Paths of Civilization

[Lisafication]

It has happened a few times. It is never pretty.

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So...I'll admit I'm lost here...why do people think that taking children away from their families in favour of communes is going to be a Good Thing? I'm not @Cetashwayo levels of history nerd and he can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure it has literally never worked in human history, ever.

 

[VoidZero]

Has anyone actually specifically spoken to Academia Nut about the nuts and bolts of the Ymaryn system? From what I've heard about it from his own descriptions he's described it as a statist dystopia where citizens are encouraged to commit suicide when they can no longer work and priests will often kill people who don't. Has anyone actually investigated what happens in the 90% of the country that lives in the countryside?

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I don't remember our priests culling our non-working population nor regular suicide of our people? Not impossible since our road network and by extension our internal information network are rather poor.

 

[Cetashwayo]

I don't remember our priests culling our non-working population nor regular suicide of our people? Not impossible since our road network and by extension our internal information network are rather poor.

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I had it confirmed by Academia Nut in an ooc discussion, but the real question is: How would you know? How do you know how the system is working? The trouble with pre-modern centralized systems is that it still relies on local power brokers and bureaucrats who due to distance and base practicality are much more divorced from the center than you might expect.

This is the scary thing about vast social changes in a pre-modern state: How do you know anything is actually working the way you expect it to? You have to really plumb the depths and ask, or do kingly tours. The countryside is vast and extremely difficult to govern; Most pre-modern empires formed around a central "core" (actually governed properly) and a "periphery" (where the local inhabitants pay lip service but don't really follow state directives). Who can you really trust to give you the information you need to understand the vastness of the countryside?

 

[Oshha]

Has anyone actually specifically spoken to Academia Nut about the nuts and bolts of the Ymaryn system? From what I've heard about it from his own descriptions he's described it as a statist dystopia where citizens are encouraged to commit suicide when they can no longer work and priests will often kill people who don't. Has anyone actually investigated what happens in the 90% of the country that lives in the countryside?

I know people have locked themselves into an intoxicating vision of Ymaryn that exists in their own mind but it doesn't seem to line up with the actual reality of this fucked up dystopia.

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Yeah, this is one of the main reasons I don't like our Elite traitline. While in theory it is nice and is mechnicially good, I doubt many people who support it would actually want to live in that sort of society. I certainly wouldn't.

Have people considered that since this is a pre-modern state with really poor information collection Academia Nut has been withholding crucial information about the countryside, and people have been acting like Imperial bureaucrats in the Celestial Palace, nodding along as they sign an order to bring peace and justice to the land whilst thousands of thugs descend on the countryside, coercing and slaughtering people at random?

How much do you really know about the state of the countryside? Who is telling you about the state of the countryside? Is it the priests? Don't you think they have a vested interest in providing you with specific information that might not be true? How would you know otherwise? Who can you trust to deliver your accurate information about the specific villages where 90% of your population lives?

What I'm suggesting is that there's a very large potential that in the pursuit of specific ideals Ymaryn is sleepwalking into a disaster of biblical proportions, unaware of an enormous crisis potentially bubbling underneath the surface.

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Honestly, I think this comes off as a little paranoid. Especially when our elitist society means that if such things were going on, somebody could foil it by accurately reporting things in order to knock down the corrupt people so they can move up to take their position. I also don't believe that the Ymaryn are that thoroughly corrupt, especially given the half-exile situation has been handled. If our government is bad as you are describing, we would have a different outcome.

 

[Oshha]

I had it confirmed by Academia Nut in an ooc discussion, but the real question is: How would you know? How do you know how the system is working? The trouble with pre-modern centralized systems is that it still relies on local power brokers and bureaucrats who due to distance and base practicality are much more divorced from the center than you might expect.

This is the scary thing about vast social changes in a pre-modern state: How do you know anything is actually working the way you expect it to? You have to really plumb the depths and ask, or do kingly tours. The countryside is vast and extremely difficult to govern; Most pre-modern empires formed around a central "core" (actually governed properly) and a "periphery" (where the local inhabitants pay lip service but don't really follow state directives). Who can you really trust to give you the information you need to understand the vastness of the countryside?

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Honestly, this is pretty much a known concern, but as we can't do much about it at this tech level, we don't worry about it too much and focus more on keeping things from getting out of control such as by influencing subordinates.

 

[Cetashwayo]

Honestly, I think this comes off as a little paranoid. Especially when our elitist society means that if such things were going on, somebody could foil it by accurately reporting things in order to knock down the corrupt people so they can move up to take their position. I also don't believe that the Ymaryn are that thoroughly corrupt, especially given the half-exile situation has been handled. If our government is bad as you are describing, we would have a different outcome.

