VoidZero
Passing Flan 布丁魔王
- Location
- Anywhere but RL
We did avert a civil war, even if a giant social change is coming as result of land distribution. (We could have done a drawback free DL back in golden age but noooooo.)
Paths of Civilization
- Thread starter Academia Nut
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- Original
We did avert a civil war, even if a giant social change is coming as result of land distribution. (We could have done a drawback free DL back in golden age but noooooo.)
HanEmpire
Delicious
I did already, as have a bunch of other people. Your bureaucracy will get bloated and inefficient and its cogs will become disillusioned with the ideal and turn self-serving. No amount of social engineering or state indoctrination will fix this problem, because people will easily see that their livelihoods are made objectively better by cheating the system. And without the bureaucracy working to keep everything properly balanced, education inequalities will crop up and your ideal will break. There's no way for the government to keep enough trustworthy eyes on everyone to keep them honest, not without turning the whole thing into a dystopian police state.
I find that to be really ridiculous tbh. Like, our rivers and roads must be packed with food-barges and food-carts all the damn time.
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- Location
- Voidbetweenstars
It doesn't help that everyone in our cities get free food.
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Okay, even granting your premise that this is what will happen, how is that worse than any other system? You can't just say "your system will have problems" when trying to make the point that it's worse than others; you need to explain how you propose to avoid such universal problems as "people are self-interested and corruption will happen."
- Location
- Huezil
HanEmpire
Delicious
Other systems don't have a massive horribad bureaucray leeching unimaginable amounts of wealth out of the state and putting up red tape everywhere. The current system is objectively better because it doesn't have that. It's orders of magnitude leaner and more effective. Yes it doesn't purport to provide for the little people, but your system will end up screwing them over anyhow. So why bother?
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VoidZero
Passing Flan 布丁魔王
- Location
- Anywhere but RL
This is why we dug channel and planning to dig another channel to lowland plain.
I think I'm starting to see what @Cetashwayo meant where government hunger is bad for rural people, since channels are generally done with crovee labor and the death toll was sky high.
- Location
- Huezil
- Location
- Austria
Do you think I am fucking joking when I say Ymaryn Bureaucracy is magic?
HanEmpire
Delicious
To be fair the Romans managed similar feats. But then again they didn't build their capital in the hills and try to feed everyone for free.
I guess the Ymaryn Green Thumb pays bigger dividends than I imagined.
Horologer
Incertae sedis
- Location
- a risen sea
Maybe, but I think it's more likely that AN is just being generous with our ahistoricity.
Forcing children to be reared communally would give local rulers a lot of power and a lot of incentive to abuse that power. Because you could not possibly micromanage every village on the planet, the local powers would be in charge of how the children were raised, and that would very quickly devolve into "some children are more equal than others". It would necessitate a massively expensive bureaucracy to even get off the ground, and then it would break down pretty fast as people abuse it to either pawn off extra kids on the community or give their own kid a leg up.
Communal rearing ignores peoples' self-interest in having their kids succeed, and it allows corruption to flourish because local rulers get a staggering amount of power over their citizens.
Even if we wanted to try it, we just don't have the info / admin infrastructure tech to make it work, and we probably won't until at least the Inudstrial Revolution rolls around.
Many of us have discovered the glory that is the Intrigue stat that we can't seem to build a sizable amount of because we keep on spending it precisely to have a slightly better idea of how stuff is actually working.
I mean, most of us are probably more optimistic compared to the reality of the situation, but a lot of us really do realize things are not very nice and are aware there are likely some nasty surprises we don't know about. We've just become rather desensitized to it while we try and make sure the state doesn't implode for whatever reason. How much of that is a good thing or a bad thing depends on one's views of the situation and the alternatives. I mostly vote for the Ymaryn depending on how I think they tend to act and what I think seems sensible to them, with the occasional nudges for trying to advance knowledge so they can grow when I believe it's feasible.
A large part of what I look to is the current values to see how our society works.
