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Paths of Civilization

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Wiadi said:
As I said, the initial impact would be relatively limited. However, given that it would weaken our primary point of opposition to Purity, I don't think it's an unreasonable slippery slope to conclude that the Puritans would have continued to make further gains in the aftermath unless actively opposed - and since we didn't resolve the half-exile issue at all, acting against them again would just mean we'd kicked the can down the road while weakening our own ability to resist. And, again, this is on top of failing to rectify the existing and morally reprehensible abuses that were occurring to the half-exiles. It's also worth noting that the worst abuses were in the countryside, and that while not all of our rural farmers were half-exiles, all of them could be half-exiled for political or personal reasons and this threat was used to extract concessions - so rectifying the half-exile abuses also removed that threat from the rest of the populace, thereby improving the lives even of those not actually subject to the punishment directly.

As an aside, I should also like to note that your conditional - "if our objective was greatest good for the greatest number" - is deeply flawed. Your subsequent sentence implies that you meant "greatest number of Ymaryn," which is an unnecessarily provincial approach - if seeking the greatest good for the greatest number, all humankind should be included among those whose good we seek. By accepting refugees, we improve the lives of those in need, and by sharing our knowledge with our neighbors (including, but not limited to, via the Artisan Games) we raise the quality of life for their populations. Consider how much good we did for how many by giving the Khemetri our Sacred Warding techniques - that good was only possible because of our openness and positivity toward outsiders. Any analysis that focuses solely on one's own people will intrinsically undervalue the importance and benefit of xenophilia as opposed to xenophobia.
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Fair enough... I guess it's hard to care about the betterment of other empires populations because we rarely see them, but then again we hardly ever see the rural poor of the Ymaryn.

That said I suspect that the lives of the rural poor will get worse than initial half-exile conditions simply because without the threat of reassignment/demotion there is nothing to stop patrician abuses from piling up, then normalizing, rinse and repeat until we hit historical serfdom conditions where the hard stop for "how much you can abuse the peasantry" is "they might rebel if they have nothing left to lose."
 
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[X][Sec] Distribute Land
[X][Sec] Distribute Land x2
[X][Sec] Distribute Land x3
[X][Sec] Distribute Land x4
[X][Sec] Distribute Land x5
[X][Sec] Distribute Land x6
[X][Sec] Distribute Land x7
[X][Sec] Distribute Land x8

Why not?
Just crash Ymaryn
 
DragonParadox said:
That is just being trapped in the same paradigm again, only with "tolerance of the intolerant is acceptable" added in.
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Nah, there was an option to crack down on Puritan violence. I'm pretty sure that would have sent a message that intolerance is not OK once it comes out in public and affects other people, and it would likely have degraded the Purity trait or forced it to change in some way.
 
agumentic said:
Yeah there is. There are laws, or at least there will be with EJ and HT. I imagine the question of "what we would do if someone abuses his administration rights" will come up.
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The patricians help draft the law just as they themselves enforce them, the king is a patrician. That is why social mobility was so crucial, those lower down on the totem pole had and interest to expose the slip-ups of the higher-ups. take that away and the law will slide ever more into normalizing inequality and abuse until the social conditions radically change.
 
DragonParadox said:
The patricians help draft the law just as they themselves enforce them, the king is a patrician. That is why social mobility was so crucial, those lower down on the totem pole had and interest to expose the slip-ups of the higher-ups. take that away and the law will slide ever more into normalizing inequality and abuse until the social conditions radically change.
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We didn't necessarily take that away? We could just implement fines, for example, or forced abdication in case of big abuses, or even a clause for land relinquishment, perhaps temporary.
 
DragonParadox said:
Fair enough... I guess it's hard to care about the betterment of other empires populations because we rarely see them, but then again we hardly ever see the rural poor of the Ymaryn.

That said I suspect that the lives of the rural poor will get worse than initial half-exile conditions simply because without the threat of reassignment/demotion there is nothing to stop patrician abuses from piling up, then normalizing, rinse and repeat until we hit historical serfdom conditions where the hard stop for "how much you can abuse the peasantry" is "they might rebel if they have nothing left to lose."
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As the probability of death by starvation becomes equal to or greater than the risk of death by riot, you will always have continuous riots till something changes. Whether that is by a collapse of government, businesses, or both.
 
agumentic said:
We didn't necessarily take that away? We could just implement fines, for example, or forced abdication in case of big abuses, or even a clause for land relinquishment, perhaps temporary.
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But we make it the exception not the rule, something abnormal, not the traditional path to power so the impetuous to normalize and excuse abuse will be much stronger than that of exposing and using it for social climbing.
 
