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Paths of Civilization

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ctulhuslp said:
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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It's one thing if people are deliberately aware of how awful things are but from my lurking this seems to be a strange strain of idealism going through it? People absolutely melting down over some votes because it doesn't line up with their ideal for the state. I know because I keep seeing reports every big vote as people get heated :p

Speaking practically, I'm not sure if the state, as it is, is in a good spot with player priorities. People are angry with the elite traitlines but the elites are where a good portion of the administration is drawn from. It's hard to avoid that kind of situation without decentralizing, and I don't think people want to decentralize. How do you have a situation where the Patricians are the ones which provide you the administration to govern and when you try to undercut them you won't have many people left to govern?

The problem is that most historical egalitarian societies are not generally bureaucratic. They are decentralized, tribal, or loose agglomerations, or very small. Athens was egalitarian (besides the slaves), but it was absolutely tiny in comparison to Ymaryn and relied on that smallness to function, as did many greek poleis. The much larger Hellenistic states were far larger and more unequal.

When you get a larger state with more social mobility (e.g. the Mid-Ottoman Empire), eventually that systems starts to fray from the demands of competition and the issues inflicted on the Empire by governance over time. Ottoman social mobility also didn't translate to larger egalitarianism. It was still an extremely unequal state, they just had a peasant to prince pipeline in the Devsirme. The numbers drawn were never significant enough to influence inequality, and when they got big enough they became a parasite on the state.

Oshha said:
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.
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Most of what I am assuming is from conversations with Academia Nut about the state of Ymaryn. Admittedly, it was a while ago, so it could just be a rehash of arguments people have already had, which I'll apologize for since I mostly lurk the thread and discussion moves so quickly I can't read it all.

VoidZero said:
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.
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Pre-modern states are parasitic entities who swallow up the surrounding area to feed their insatiable needs. They provide common security and benefits, but often being outside of the state's reach is far better for peasant communities than being inside of it. It's not like the state is providing you healthcare! It's just that the state ensures peasants don't run away, through a variety of soft and hard methods.

The main beneficiaries of the state is not the countryside, it's the core areas and urbanity. Rome benefited from the Roman Empire, but the Italian countryside was a hellscape and it drove inequality to truly horrifying levels by the 2nd century AD.
 
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agumentic said:
Alright, so the government doesn't set policy for the rearing, merely redistributes resources so everyone has the same amount for it and ensures no foul-play is happening, correct? Disregarding for a moment the can of worms that is resource redistribution and its effect on meritocracy, how exactly would it work? Since communities are not one and equal, their "best" are not the same either. And there's still no actual incentive to not benefit your community instead of others, which means you need a giant central apparatus to watch for corruption, which would be open for corruption itself.
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Your argument rests on the assertion (without backing) that the best one community can do will be meaningfully better than the best another can do. Given that you ceded (at least for the moment) the point that equalizing available resources across communities will occur, this assertion seems inaccurate. And if communities have similar capabilities, then even allowing them to work solely for their own benefit (aside from paying taxes etc.) would result in the desired parity across communities.
Cetashwayo said:
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.



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.
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Your first point rests on what people will want to do. This is, as far as I can tell, essentially an elaboration on the "human nature" point I've already been addressing. My answer remains the same: we work to establish social values that change what people will want to do to bring it in line with what we need them to do for the system to function. This is, again, a long-term prospect; no historical example will map to it well because no historical society (AFAIK) has been subjected to an immortal guiding entity's extensive social engineering project over the course of centuries or millennia.

Regarding your second point: I am not suggesting this system would eliminate the existence of a ruling class, merely its hereditary nature. The original suggestion came from trying to synthesize two desires expressed by others in the thread: egalitarianism and meritocracy. This requires that it be possible to obtain social status and power through accomplishment, but also that such accomplishment be equally possible for all regardless of their circumstances of birth. Thus my aim is not to devise a system with no ruling class, just one in which ascension to said class is determined by one's own merits and not those of one's ancestry.
HanEmpire said:
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.
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Yes, the system will have downsides and failure states we'll have to work to avoid. But here we run into the situation you previously characterized as my position - no system lacks failure states and unintended consequences, and I don't see these as meaningfully worse/more probable than those of any probable alternative (though this may partly be because nobody arguing with me has put forth their own proposal, instead favoring "just keep everything the same and I'm sure it'll work itself out").