- Personal Stewards of Nature tells me that one of the few truly pure good things a person can do is to care for and maintain the land. I have assumed that this means that one of the ways Patricians and others of higher class justify their rule to the common person has a lot to do with showing how productive the land is. I suspect heavy focus on agriculture is still one of the most prominent.
- Greater Justice tells me that justice serves the State first and foremost. So I suspect that even if a person was only acting with the options left to them, they will still be forced dealt with in the manner that most benefits the community or state. Either put to work as a half exile or killed if they aren't of use. I was not happy when I saw Greater Good merge with our justice line, but decided not to point out how horrible that actually is.
- Pride in Acceptance is a 'humbling' trait that tends to take people out of their comfort zone in order to show they are open to new ideas. Combined with purity and other traits, I suspect that this is very results oriented as opposed to being genuinely accepting of people. No one wants to take accept new things, but they take pride that they can despite that, so they want to show that it is worth it.
- Division of Power is likely everyone's excuse for believing they should have a say in things. I suspect it isn't really believed in currently and would need some major event to truly entrench it into Ymaryn culture. In the meantime it makes a convenient excuse for a power grab.
- Joyous Symphony is a trait that shoves conformism down the throat of every person in the state and shuns people who do not support state conformity. It's a mixed bag. On the one hand, we gain the ability to truly act like a state, on the other hand we have immense pressure for people to contribute to the community as a whole or face being a social pariah, with all that entails in a society as primitive as ours. I'm really still not sure what I think of its narrative. At least it emphasizes that it takes different types of people working together to make great things happen.
- Honourable Death is... yeah. Another very mixed bag. On the one hand, it has saved our asses several times and allows people to find greatness in doing something that is incredibly hard, but often necessary at times to save their loved ones. On the other hand, when someone is without honor this continues to mean that some form of suicide, either through directly killing themselves or taking on increasingly risky actions, is the single path left for them to gain honor. Many of us are quite aware that 'death by overwork' is a thing in Ymaryn society because of this. It doesn't take much to extrapolate that to death is the ultimate redeemer for the honorless, especially when combined with our conformist traits in greater justice and joyous symphony.
- Philosopher Kings means that we have some form of really primitive meritocracy. It encourages people to know and learn, and encourages for the leaders to be knowledgable too. It's what I like to call one of our "legitimacy traits" as a result, the others being Personal Stewards of Nature and Divinely Glorious Elites. I like these traits and wish we had a wider breadth of them, along with more traits that gave us the ability to gain personal glory.
- Swords and Ploughshares says... very little about our culture. It does mean that war is pushed more towards an industry rather than a form of glory, which is nice, other than us having little actual honor folded into war that encourages us to act in certain ways. We at least have laws to balance that out.
- Divinely Glorious Elites is probably our only way for people to gain reliably gain glory on a personal level. It basically boils down to 'aim to be the best' and recently 'hire the best'. It's a nice trait that encourages education, but it being one of the few ways of gaining personal glory basically means that talent is paramount, but not everyone can be talented since it is compared to others by its very nature. When combined with honorable death as being the other reliable way of gaining glory... yeesh. I continue to consider the lack of concern towards the individual as the greatest pitfall in Ymaryn society at the moment.
- Lord's Loyalty is last. It's a nice, if incredibly simplistic trait that sets up the concept of obligations between the people and those who work under them. I'd like to see this evolve in a legal way that puts forth the importance of the individual going both ways in the equation.
Edit: Now all you have to do is get AN to pm you what is actually happening! And input from everyone else I suppose...
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Legion0047
Retired Shadowrunner.
- Location
- Austria
- Pronouns
- God Emperor
we really should put a road project on repeat.
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Why, exactly, does the system I propose require such a "massive horribad bureaucracy" in comparison to our current one (or, more precisely, our current one extrapolated to a later stage of development and higher techbase - since, again, my proposal is not one meant for immediate implementation)?
Regarding "more equal than others," elaborate? It's a nice buzzword (buzzphrase?) but doesn't mean much in isolation.