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agumentic said:
Yeah there is. There are laws, or at least there will be with EJ and HT. I imagine the question "what we would do if someone abuses his administration rights" will come up.
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The entire reason that the Partricians want to Distribute Land is to remove those laws. They're pissed that Patricians who abuse their power can be punished by demotion, as happened to those Patricians that were abusing the half-exile laws were, and want to be able the break the law with impunity.
 
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Alratan said:
The entire reason that the Partricians want to Distribute Land is to remove those laws. They're pissed that Patricians who abuse their power can be punished by demotion, as happened to those Patricians that were abusing the half-exile laws were, and want to be able the break the law with impunity.
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Adding to this, when the law gets broken with impunity it usually ends up simply being changed to reflect the new status quo.
 
FINALLY some bloody free time. Time to get cracking on composing the vote.

As for the whole serfdom thing? The closest thing to a cure we can get is high level cities supporting large numbers of high level markets and the roads and harbors to link them up, and the administrative structure to observe and record the flow of wealth. Large numbers of the poor making large numbers of small transactions is how you discover that you can make more money by taxing less.

That's pretty much the main way to remove the incentive for abuse, as long as its profitable to abuse people, the abuse, or methods to enable abuse will always be popular. Until then Justice and Roads will have to do.
 
The big question is who makes the money. The rural patricians will always make the most money by brutally exploiting the rural poor and confiscating all the surplus they produce, with the threat of the whip if they don't work. Society as a whole may be richer by letting them be meaningful economic actors, but the rural patricians will be poorer.

More importantly, there are some things more important than absolute money. Relative amounts of power are very important to many people, and making the rural poor desperate makes them dependent on their lords, increasing the leverage they have over them.

Distribute Land means that roads and justice stop mattering so much, as we can no longer meaningfully discipline the Patricians. The traditional constraints on their behaviour have been removed, along with the incentives for their beer peers to care about it.

Who would dare report that they're being abused, when the abusers will still be in charge of them and their family afterwards and can retaliate.
 
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veekie said:
FINALLY some bloody free time. Time to get cracking on composing the vote.

As for the whole serfdom thing? The closest thing to a cure we can get is high level cities supporting large numbers of high level markets and the roads and harbors to link them up, and the administrative structure to observe and record the flow of wealth. Large numbers of the poor making large numbers of small transactions is how you discover that you can make more money by taxing less.

That's pretty much the main way to remove the incentive for abuse, as long as its profitable to abuse people, the abuse, or methods to enable abuse will always be popular. Until then Justice and Roads will have to do.
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That is at most a salve to one's conscience... the fact of the matter is that the rural poor are disorganized lacking in education and time to look out for their own interests. It will always be advantageous to abuse them until we get universal suffrage as a bare minimum. Worse and worse abuse will happen now that the Pandora's Box has been opened.
 
Alratan said:
The big question is who makes the money. The rural patricians will always make the most money by brutally exploiting the rural poor and confiscating all the surplus they produce, with the threat of the whip if they don't work. Society as a whole may be richer by letting them be meaningful economic actors, but the rural patricians will be poorer.

More importantly, there are some things more important than absolute money. Relative amounts of power are very important to many people, and making the rural poor desperate makes them dependent on their lords, increasing the leverage they have over them.

Distribute Land means that roads and justice stop mattering so much, as we can no longer meaningfully discipline the Patricians. The traditional constraints on their behaviour have been removed, along with the incentives for their beer peers to care about it.

Who would dare report that they're being abused, when the abusers will still be in charge of them and their family afterwards and can retaliate.
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So you are saying that since we currently have such poor road connectivity there will be no change in how much the rural poor are being exploited?
 
Alratan said:
The entire reason that the Partricians want to Distribute Land is to remove those laws. They're pissed that Patricians who abuse their power can be punished by demotion, as happened to those Patricians that were abusing the half-exile laws were, and want to be able the break the law with impunity.
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I don't believe the Patricians are pissed because lots of them lost land over corruption. I don't think we were especially investigating corruption at the time, so this wouldn't have happened.