I think your last paragraph highlights a key difference in our positions, though. You seem to regard modern society (which one? I'm not sure) as an adequate end goal. I do not have such a high opinion of any I can think of, but in case I'm being too provincial here, do let me know which modern society/ies you'd regard as where you'd like to see the Ymaryn end up.
 
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I admit, this is pretty funny, I can at least take advantage of my leave to post here as a normal user.
Cetashwayo said:
Pre-modern states are parasitic entities who swallow up the surrounding area to feed their insatiable needs. They provide common security and benefits, but often being outside of the state's reach is far better for peasant communities than being inside of it. It's not like the state is providing you healthcare! It's just that the state ensures peasants don't do that, through a variety of soft and hard methods.
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Indeed, do remember that historically until now, the primary beneficiary of the existence of a State has always been and would always be, the State itself, not the people it governs but the core that it rests upon.
 
Wiadi said:
Your first point rests on what people will want to do. This is, as far as I can tell, essentially an elaboration on the "human nature" point I've already been addressing. My answer remains the same: we work to establish social values that change what people will want to do to bring it in line with what we need them to do for the system to function. This is, again, a long-term prospect; no historical example will map to it well because no historical society (AFAIK) has been subjected to an immortal guiding entity's extensive social engineering project over the course of centuries or millennia.

I am not suggesting this system would eliminate the existence of a ruling class, merely its hereditary nature. The original suggestion came from trying to synthesize two desires expressed by others in the thread: egalitarianism and meritocracy. This requires that it be possible to obtain social status and power through accomplishment, but also that such accomplishment be equally possible for all regardless of their circumstances of birth. Thus my aim is not to devise a system with no ruling class, just one in which ascension to said class is determined by one's own merits and not those of one's ancestry.
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Providing communities the power to govern child rearing, the single most important power for any community, will result in those communities having coercive powers over their members. This isn't human nature, it's relatively simple sociology and logical causation. From conversations with Academia Nut I am skeptical about the true effectiveness of such social engineering efforts on a countryside that you have trouble getting information about, let alone governing. You can say this is for the future, but I have to say I'm skeptical about the entire core idea. Yes, no one in real life has a national gestalt guiding them, but you can't deflect real world examples with "well we'll just social engineer" them. How will you do that? Who's gonna do it? How will you enforce it? Will you vest communities with such enormous coercive power? What governing unit will be the lowest level unit of a commune? A village? So we're Tsarist Russia now?

I am asking you to explain who is going to enforce this system. This is your problem, really the core problem at the heart of these kinds of initiatives in Ymaryn. Your Patricians who directly benefit from the system are the ruling class. They are also a significant portion of the bureaucracy. To work, this system will rely on...

The Bureaucracy. Staffed by Patricians.
 
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Cetashwayo said:
It's one thing if people are deliberately aware of how awful things are but from my lurking this seems to be a strange strain of idealism going through it? People absolutely melting down over some votes because it doesn't line up with their ideal for the state. I know because I keep seeing reports every big vote as people get heated :p

Speaking practically, I'm not sure if the state, as it is, is in a good spot with player priorities. People are angry with the elite traitlines but the elites are where a good portion of the administration is drawn from. It's hard to avoid that kind of situation without decentralizing, and I don't think people want to decentralize. How do you have a situation where the Patricians are the ones which provide you the administration to govern and when you try to undercut them you won't have many people left to govern?

The problem is that most historical egalitarian societies are not generally bureaucratic. They are decentralized, tribal, or loose agglomerations, or very small. Athens was egalitarian (besides the slaves), but it was absolutely tiny in comparison to Ymaryn and relied on that smallness to function, as did many greek poleis. The much larger Hellenistic states were far larger and more unequal.

When you get a larger state with more social mobility (e.g. the Mid-Ottoman Empire), eventually that systems starts to fray from the demands of competition and the issues inflicted on the Empire by governance over time. Ottoman social mobility also didn't translate to larger egalitarianism. It was still an extremely unequal state, they just had a peasant to prince pipeline in the Devsirme. The numbers drawn were never significant enough to influence inequality, and when they got big enough they became a parasite on the state.
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I, for one, get heated, but, well...we cannot be both administratively powerful (well, enough to accomplish some logistical feats which boggle my mind at least) and decentralized, can we?