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I'm exaggerating, I don't literally mean random people are being murdered by death squads. But how do you know how corrupt things are? Corruption is more than just a meter on the screen. Who is in the countryside gathering the information you need? You'll know if there's a rebellion, or some evil plot. But how do you know the exact conditions in villages? You probably can't, which is why most pre-modern states solve this by not needing to.

Honestly, this is pretty much a known concern, but as we can't do much about it at this tech level, we don't worry about it too much and focus more on keeping things from getting out of control such as by influencing subordinates.

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Yeah, which is why the suggestion to totally reorganize the way that the family unit is governed is probably not a good idea

 

[Wiadi]

Why is anyone supposed to believe a bronze/iron age state has the capabilities to create a system of communal child fostering (through what, creating village communes? That was fantastic for Tsarist Russia, really helped the egalitarianism) that doesn't end in an enormous catastrophe for everyone involved?

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I don't know about anyone else, but I'm absolutely not arguing that we should implement this system in the near future - I agree, our current resources are absolutely inadequate to the task. I'm describing it as a long-term goal, as part of a discussion that's gotten somewhat out of hand but which originally concerned the more immediately salient point of putting checks on our ruling class's power. This discussion is pertinent in that my proposal would likely require long-term social engineering of desired values to enable the Ymaryn to even consider it as a society, let alone accept it; the system itself would only be implemented in the far future if at all.

This idea is nightmarish. Women forced to have children through social pressure for the "good of the community", like broodmares without agency, absolutely crushed under the thumb of the village commune that governs the choices in their lives from the womb to the grave.

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This is just hyperbole. I'm not suggesting controlling "the choices in their lives from the womb to the grave," I'm proposing that child-rearing in specific should be handled by communities rather than individuals. This does not mean mandating reproduction, just developing a society in which people are willing to have children even if those children will not be "theirs" - see again my above point about long-term social engineering.

I agree that attempting to put this system in place immediately through main force would be disastrous, even if it were possible. This is why I consider it relevant to discuss even now: because while we cannot put it into place under current conditions, we can (and, I contend, should) begin laying the groundwork.

 

[NonSequtur]

Can anyone name one example where mass state seizure of children hasn't resulted in horror?

Especially when our elitist society means that if such things were going on, somebody could foil it by accurately reporting things in order to knock down the corrupt people so they can move up to take their position.

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That requires the central authority is actually capable of knocking down local administrators as often as would be required.

 

[agumentic]

I had it confirmed by Academia Nut in an ooc discussion, but the real question is: How would you know? How do you know how the system is working? The trouble with pre-modern centralized systems is that it still relies on local power brokers and bureaucrats who due to distance and base practicality are much more divorced from the center than you might expect.

This is the scary thing about vast social changes in a pre-modern state: How do you know anything is actually working the way you expect it to? You have to really plumb the depths and ask, or do kingly tours. The countryside is vast and extremely difficult to govern; Most pre-modern empires formed around a central "core" (actually governed properly) and a "periphery" (where the local inhabitants pay lip service but don't really follow state directives). Who can you really trust to give you the information you need to understand the vastness of the countryside?

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Well, they are most probably not starving, seem generally content and can advance at least theoretically, and that's pretty much the best you can hope for a time being. Even Wladi wants his system sometime in the future.

 

[Cetashwayo]

This is just hyperbole. I'm not suggesting controlling "the choices in their lives from the womb to the grave," I'm proposing that child-rearing in specific should be handled by communities rather than individuals. This does not mean mandating reproduction, just developing a society in which people are willing to have children even if those children will not be "theirs" - see again my above point about long-term social engineering.

I agree that attempting to put this system in place immediately through main force would be disastrous, even if it were possible. This is why I consider it relevant to discuss even now: because while we cannot put it into place under current conditions, we can (and, I contend, should) begin laying the groundwork.

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Who do you believe will control child rearing in a community? Do you know how communities function in historical circumstances? Communities need to be able to coerce and socially pressure their members to follow certain outcomes, which means that communities will, as in the case of the Russian peasantry, force individual peasants against their will to provide their children for the good of their community. But that's not the same thing as the good of the state. The community is concerned about its own needs and will not want to send its children away from the fields where they can be the most use. Comfortable peasants will not leave their villages to go anywhere else, and those that want to will be socialized from birth to be disabused of such notions.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm absolutely not arguing that we should implement this system in the near future - I agree, our current resources are absolutely inadequate to the task. I'm describing it as a long-term goal, as part of a discussion that's gotten somewhat out of hand but which originally concerned the more immediately salient point of putting checks on our ruling class's power. This discussion is pertinent in that my proposal would likely require long-term social engineering of desired values to enable the Ymaryn to even consider it as a society, let alone accept it; the system itself would only be implemented in the far future if at all.