As I understand it, they were pissed because lots of Patricians lost their positions period, which happened because we had a major shakeup of our economy.
 
PrimalShadow said:
I don't believe the Patricians are pissed because lots of them lost land over corruption. I don't think we were especially investigating corruption at the time, so this wouldn't have happened.

As I understand it, they were pissed because lots of Patricians lost their positions period, which happened because we had a major shakeup of our economy.
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They're mostly pissed because they lost their source of cheap labour. Same as the guilds.
 
Alratan said:
The big question is who makes the money. The rural patricians will always make the most money by brutally exploiting the rural poor and confiscating all the surplus they produce, with the threat of the whip if they don't work. Society as a whole may be richer by letting them be meaningful economic actors, but the rural patricians will be poorer.

More importantly, there are some things more important than absolute money. Relative amounts of power are very important to many people, and making the rural poor desperate makes them dependent on their lords, increasing the leverage they have over them.

Distribute Land means that roads and justice stop mattering so much, as we can no longer meaningfully discipline the Patricians. The traditional constraints on their behaviour have been removed, along with the incentives for their beer peers to care about it.

Who would dare report that they're being abused, when the abusers will still be in charge of them and their family afterwards and can retaliate.
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Oh no, all that shit still happens.

But the next time, there will actually be vested interests in the opposite. You can't push back against an issue with nobody else who hate it.
But market forces would start the slow push back once there is actually PROFIT in treating people average for the crown.
 
PrimalShadow said:
I don't believe the Patricians are pissed because lots of them lost land over corruption. I don't think we were especially investigating corruption at the time, so this wouldn't have happened.

As I understand it, they were pissed because lots of Patricians lost their positions period, which happened because we had a major shakeup of our economy.
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We almost had a king named after Walpole after we made the decision to pay the half-exiles.
Academia Nut said:
Basically in the early 18th century in Britain there was some economic shenanigans that resulted in a company (the South Sea Company) becoming a bubble with a total paper worth greater than the British GDP at the time despite making no actual money through trade, and when it inevitably burst a lot of people lost all their money while some ran off like bandits. The debt incurred to the government was actually still being dealt with 300 years later (still is in all probability). Anyway, one Robert Walpole decided to take advantage of the situation by eliminating some of his rivals who had been at the heart of the situation. Only Walpole needed to make sure that he and his supporters also didn't get caught up in things because they had also been making bank off the entire scam. So he made sure that during the investigation only evidence that implicated his enemies and not him or important allies like the king ever made it to light, even if he had to make sure that the evidence could flee to a foreign country under hilarious circumstances.

He then essentially became Britain's first modern Prime Minister.
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So yes, some of it was likely due to the patricians not being able to pay their workforce. The rest was probably the patricians in power throwing each other under the bus.
 
Also I think it bears considering just how many of our core values are if not incompatibility then at least uncomfortable to feudalism:
  1. Personal Stewards of Nature -this one is safe, it might even be strengthened, our local nobility understands that their straighten comes from the land amd its productivity
  2. Greater Justice - the aristocracy are by definition the 'few' so the collectivist notion of justice will chafe them
  3. Pride in Acceptance - local loyalties means more power to the local nobility not those depraved people in the next valley over (and especially the cities where proper gods-given hierarchies are not followed). Expect this one to come under heavy attack
  4. Division of Power (PiA Linked) - The elitism vale specifically conflicts with this, so the patricians will explicitly attack it as best they can
  5. Joyous Symphony - Expect the nobility to both like this since it's a value that tells peasants to do what they are told and not rock the boat but also hate it becauseit tells the nobles they can''t invade whoever they want for loot an glory
  6. Honourable Death (Spiritual/Honour) - Entirely compatible, reinforced
  7. Philosopher Kings (Maxed Development) - When you are on top of the pile by simple birth you definitely do not want your underlings questioning the social foundations. Exect slow erosion
  8. Purity - Rural nobles would like this since it reinforced dependency to the local over the corrupt and foreign
  9. Swords and Ploughshares - the basis for the military power of the rural elites, reinforced
  10. Divinely Glorious Elites (Maxed Development) - Elitism 101, need I say more
  11. Lord's Loyalty - Reinforces bonds of loyalty, works fine with feudalism
 