I'd say that erring on side of statism with pushing the number of people with access to "meritocratic" part of society via better infrastructure is pretty much the best we can do; preferably focus on some more egalitarian traits (sooo Division of Power and maybe Acceptance and might be Justice line but not in current form) and...yeah?

I doubt we can make "state for the people" until, urgh. Printing press? Widespread newspapers is probably a decent identifier of growing awareness of things going on by people...

ALthough, there is one big thing @Cetashwayo . We were not created by conquering elites, and while we now have quite a lot of conquered land (vassals, but still), I assume this is a deviation wrt what state does and its "mindset".
 
How the order to break up families will work out:

Heavenly King of Ymaryn: "For the good of justice and peace in the land, I vest in you my holy bureaucrats the power to break apart families and start anew, all under one father, in Ymaryn"

Head Scribe Patrician Yugh Gardamma, Twenty-Sixth of his line, elder scion of the Gardamma Clan, A Most Holy and Fortuitious Clan, the Thousand Year Clan, That Has Crossed the Ages and Kissed the Heavens, that has Married Into Such Clans as the Hula Clan, the Thora Clan, the Ulona Clan, and the Eternal Clan Vogora, A Clan Of Such Wealth and Honour that it shields the people from the cruel elites: "Of course sir, I will begin killing peasants at once"
 
Cetashwayo said:
It's one thing if people are deliberately aware of how awful things are but from my lurking this seems to be a strange strain of idealism going through it? People absolutely melting down over some votes because it doesn't line up with their ideal for the state. I know because I keep seeing reports every big vote as people get heated :p
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You of all people shouldn't be surprised by this, you ran an Ancient Greece civ-quest where voters kept trying to make a gender-neutral democratic empire with full citizenship for immigrants.
Wiadi said:
Yes, the system will have downsides and failure states we'll have to work to avoid. But here we run into the situation you previously characterized as my position - no system lacks failure states and unintended consequences, and I don't see these as meaningfully worse/more probable than those of any probable alternative (though this may partly be because nobody arguing with me has put forth their own proposal, instead favoring "just keep everything the same and I'm sure it'll work itself out").
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Yeah, this is where we're not seeing eye to eye. You think your system has similar amount of potential failures as our current system, and thus just as resilient and viable. I'm seeing North Korea in the making.
 
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Cetashwayo said:
It's one thing if people are deliberately aware of how awful things are but from my lurking this seems to be a strange strain of idealism going through it? People absolutely melting down over some votes because it doesn't line up with their ideal for the state. I know because I keep seeing reports every big vote as people get heated :p
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As a large quest with a lot of people following it, you have some people who realise how bad things are, but also others who don't realise how many things that the Ymaryn do that they would consider evil. I personally like to think of myself as a pragmatic idealist. I try to vote for what I believe to be the best option and try to vote with morals over pragmatism where I can, but I am under no delusions about how at best, the Ymaryn are least bad choice rather than being a good choice. I also feel that as the Ymaryn have grown larger, things have gotten worse as they become harder to manage.

That said, I do believe that the Ymaryn are the least bad choice because while I feel that the collectivism and elitist are becoming too extreme, the Ymaryn (and I'm talking in general here as there are exceptions to the rule) are still non-xenophobic, are against slavery (and they walk the walk rather than just talking the talk), took genuine action to address the Half-Exile mistreatment rather than covering it up, ignoring it or making worse, they don't raid their neighbours or loot and rape their villages and the Ymaryn also took action against abusing their One-God heretics and treated them fairly after punishing those who abused them.

The Ymaryn also have people like Alyxunmyn, Uvothyn and Gaisyn so I don't think the Ymaryn are all bad and while there is bad people amongst the Ymaryn, there are also good people.