People would not be able to abuse it to pawn extra kids off on the community, because all kids would already go to the community. People would not be able to abuse it to give their own kid a leg up because they would not have "their own kid(s)" - all children would be raised communally, with no special connection to their biological origins.
People's "self-interest in having their kids succeed" would be one of the instincts we would have to override through establishing community-focused values that de-emphasize biological family as a relevant factor in people's lives. Local rulers (or rather, local power structures, as having single locally-absolute leaders is obviously a terrible idea for such a system) would have to be held in check, but the same is true in any system that delegates power, and those that don't become massively overcentralized and inefficient so I don't really see what you want here. "Less government power" isn't the answer, because then that just makes people free to abuse each other as private citizens, which is not a goal I especially favor.
Regarding techbase, I absolutely agree that we don't currently have it - I want to lay the groundwork now so that, when the techbase is available, properly collapsing our civilization will allow a new one with the desired system to emerge.
- Location
- Southern Virginia
Protip: Peasant farmers don't need to be fed by the state. Your bureaucracy "feeding everyone" works by taking the surplus production of the peasantry and distributing it to non-subsistence populations. Like priests and artisans and bureaucrats. The peasantry are presumably compensated with finished goods to some extent or other, and the bureaucrats do some famine relief when the weather disrupts the harvest... but do you really think your hereditary bureaucrats are routinely taking land from peasant families and reassigning it? And how many peasant revolts have been supressed before you ever hear about them?
- Location
- Huezil
We already "know" that the if a patricians or tax collectors get a become a bore, they will "mysteriously" disappear. One, and that's because in Ymarin society you can do anything, but don't anger the Yeomen, they're like the weakest "political block" but have enough manpower... to starts another state, like the Storm Ymarin.
So yeah, messing with our peasants who see land as sacred is insanity, except if you can prove that dat person isn't taking care of that, and with the level of farming techs being passed around as "religion", the community can and will say if someone isn't farming well.
And if you don't farm well, you get a beating, them is sent to shit-shoveling.
- Location
- Austria
It was long before the current state of affairs, when yeomen had way more power.
- Location
- Huezil
Except the proportions between urban patricians and rural patricians is skewed, and the connections are even more skewed, so if they want, they will kill a rural patrician and disappear into the forest, and even if you send a Blackbird after them, the Blackbirds are under the Priests umbrella but are trained by Yeomen mostly (our best hunters and rangers), so whom you will prosecute a Yeomen?
So yeah, on the rural areas, you can do crazy shit.
- Location
- Austria
*looks at proles with arbaletes*
Not really, not anymore.
Now cities hold a lot of military power. If yeomen get uppity in some region, you can send some troops( even yeomen from other regions, since class consciousness is not a thing) , burn a couple of villages in the name of Greater Justice and all will be well.
- Location
- Huezil
That action would probably trigger PSN, so well, what's the benefit of that much hassle?
HanEmpire
Delicious
The extrapolated future form of the current education system will not try to intervene to make sure no one is advancing ahead of the norm. Communities lacking in top-tier education facilties will reap less rewards from society, and the setup will always produce an education gap between urban centres and rural communes. This is unfortunate perhaps, but practical from the perspective of governance.
Your proposal on the other hand is to setup a system where communal education facilities are constantly regulated by the central government that constantly intervenes to correct imbalances and unfair advantages. Which raises the question of how you plan to run such a micromanaging system like that, with all of its minute details, on a state-wide scale without a sprawling bureaucracy. Who's going to set the curriculum, collate and compare children performances, observe and report on local practices, decide what aspects are unfair and fair, quantify what resources to take away or give out, oversee the chain of command and resources to make sure everything gets where they need to get to, dole out punishments to communities guilty of cheating the system, handle complaints and accusations of unfairness, and every other little detail that needs to be taken care of? And the biggest problem of all, how are you going to make sure that at all those steps the assigned people are doing what they're supposed to do and nothing more? And who's going to watch the watchmen to make sure they're not taking bribes to look away? Are you going to base all that on an honour system, just hope that everyone is objective, altruistic, and honest? Will you assign all power to a handful of all powerful officials, who'll no doubt get ground down with the ridiculous workload? This is a monstrosity of a government you're dreaming up here, with all the high minded ideals and impracticality that mark every single utopian endeavours in history.
