In a world obsessed with labels, Socialist, Liberal, Republican, Christian, Muslim, Atheist… it’s easy to think that people’s beliefs and behaviors fit neatly into categories. But strip away the labels, and patterns emerge that are more fundamental, rooted in how humans relate to authority and act in society. These patterns can be understood as five archetypes:
Agorists – Live by their own rules. They prioritize personal freedom, voluntary exchange, and autonomy, bypassing formal systems entirely. Agorists see life as a network of interactions rather than a hierarchy to be obeyed.
Civicists – Trust institutions and value collective responsibility. They comply with existing systems to advance the common good, believing that structured governance, laws, and traditions are essential for societal stability.
Kleptocrats – Exploit institutions for personal gain, bending or breaking rules to extract power or wealth. They see society as a ladder to climb, often at others’ expense.
Revolutionists – Confrontational and adversarial, often violent. They reject incremental reform, seeing it as insufficient. They challenge entrenched structures through force, subversion, often sparking societal upheaval with the intent of destroying the existing system to replace it with a new one.
Agnostics – Humanity is ultimately Agnostic, despite claiming belief or disbelief in a higher power, all humans just can’t grasp the unknowable nature of ultimate reality.
Every individual can embody a combination between all this archetypes, despite their superficial labels, preaches, and ideologies. We should focus more on what each individual truly is: how they act in the world and whether they genuinely live what they claim to believe. Ultimately, these are the archetypes that describe humanity in its raw form.