Cetashwayo said:
Most of what I am assuming is from conversations with Academia Nut about the state of Ymaryn. Admittedly, it was a while ago, so it could just be a rehash of arguments people have already had, which I'll apologize for since I mostly lurk the thread and discussion moves so quickly I can't read it all.
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Kind of the case. The smarter or at least more knowledgeable voters have already realised what you have pointed out such as myself, but there is also a louder group who don't realise how bad the Ymaryn are and go on about how good we are.
 
ctulhuslp said:
ALthough, there is one big thing @Cetashwayo . We were not created by conquering elites, and while we now have quite a lot of conquered land (vassals, but still), I assume this is a deviation wrt what state does and its "mindset".
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The state's mindset, while not necessarily the same between states, is more about the basic requirements of state security. States need to collect taxation, they need to govern the area, they need to ensure coercive control remains in their hands. Without the enormous wealth of the modern state, not only vested in its citizens but in its bureaucratic efficiency, states generally have a budget that is dominated by the costs of war, court, and paying their tiny bureaucracies. They can have infrastructure projects and great works of architecture and so on, but these are not really re-distributive projects, and often rely on local laborers who tend to be treated poorly. Or they're paid well seasonally and then go back to their farms (or it's corvee labor). Or they increase the yield from an area but that redistribution, which can go back to the farmers, is still a pittance.

The state can have an egalitarian or a meritocratic ideal (it's probably not a very good idea to have these both at the same time, mind you, for reasons that are becoming increasingly clear) but how that ideal lines up with the imperative of the state is difficult. I mean, you can't not tax the peasantry. The problem with historical states, and probably with Ymaryn as well, is that people are locked in. It's hard to envisage an alternative to Ymaryn's system without a total societal collapse. You could probably decentralize a lot of functions but then that runs counter to what players want. The issue with decentralized states is the competition of other states. The Ottoman Empire's decentralized state at the end of the eighteenth century functioned fine, but it had fallen behind the European powers and the demands of war had ballooned its military forces. It was running out of money and slipping near constantly into debt.

HanEmpire said:
You of all people shouldn't be surprised by this, you ran an Ancient Greece civ-quest where voters kept trying to make a gender-neutral democratic empire with full citizenship for immigrants.
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People tended to be pretty good about going away from that once they had some pressure put on them, though. I significantly curtailed a lot of the craziest shit and people were much less inclined to go crazy by the end, and I had a lot of pleasure making a state that was different but not insanely divergent.
 
Cetashwayo said:
People tended to be pretty good about going away from that once they had some pressure put on them, though. I significantly curtailed a lot of the craziest shit and people were much less inclined to go crazy by the end, and I had a lot of pleasure making a state that was different but not insanely divergent.
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Cetashwayo says as the Eretrian steamtanks demolish the last vestiges of Julius Caesar's legions; industrial Eretria easily overtaking the world on a wave of modernity, democracy and egalitarian worship of the natural scientific method.
 
Cetashwayo said:
Providing communities the power to govern child rearing, the single most important power for any community, will result in those communities having coercive powers over their members. This isn't human nature, it's relatively simple sociology and logical causation. From conversations with Academia Nut I am skeptical about the true effectiveness of such social engineering efforts on a countryside that you have trouble getting information about, let alone governing. You can say this is for the future, but I have to say I'm skeptical about the entire core idea. Yes, no one in real life has a national gestalt guiding them, but you can't deflect real world examples with "well we'll just social engineer" them. How will you do that? Who's gonna do it? How will you enforce it? Will you vest communities with such enormous coercive power? What governing unit will be the lowest level unit of a commune? A village? So we're Tsarist Russia now?
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By "social engineering" I refer to the thread's ability to guide and shape the values of the Ymaryn, as we have been doing since their inception. No actor on the ground needs to be aware of the plan until they are ready to think of it on their own based on the values we've instilled in them, and similarly, no enforcement should be necessary beyond the known ability of the players to influence what values the Ymaryn acquire, discard, and evolve.
Cetashwayo said:
I am asking you to explain who is going to enforce this system. This is your problem, really the core problem at the heart of these kinds of initiatives in Ymaryn. Your Patricians who directly benefit from the system are the ruling class. They are also a significant portion of the bureaucracy. To work, this system will rely on...

