sport of sacred spherical cows
In time—with widespread availability of printing technology—a fourth estate would emerge: the press. Having never been subsumed into form of government itself, the press would demonstrate the role of institutional power to check the power of other estates; thereby sovereign power.
It's not about the constitution of a legislative body or of courts (which also seated lords), but the cohesive power of each estate to influence and interfere with the interests of the others, thereby society itself.
sport of sacred spherical cows
Our second estate, in lieu of letters patent or other fons honorum, stands not so much as aristocracy as it does as plutocracy—those of oligarch classposture—running a historical gamut of plantation owners, shipping merchantilists, war profiteers, media figures, bankers & treasurers, holders of pre-revolutionary estates (manor lords), real estate magnates (a word for lords), ship & rail tycoons (another word for lords), oil monopolists & speculators, industrial capitalists, and chain retailers.
sport of sacred spherical cows
In the U.S., we had no national state church, and likewise no titled nobility, and yet we nonetheless have developed our own centers of institutional power. In many ways our estates still mirrored those of what came before.
Our first estate is that of our secular religion—electoralism. Our kayfabe panto institutional political parties exercising a great deal of power over the epistemology, the ethics, and—as has become increasingly apparent—the metaphysics of collective discourse and phronesis.
sport of sacred spherical cows
More recently, the ranks of oligarch classposture, the second estate, have expanded to include media consolidators & computer technologists.
However new and novel their means and money, these are our cognate of the lords temporal. Not peerage so much as landed gentry, where here the role of landlord extends to ownership and control of ships, media properties and outlets, money supply, statutory monopolies and corporate trusts, means of production, monopsonies, and other societal infrastructure.
sport of sacred spherical cows
Where our first estate, in its authority over doxa and pragmatics, relates back to the lords of once religious authority, and likewise our second estate, representing a categorically delimitable class by wealth if not by title, relates back to the lords of once aristocratic privilege, our third estate does not map nearly as cleanly.
French third estate was comprised of both peasants and bourgeoisie. So too the wealthy and not-so-wealthy commoners of England.
Our third estate bucks this custom.
sport of sacred spherical cows
Our third estate evolved from another categorical demarcation: slavery, servitude and poverty.
From the beginning, our third estate was not everyone not part of the first two estates, as in France, nor a commons, as in England, but those not of the political or plutocratic classes who nonetheless had suffrage, the franchise, eligibility to vote.
Originally, even as the second estate was defining itself through control of infrastructure and markets, the third estate knew itself as land-holders.
sport of sacred spherical cows
As voting expanded to those who didn't own land, and then to the formerly enslaved and to women, the contours of our third estate shifted, but always so as to preserve identification with privilege.
The term "middle class", at the time of the revolution meaning untitled yet well-bred or wealthy, came to denote this protean posture within Usian society. The phrase would become a flattering empty signification, "class" as self-determined audience surrogate, an everyman of self-worthy achievement.
sport of sacred spherical cows
In time, term that once referred to refined manner and ample means, came to assimilate the sense—even the popular glorification—of worker, while nonetheless held in distinction from the laboring classes.
To be middle class was paradoxically to have earned and to further retain—through hard work—one's social position above the "working class".
Such autohagiographic identification, having donned the mantle of proletariat as raiment of common preeminence, we refer to as perquisitive classposture.
sport of sacred spherical cows
Literally, thoroughgoing habitude or bearing of seeking property, or more generally, seeking perquisites, that is, perks—this is perquistive classposture, our third estate.
Pursuit of happiness as class consciousness of plebeian success, interests of our third estate are not those of under-privileged laboring poor, nor those of lumpen classpostures, nor especially those of global majority subjected to our metropole.
Third estate wield their identity as workers in conservation of accrued perks.
sport of sacred spherical cows
Having thus enumerated first three estates of the Usian realm, as distinct from branches of sovereign government—which estates in checking each the others, do check in turn—we now turn to the remaining estates, for there remain two more.
Where the domain of our first estate, kayfabe panto, is our collective discourse and phronesis, the domain of our fourth estate, consensus media, is our collective lore and aesthetics. The first rendering our doctrine and praxis; the fourth our myth and desire.
sport of sacred spherical cows
Which is to say, our fourth estate exercises greater institutional power than even the press of yore.
Partly, this reflects the secularization of the first estate. Our institution of arbitrating the cosmological balance of good and evil, having shed its role of keeper of parochial history and patron of public art, left a vacuum that consensus media has come to fill.
Yet also, this would seem to be a consequence of the democratization of media itself, both in its production and its consumption.
sport of sacred spherical cows
Yet if the press—which would become our consensus media—was, as fourth estate, a newcomer to the estates of the realm, the last of the estates is younger still.
Our fifth estate being armed enforcement.
Where, in historical past, a capacity for the enactment of violence might variously—though in different measure and with different expediency—be organized by any of the estates of a realm, and subsequently such capacity would come to be monopolized by the sovereign, same has since metastasized.
sport of sacred spherical cows
Which is to say, what was once a monopoly on violence has grown and spread to become its own institutional base of power.
Proliferation of fifth estate consumes ever more resources, spreading to and disguising itself as other organs of society, invading, colonizing and degrading once robust institutions, even as such tumors starve other institutions of vitality.
Having escaped matrix of sovereign power, our fifth estate now operates as a check on the sovereign—alongside the other four estates.
sport of sacred spherical cows
Usian children are taught that branches of our peculiar Constitutional government exist in balance of mutually assured inspection. As if the sovereign were some finely-tuned, self-contained, perpetual-motion machine, ticking onward in clockwork equilibrium.
Conflation of branches with estates feeds this imaginary.
Yet estates of the Usian realm are not said branches, instead acting each to contend and collude with the others in tensegrity across said branches.
Such tensions brought us to now.
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