One thing I noted was that when they put all of one "type" together those also differentiated out into the same roles. So among the dominants, if everyone is a dominant, they still split into some exploiters, slaves, independents etc. This is something that also applies to DCNH and humans - one may have a certain role among one group, and a different role among another. You see this in everyday action too. A group of kids will be playing, and one decides he's the leader, starts bossing other people around, but when a teacher or coach shows up, suddenly that same kid is the slave, the worker kid doing whatever the coach/teacher wants. In other words going from D to N.

It'd be interesting to see how different groups would end up interacting and adapting to each other, if you'd see patterns emerging. Does H exist only when there are enough D and Ns around? Seems like that might be the case based on what was said about that group only appearing when the numbers increased. In other words, there needs to be enough waste from the Ds and Ns for them to be able to exist on the crumbs, and perhaps enough going on with the other groups for them to go unnoticed.

 

I see myself as one of the independent rats heh (maybe that's how we all envision ourselves) - but also from experience know that I'd be encouraging the slaves to become independents too, or to combine resources together and make the fatass exploiters take care of themselves. And defending the rights of the scavengers to scavenge as they wished. But slaves are the "useful idiots" and don't want to be independents. As a social commentary on present conditions in the US - I see the exploiters currently using slaves to try to usurp a different set of exploiters and independents. One group of slaves are the pink-haired weirdos crying about every little thing, "oh no, don't say that word, I might cry" - and then they all cheer, "ha ha look at us, we have powah!!" but they're just being used to transfer power back to the exploiters.

I'm curious too if the nature of the divisions changed based on the composition of the starting group: ie if you start with all independents do you have looser divisions of power than if you start with all dominants, and what if you start with all scavengers? do the resulting groups all look identical or does each have a different character?

I kind of think in humans at least that they do have a different character. I was recently doing some research and reading various things from the time period of the Revolutionary War. And if you think about what kinds of people were coming here at that time - many explorers (independents) many people seeking to make their own life in a new land (independents) quite a few literal slaves (who generally fought on the British side) and some dominants (slave owners and governors) and then you see what resulted from mostly creative types forming a government. Later on the character of immigrants changed - slowly the character changed from independents to scavengers. This is because anyone immigrating into an established country to pick up what scraps they can is more scavenger like, and anyone coming to a new country to see what they can build and create on their own in more independent like. Of course you'll get normalizers mixed into both groups as well. So, the nature of immigration always changes over time as the land they are traveling to changes.

But also, as things become more established a caste system develops and the dominants and normalizers start becoming the majority. In other words, you get authoritarians of various stripes and their slaves. And that's what you see now - groups of authoritarians fighting each other, but using their minions to do so. And the libertarians (independents, C) types are a much smaller group, and the H types (the disaffected, hey idk, I'm just along for the ride) types don't participate at all. You also see the nature of various business change based on the environment - you can have a very C-type business like Google become more of a D-type business because it's just too easy to step into power even if that wasn't the intent when the vacuum exists in an area. Amazon was always a D-type business though.