The Bureaucracy. Staffed by Patricians.
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This is why breaking the power of the Patricians is a crucial part of the proposed plan. I acknowledge that an entrenched ruling class will likely never implement such reforms, so we need to institute the system from the ground up. This will most likely require at least one social collapse, in order to clear the way for the new system while preserving the prerequisite values for its formation, which we will need to have developed prior to said collapse. Multiple instances may be needed if the first does not chance to produce successors with the right combination(s) of traits.
HanEmpire said:
Yeah, this is where we're not seeing eye to eye. You think your system has similar amount of potential failures as our current system, and thus just as resilient. I'm seeing North Korea in the making.
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Would you like to articulate more clearly why that is, then? All I've heard so far is "people will blame the existing system of governance when things go to shit," which is...basically always going to happen.
 
Aaah there are so many mods!
ManusDomine said:
Cetashwayo says as the Eretrian steamtanks demolish the last vestiges of Julius Caesar's legions; industrial Eretria easily overtaking the world on a wave of modernity, democracy and egalitarian worship of the natural scientific method.
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I need to pick that story back up, sounds like a lot of progress has been made.
 
Wiadi said:
This is why breaking the power of the Patricians is a crucial part of the proposed plan. I acknowledge that an entrenched ruling class will likely never implement such reforms, so we need to institute the system from the ground up. This will most likely require at least one social collapse, in order to clear the way for the new system while preserving the prerequisite values for its formation, which we will need to have developed prior to said collapse. Multiple instances may be needed if the first does not chance to produce successors with the right combination(s) of traits.
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Social collapses tend not to play by the rules of the immortal god gestalt of Ymaryn :p
 
ManusDomine said:
Cetashwayo says as the Eretrian steamtanks demolish the last vestiges of Julius Caesar's legions; industrial Eretria easily overtaking the world on a wave of modernity, democracy and egalitarian worship of the natural scientific method.
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Has this happened? Cause i need to read that.

Cetashwayo said:
Head Scribe Patrician Yugh Gardamma, Twenty-Sixth of his line, elder scion of the Gardamma Clan, A Most Holy and Fortuitious Clan, the Thousand Year Clan, That Has Crossed the Ages and Kissed the Heavens, that has Married Into Such Clans as the Hula Clan, the Thora Clan, the Ulona Clan, and the Eternal Clan Vogora, A Clan Of Such Wealth and Honour that it shields the people from the cruel elites: "Of course sir, I will begin killing peasants at once"
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Is this actually how it turned out historically? Because I'm probably influenced into knee_jerk reaction of government is good.
 
Wiadi said:
By "social engineering" I refer to the thread's ability to guide and shape the values of the Ymaryn, as we have been doing since their inception. No actor on the ground needs to be aware of the plan until they are ready to think of it on their own based on the values we've instilled in them, and similarly, no enforcement should be necessary beyond the known ability of the players to influence what values the Ymaryn acquire, discard, and evolve.


This is why breaking the power of the Patricians is a crucial part of the proposed plan. I acknowledge that an entrenched ruling class will likely never implement such reforms, so we need to institute the system from the ground up. This will most likely require at least one social collapse, in order to clear the way for the new system while preserving the prerequisite values for its formation, which we will need to have developed prior to said collapse. Multiple instances may be needed if the first does not chance to produce successors with the right combination(s) of traits.


Would you like to articulate more clearly why that is, then? All I've heard so far is "people will blame the existing system of governance when things go to shit," which is...basically always going to happen.
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I think the fact that your system requires (possibly multiple) collapses is the main issue here.

A remnant of the Ymaryn will likely not have kept the traits you desire to make an egalitarian utopia, and would instead keep traits such as Lords Loyalty and We have Reserves instead.

These fragments will likely be more warlike, as the fact that they exist at all is probably because of a Warlord that unified the land by force.

Much like the Lowlands confederation breaking and becoming the Highland Kingdom, the Ymaryn would likely be succeeded by multiple highly centralized Kingdoms with hereditary monarchs keeping things together through force of arms.
 
Cetashwayo said:
Social collapses tend not to play by the rules of the immortal god gestalt of Ymaryn :p
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From what I've understood of AN's comments in the thread, a social collapse would lead to us selecting from among successor states which each retain some portion of our values, infrastructure, etc. This plan simply requires that one of the successors from a given collapse has the necessary conditions for implementation; if none do, then those conditions will need to be re-developed and another collapse initiated. If the inheritance is random then sufficient "generations" should produce the desired result by chance; if not, with experience we can work to shape the pre-collapse conditions to maximize likelihood of desirable outcomes.
 
