probably adult subcultures where you can get away with it (such as, I suspect, subcultures that are big on machismo), but generally the adult world seems to have stronger civility norms than the teenage world; civility norms strong enough to preclude a culture of normalized casual recreational sadism. Adults experience more pressure to hide their sadism (behind closed doors, behind moralistic outrage, behind instrumental punishment), and that circumscribes it.

The toxic culture of middle/high school probably does have a lot to do with the way adults treat teenagers (e.g. the way they’re given few sources of status besides popularity games), but I don’t think teenage bullying is an extension of the logic of the way children are treated by adult authority figures. I think it’s feeds on its own, unusually toxic social dynamics.