CLASS STRUCTURE

The actuality is that Dudes are emerging as a new, self-determined Class in 21st C. America. Following are definitions of three major class stratum, based less on the traditional economic standard and more on lifestyle/value systems. In no order:

DUDES – Places greatest importance on being Individual. Prefers to develop Individual Characteristics (either imposed/manufactured or discovered inherent). Information/object/commodity and/or social community. This has its positive aspects, such as creativity and innovation, and its negative aspects, such as social alienation, empty novelty, universal irony, cynicism, and dead-end nihilism.

FOLKS – Primary awareness is of Group; a Folk sees itself as a piece within a whole. The Group is religious, ethnic, or regional, into which the Folk has been born.

DICKS – This is the active scaler of corporate, political, or social ladders, for the express goal of dominance. The values and goals of this person are socially determined, yet glorify the imperial individual. This is the common but essentially conflicted life template of the Dick.
The group is named after the common slang for male genitalia, implicating the overwhelmingly masculine content and character of almost all power structures of recorded civilization.

ZOMBIES/FIENDS – This type has a personal fixation that tends to incessantly draw the majority of a human’s energy and focus. A true Zombie or Fiend is isolated from a sense of humanity – it may indulge its fixation in the company of like monsters or sympathetic dudes, but is desperately aware of the condition: every man for himself. GHOULS are another identified Monster type, with the behavior of a Zombie but no discernable fixation. Observing the Ghoul, one is reminded of mind-control slave conspiracy theories.
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An individual is never 100% Dude or Folk or Dick or Monster, but possesses and demonstrates qualities of each as he moves within different aspects of his life: self-development(dude), family and social relationships (folk), arenas of wage-earning (dick), and obsessions (monster). However, every person will display a primary alignment with one of the groups. This is referred to as a “strong” association. A person may change their group alignment within their lifetime.

Dudes are emerging from a national cultural struggle between the dominant Folk and Dick class identities, which are naturally polarized, much as the traditional masculine father and feminine mother. The identity qualities of Dick and Folk are so predominant in our historical social landscape that we suggest all dudes lean one way or the other, and evidently tend to congregate with the like subsets.



Dudes and Folk

Often, dudes have to define themselves against a folk upbringing, reassessing the values that have been passed down to them from their families, schools, churches, corporate environments, and so on. (Please note the Hornby Rule, wherein a dude temporarily suspends the judgment of his primary dude value system when considering or interacting with the individuals of his native folk.) Folk-structures tend to promote conformity, which is not bad in itself. It is through elaborate folk structures that great traditions have been passed down, often in a non-hierarchical, organic way, and these traditions provide us with the cultural, symbolic “raw materials,” so to speak, which we dudes may rearrange as artists to produce our own dude-selves.

The strong influence of Folk upbringing compels Dudes to participate in Groups where individuals share a valued quality, activity or aspect of identity. There are innumerable examples of these subcultures, from burlesque theater to knitting circles to community-supported agriculture to guerrilla bike-riding. The Group can take occasional or overwhelming prominence in a dude’s life, depending on the dude and the activity, and in cases of heavy involvement, might result in a dude’s personal transition (back) to folk. For example, a dude might come into a Group before he has formed a substantial chunk of his own value system. The Group feels familiar and the ideas and attitudes he finds therein are more developed extensions of his own inklings. The dude might then personally espouse a kind of allegiance to and emulation of the Group that is Folk in character. In another case, a strong dude might be moved by social injustice to band together with other similarly-oriented dudes in a Group that addresses and combats the perceived injustice. If the Group’s fellow members and goals take prominence in the dude’s life, then she, too, is moving from a Dude to a Folk lifestyle.

Babymaking is the concrete way of transforming partnered dudes into “Genetic Folk”. In response to a baby, a great number of young dudes will abandon the full-time dude lifestyle for some combination of Dick and Folk (economic and familial) existence, faithfully if decreasingly retaining contact with some friend(s) or preoccupation from fondly regarded Dude years.

Dude/Folk hybrid

So: any grouping of Dudes can, with enough individual fervor, act as a Folk Group. But is there a Dude Type that stands out as a Dude/Folk hybrid? Because the dude and folk tend to embody polarized orientations (the individual versus the collective), this becomes tricky, but not impossible, territory. We have personally known some Proto-Hippies that have pulled this off quite successfully.


Dude/Dick hybrids

It is less difficult to identify Dude/Dick hybrids, since the two groups overlap in their heightened regard for the individual. One manifestation is the self-dubbed “Rock Star”, the guy who sidesteps his or her own mediocrity by being aggressively enthusiastic about the objects of “his” or “her” taste. In this way, it places its self at the pinnacle of some self-defined pyramid, experiencing at least the illusion of (cultural) power dominance. See Dude Training for origins of Rock Stars.

The “Motivated Hipster” (see Performance Tempo Manifesto) is a more productive or visionary version of the Rock Star, actually engaged in the development of its own social extension. The Motivated Hipster succeeds in achieving relative cultural power through a ruthless pursuit of achievement, most notably engaging others towards its end without returning the favor.

The Dude/Dick hybrid announces itself most physically in the Sausage Party, a common gathering of self-identified “bros” (may include a small content of girlfriend [fuck accessory] or otherwise tamed vagina). Sausage parties are celebrations of shared maleness that stand as islands of relief from wild vaginas that naturally compromise and question the evident power of the dick. Sausage parties often focus on a shared hobby or consumable, such as sports, music, comic books, tai chi or booze. Explicit competition or mastery of the subject recreates a familiar and reassuring power structure to place his self within the sausage grouping.