VoidZero said:
Has this happened? Cause i need to read that.
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It did not.

VoidZero said:
Is this actually how it turned out historically? Because I'm probably influenced into knee_jerk reaction of government is good.
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Edward Said said:
Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.
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Cetashwayo said:
The state's mindset, while not necessarily the same between states, is more about the basic requirements of state security. States need to collect taxation, they need to govern the area, they need to ensure coercive control remains in their hands. Without the enormous wealth of the modern state, not only vested in its citizens but in its bureaucratic efficiency, states generally have a budget that is dominated by the costs of war, court, and paying their tiny bureaucracies. They can have infrastructure projects and great works of architecture and so on, but these are not really re-distributive projects, and often rely on local laborers who tend to be treated poorly. Or they're paid well seasonally and then go back to their farms (or it's corvee labor). Or they increase the yield from an area but that redistribution, which can go back to the farmers, is still a pittance.

The state can have an egalitarian or a meritocratic ideal (it's probably not a very good idea to have these both at the same time, mind you, for reasons that are becoming increasingly clear) but how that ideal lines up with the imperative of the state is difficult. I mean, you can't not tax the peasantry. The problem with historical states, and probably with Ymaryn as well, is that people are locked in. It's hard to envisage an alternative to Ymaryn's system without a total societal collapse. You could probably decentralize a lot of functions but then that runs counter to what players want. The issue with decentralized states is the competition of other states. The Ottoman Empire's decentralized state at the end of the eighteenth century functioned fine, but it had fallen behind the European powers and the demands of war had ballooned its military forces. It was running out of money and slipping near constantly into debt.
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> tiny bureaucracies
Hm.
@Cetashwayo , how feasible it is to ensure ~1 million people (not the case anymore I suspect, so asking with way smaller numbers from ages before) are completely fed and mostly landed with ~early iron age technological society? Like, literally almost everyone has some farming space (given on demand if one wants to farm) and food. At least in theory.

Our bureaucracy is not tiny if it can do even some approximation of this, no?

(which is why I think it's actually a low-magic setting and we pumped every bit of Ymaryn magic into ensuring our administration is even a thing)
 
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ctulhuslp said:
> tiny bureaucracies
Hm.
@Cetashwayo , how feasible it is to ensure ~1 million people (not the case anymore I suspect, so asking with way smaller numbers from ages before) are completely fed and mostly landed with ~early iron age technological society? Like, literally almost everyone has some farming space (given on demand if one wants to farm) and food. At least in theory.

Our bureaucracy is not tiny if it can do even some approximation of this, no?

(which is why I think it's actually a low-magic setting and we pumped every bit of Ymaryn magic into ensuring our administration is even a thing)
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Most of our population is not landed.
Fed yes landed no.
 
Wiadi said:
From what I've understood of AN's comments in the thread, a social collapse would lead to us selecting from among successor states which each retain some portion of our values, infrastructure, etc. This plan simply requires that one of the successors from a given collapse has the necessary conditions for implementation; if none do, then those conditions will need to be re-developed and another collapse initiated. If the inheritance is random then sufficient "generations" should produce the desired result by chance; if not, with experience we can work to shape the pre-collapse conditions to maximize likelihood of desirable outcomes.
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You know we are bordering on steppe plain filled with nomads with growing sea empire past Trelli yeah? Losing our state funded spike shell is very bad for our collective health.
 
SpeckofStardust said:
Most of our population is not landed.
Fed yes landed no.
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Uh no?
I mean, most of our population must be rural farmers, our urbanization is ridiculously high as is.
Of rurals, well, there are likely unlanded workers and half-exiles may be without land (although IIRC they are assigned marginal land to feed themselves)....but I doubt they are majority?

Like. Technically none are landed because ~no private land ownership~, but we aren't talking about them all being technically being tenant farmers of the king because nobody cares I assume.

Malevolo said:
90% of our population is rural, only now the patricians are starting to become "landed", and we are on the verge of our second collapse, even if the first one was aborted (Second Sons).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Less than 90%, we are high on urbanization.
 
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