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The problem is that communal child-rearing enables the ruling class' power, because the people who are most likely to avoid the system are the ruling class. Who is going to enforce this system? Where are you drawing your bureaucrats from? Peasants who become bureaucrats no longer associate themselves with the peasantry. They become a scholarly class close to the levers of power. Otherwise, you draw bureaucrats from the elites you're planning to curtail.

 

[VoidZero]

I had it confirmed by Academia Nut in an ooc discussion, but the real question is: How would you know? How do you know how the system is working? The trouble with pre-modern centralized systems is that it still relies on local power brokers and bureaucrats who due to distance and base practicality are much more divorced from the center than you might expect.

This is the scary thing about vast social changes in a pre-modern state: How do you know anything is actually working the way you expect it to? You have to really plumb the depths and ask, or do kingly tours. The countryside is vast and extremely difficult to govern; Most pre-modern empires formed around a central "core" (actually governed properly) and a "periphery" (where the local inhabitants pay lip service but don't really follow state directives). Who can you really trust to give you the information you need to understand the vastness of the countryside?

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I assume our census would capture out of trend population change but It is done locally by priest and officials who can be paying lip service. Historically this kind of thing can be discovered if the King/Emperor had touring spies/agents, but those can become corrupted like Ming 's version.

My assumption had always been our none-core not adhering to our law but this rises serious undiscovered problem.

Prehaps we can somehow reduce the burden or increase the usefulness of the none-working population?

 

[HanEmpire]

Close, but not quite accurate. I believe that other systems will share the same flaws as you say mine will have - that is, corruption and inefficiency. Given that, unless you can present a reason why my proposal is unusually prone to them, they do not seem relevant to the discussion - "this wouldn't fix every problem we currently have and is therefore bad" is not good argumentation.

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Simple. Your system requires us to build an intricate state bureaucracy that penetrates down to every single community within the Kingdom to assess, compare, and standardize the level of education with a high degree of accuracy and precision. Even we (as in us modern humans) don't have the required level of administrative efficiency to pull that off without producing a hideously bloated government that will end up fucking everything up. It's reminiscent of, say, China's Great Leap Forward where the state command economy simultaneously produced countless famines while mountains of food were rotting away in warehouses, all because people kept reporting numbers that made themselves look better.

Incidentally this is why I first started to accuse you of wanting to shift human nature, because you keep assuming people will act more honest and selfless than they actually are.

Now the idea becomes more workable if we ignore the half that has the government constantly monitoring and fine-tuning the schools. If we pursue education with a light guiding hand we'll end up with a public schooling system of very variable quality which we can work at to incrementally increase in quality as time goes on.

That doesn't fix the secondary problem that I have with your idea, which is that it comes with a social value that'll strangle us if certain conditions are not met. For this value I imagine that if stability or some other stat gets too low, the people will start blaming the education-hoarders for getting a clearly unworthy leader elected through unfair tutelage. I can see people striking out at rich people and killing "unworthy" intellectuals out of misdirected jealousy, doing ungodly damage to our civilization in the process.

I don't see why we should bother to deal with any of that. We can get to universal education just fine with our current trajectory. We did it in real history after all.

 

[Oshha]

I'm exaggerating, I don't literally mean random people are being murdered by death squads. But how do you know how corrupt things are? Corruption is more than just a meter on the screen. Who is in the countryside gathering the information you need? You'll know if there's a rebellion, or some evil plot. But how do you know the exact conditions in villages? You probably can't, which is why most pre-modern states solve this by not needing to.

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To be honest, I figured that this was pretty obvious like 'water is wet' sort of obvious. We've in the Iron Age.

Also, the countryside being secretly dark and evil is kind of a think we've known for a long time now. We just don't have any real ways to address it in our current state.

At its least dark this amounts to using their martial skills to become skilled warriors for the People in general, while at its most dark it becomes a form of banditry. On occasion entire trade caravans will disappear, the locals blaming bad weather. While often difficult to prove, this is usually caused by a village turning bandit - often prompted by their local leadership having some sort of dispute with the caravan.

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Yeah, which is why the suggestion to totally reorganize the way that the family unit is governed is probably not a good idea

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No disagreement here.

That requires the central authority is actually capable of knocking down local administrators as often as would be required.

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The king was throttling the governor of Sacredshore.

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We kind of do? It happens enough to keep things under control, which is the best we can hope for now. I'm not saying it is perfect and I'm sure plenty of lives get ruined, but I'm trying to point out that there is cultural incentive for corruption to be dealt with because you benefit from doing so. Look, I'm not saying the system is good, but it is good enough and does the job it is supposed to.

Of course, this is always the case as seen by the Second Sons Crisis.

