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.
