Commoner

The commoner is a role, and the definition says it is created rather than found. It is one of four positions in a power structure, alongside great men, witches and wretches, and it is specifically the reflector role operating at the level of a state or above. A reflector adopts the perspective of an external endo-ideal and enforces the laws of endoreality, is seen as obedient and selfless and by sublating their own will avoids the guilt and shame that fall on the negative image. Scale that up to a whole population and you have the commoner. Two functions are named and they look opposite. The commoner holds the status quo in place, and during revolution the commoner overthrows it. The same block of opinion serves both, which is why revolutions can replace an endo-ideal without disturbing the structure underneath. Comfort and coercion appear together in the definition and are not two separate things. Structures designed for the comfort of commoners are the same structures that coerce them, since a role that is pleasant to occupy needs less force to maintain. What makes the role dangerous is uniformity rather than number. A solid block of uniform opinions is the material oligarchy is built from, and it is also the instrument of ostracism, directed at witches, who are sources of knowledge or innovation where authoritative power wants neither, and at wretches, who are hidden behind the reflectors and made to absorb society's guilt and punishment.

A commoner was historically anyone outside the nobility and clergy, a legal category in the estates of the realm rather than a description of income, and the word survives in the common man of populist rhetoric and in the commons as a shared resource. Political theory has its own versions of the mass, from Ortega y Gasset's revolt of the masses to Hannah Arendt's atomized populations and Antonio Gramsci's account of consent manufactured through hegemony. Marsh keeps the estates sense of a defined rank and drops the idea that it names whoever is left after the powerful are counted. The commoner is manufactured deliberately, its comfort is part of how it is held and its uniformity is the raw material of the oligarchy it believes itself excluded from.