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DragonParadox said:
Also I think it bears considering just how many of our core values are if not incompatibility then at least uncomfortable to feudalism:
  1. Personal Stewards of Nature -this one is safe, it might even be strengthened, our local nobility understands that their straighten comes from the land amd its productivity
  2. Greater Justice - the aristocracy are by definition the 'few' so the collectivist notion of justice will chafe them
  3. Pride in Acceptance - local loyalties means more power to the local nobility not those depraved people in the next valley over (and especially the cities where proper gods-given hierarchies are not followed). Expect this one to come under heavy attack
  4. Division of Power (PiA Linked) - The elitism vale specifically conflicts with this, so the patricians will explicitly attack it as best they can
  5. Joyous Symphony - Expect the nobility to both like this since it's a value that tells peasants to do what they are told and not rock the boat but also hate it becauseit tells the nobles they can''t invade whoever they want for loot an gold
  6. Honourable Death (Spiritual/Honour) - Entirely compatible, reinforced
  7. Philosopher Kings (Maxed Development) - When you are on top of the pile by simple birth you definitely do not want your underlings questioning the social foundations. Exect slow erosion
  8. Purity - Rural nobles would like this since it reinforced dependency to the local over the corrupt and foreign
  9. Swords and Ploughshares - the basis for the military power of the rural elites, reinforced
  10. Divinely Glorious Elites (Maxed Development) - Elitism 101, need I say more
  11. Lord's Loyalty - Reinforces bonds of loyalty, works fine with feudalism
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Stewards will fit right in with feudalism, as the entire system places near sacrosanct value on land.

Greater justice does not conflict, as the nobility are either the exemplars of justice, or the ones who care for the masses, as such, the nobles justice is the greater one, as it the justice of those who carry the burden's of the many.

Pride in acceptance will fit right in as well, afterall fuedalism is a system that adores complexity and depth, a multiplicity of loyalties, obligations and customs is expected.

Division of power, this like the above, fits right in with decentralised/delegated power structures of feudal society.

Joyous symphony you describe aptly, albeit you have to consider that aristocratic classes are always honour driven, a Lord cares not the slightest for coin or power if his honour or prestige is marred in the process (it why IRL nobility was relatively benign prior to its commercialisation)

Honourable death fits perfectly with high culture ethos.

Philosopher kings would actually reinforce feudalism. The nobility was always an exemplar of cultural sophistication and patrons of all things new and fascinating, this mixed with arte, will simply reinforce the standing an culture of nobility. (it took many thousands of years IRL for philosophical traditions to question the notion of nobility, the ideas of monarchy and divinity where discussed millenia before anyone even considered questioning nobility, hell most pre modern philosophical traditions actively glorified it)

Purity would fit in with noblesse oblige and high culture, the courtly life is a pure and elevated one, and failure to adhere to it is anathema.

Swords to ploughshares will fit right in with Stewards and the idea of sacred land.

Divinely glorious elites: chivalry, noblesse oblige and courtly culture on steroids, this basically make it a death sentence to be shown as lacking the quality of nobility, especially with all the other synergies.

Lords loyalty, standard fare of any intricate or ritualised culture with a variety of stations.


Our values are perfect for the most benign and utopian forms of feudalism, if the thread but focus on some bloody cultural development.
Feudalism is complex enough an institution that literally anything can fit into it, the question is : what kind of feudalism do want?
 
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Killer_Whale said:
No civil wars until after the space age. Which one is that?
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One with an obsessive focus on the royal court and aristocratic ritual, and a nobility trigger happy about canabilising one of thier own to garner prestige and honours by reducing that of others if nothing else.

So long as the court is maintained, the interests of the nobility become whatever the monarch wants them to be.

Key thing is continuous maintenance and expansion of ritual and ceremony and cultural development. Something I have doubts that the thread would follow.

(historical courts required anything from a quarter to two thirds of the entire annual revenues of thier respective empire to be maintained. Courtly culture was monolithic in expenses, as it had to employ literal armies of scholars, poets, artists, musicians, scientists, craftsmen, inventors, cooks, physicians.. Etc. Every possible venue of cultural, artistic, mechanical and intellectual development was patroned by the court and aristocracy. Some courts where so massive that they where their own cities, with the collective essence of an entire empire living beneath its grandeur. Courtly ritual was an effective political tool for monarchs, and its basically responsible for the majority of human advances from late antiquity to the early modern period(sans ecclesiastical scholastics) , but damn was it expensive)
 
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