 

[ctulhuslp]

Honestly, I think this comes off as a little paranoid. Especially when our elitist society means that if such things were going on, somebody could foil it by accurately reporting things in order to knock down the corrupt people so they can move up to take their position. I also don't believe that the Ymaryn are that thoroughly corrupt, especially given the half-exile situation has been handled. If our government is bad as you are describing, we would have a different outcome.

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Accurate reporting is probably just as likely to squish the whistleblower if the target has more power or just plain gets lucky.

 

[Oshha]

Accurate reporting is probably just as likely to squish the whistleblower if the target has more power or just plain gets lucky.

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True.

I'm not saying it is perfect and I'm sure plenty of lives get ruined

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I'm not arguing that the system is good. In fact, I think it is evil and I wouldn't want to live under it, but I do think that the system does work.

 

[Legion0047]

This has reached the Aqueducts are bad point of absurdity and there is a mod waiting to hit us with an hammer so stop this discussion yesterday.

 

[ctulhuslp]

True.

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Eh.

Thing is, Cetashwayo is not really wrong about it being a statist dystopia, but a lot of players deliberately wanted it that way and welcomed it?
Of course, there is no reason to think that we can do better - I doubt there is a single antique state that is not horrifying by modern standards. So, Iunno. I am unhappy about both elitist traitlines being focused on and maxed out, but I am not sure how much better can we do.

I'd say the sure steps are paper, roads and academies, but those are not easy to solve problems.

 

[Oshha]

This has reached the Aqueducts are bad point of absurdity and there is a mod waiting to hit us with an hammer so stop this discussion yesterday.

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What on Earth are you going on about?

 

[Cetashwayo]

Why would a mod hit it with a hammer no one's breaking the rules

 

[Legion0047]

Oh so the discussion leveled out?
i just panicked when i saw red.

 

[HanEmpire]

Accurate reporting is probably just as likely to squish the whistleblower if the target has more power or just plain gets lucky.

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Not even that, the answer of the people up top might be "so what?". In a pre-modern state such a problem would be so widespread that people literally wouldn't give a crap. If a few mouths got shut because there wasn't enough food to go around, then that's just how the world works.

This has reached the Aqueducts are bad point of absurdity and there is a mod waiting to hit us with an hammer so stop this discussion yesterday.

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No worries, there's an admin in the mosh pit with us.

 

[Oshha]

Thing is, Cetashwayo is not really wrong about it being a statist dystopia, but a lot of players deliberately wanted it that way and welcomed it?
Of course, there is no reason to think that we can do better - I doubt there is a single antique state that is not horrifying by modern standards. So, Iunno. I am unhappy about both elitist traitlines being focused on and maxed out, but I am not sure how much better can we do.

I'd say the sure steps are paper, roads and academies, but those are not easy to solve problems.

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I'm not disagreeing on that.

Yeah, this is one of the main reasons I don't like our Elite traitline. While in theory it is nice and is mechnicially good, I doubt many people who support it would actually want to live in that sort of society. I certainly wouldn't.

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I think that Ymar is a horrible place to live and it is only gotten worse as the Ymaryn have become more elitist, hence why I think our Elite value line is a bad thing and I agree with the sentiment that the Gloriously Divine Elites might be the Ymaryn's version of Moloch Calls.

But I also think that Cetashwayo's exaggerations about how bad things could be are just that, exaggerations. But I didn't realise that when I first read it so I assume he was either being paranoid or was doomsaying, of which I assumed the former based on what I've seen of him.

 

[ExNihilo]

This has reached the Aqueducts are bad point of absurdity and there is a mod waiting to hit us with an hammer so stop this discussion yesterday.

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At least two of the people involved are mods, if they go over the line it'll be their own fault, they know where it is.

 

[VoidZero]

Eh.

Thing is, Cetashwayo is not really wrong about it being a statist dystopia, but a lot of players deliberately wanted it that way and welcomed it?
Of course, there is no reason to think that we can do better - I doubt there is a single antique state that is not horrifying by modern standards. So, Iunno. I am unhappy about both elitist traitlines being focused on and maxed out, but I am not sure how much better can we do.

I'd say the sure steps are paper, roads and academies, but those are not easy to solve problems.

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The IC statist dystopia was a surprising and disliked reality check. =3=
I mean the plan was to create a giant government that protects itself so it can protect people, but it has became a lot more self focused and started eating people.

@Cetashwayo

Let me dream for once! T_T

 

[notgreat]

Let's just say that we probably need to have The Law Megaproject done ASAP.

And not try to do a massive expansion of government for questionable benefits. Our government is already large enough to be difficult to manage, and we'll want to actually have an oversupply of academies before we go about trying to standardize education (right now we have a drastic undersupply, costing us noticeable stats every turn)