Academia Nut is busy this month and will return next month with a revamped system.
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Horologer
Incertae sedis
- Location
- a risen sea
People favor their own children, and upbringing would rapidly become only nominally communal. The only reason even the shell of communalism would remain is because people would use it as a pretext for feeding their children or offloading childrearing costs onto the community itself, which is what I meant by "pawning off". People would officially have no bias towards any given child based on their heredity while entirely coincidentally favoring the kids that just so happen to be related to them.
Communal upbringing would become a toxic institution very fast, as people bicker backstage to give their kids a leg up and the patricians find a way to sidestep it entirely. That's what I mean by "some children are more equal than others": the system would be egalitarian in only in the most facile sense, and at the most fundamental level would be used as a tool against equality. Trying to prevent that would require a complete overhaul of our society that has a very high probablity of going pear-shaped, and functioning oversight would require a staggeringly huge bureaucracy. This needs true social engineering, and we currently lack the fine-tuning capability to make social engineering feasible.
Fortunately, the only presently feasible steps in that direction that I can think of are things we want to do anyway. Universal basic education, a formal system for wards of the state, and increasing community consciousness are all items already on our checklist. Given that we both agree it's not happening right now, and that we're going to be taking steps in that direction already, I think we should shelve the argument for now.
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Okay, I said I was having fun here and I still am, but it's getting a bit tiresome to have to keep repeating the same points. I am not advocating for micromanagement from the central government, because that would turn into the sort of bureaucratic nightmare you're describing. I am advocating for a system whereby the central government sets down rules for provincial governments to follow, which in turn establish standards for communities within those provinces, and so on. This is essentially an evolution of the same system we have now, just with the addition of child-rearing to the responsibilities of the local communities (and thus the addition of its regulation to the responsibilities of the higher levels of government). Adding roles to the government will, of course, always somewhat increase the demands on the bureaucracy; however, I do not see how incorporating a single new area into the state's remit will inevitably result in a massive increase in corruption and inefficiency.
Also, yes, I realize that our current bureaucracy is already deeply corrupt; however, I contend that it will be less so in a system without noble families to develop elaborate structures of patronage and favoritism. Add to that the advancements in technology that would be necessary before I would even want to implement my proposed system, which would dramatically increase the practicality and reliability of reporting, and the social values emphasizing the community over the individual that would discourage (while, admittedly, likely not eliminating) focus on personal wealth and status over the good of society. The result seems unlikely to be worse than our current system on that front, though some of the relevant improvements (chiefly the technological ones) should come whether or not we pursue my desired system.
If you want to fiat that it's impossible to develop social values such that people legitimately don't favor their biological descendants, then fine, make it so they don't even get to know who their biological descendants are. Children are taken immediately from birth to be raised by the community, with parents at best being able to guess based on visual resemblance who's actually related to them. If you think that guessing would be too much of a problem, then have nearby communities transfer children among themselves so that parents do not have access to their offspring at all. Each of these steps somewhat increases the challenges of implementation and so should not be introduced immediately, as I don't believe it's as impossible as you claim to overcome the relevant challenges without them, but if they prove necessary solutions are available.
"Complete overhaul of our society" is in fact part of the game plan here; you may have missed it but I stated that the system I want would most likely be possible to implement only in the wake of a societal collapse, preferably engineered by us to maximize the odds of a suitable successor state emerging. This also provides an answer to your concern about our social-engineering capabilities - while our precision may be limited, repeated "generations" of civilization should allow us to achieve our desired results through trial and error.
While I agree with your goals, I do not think the argument is irrelevant to our current actions because I am in favor of other steps for which the rest of the thread does not seem to share my desire. For instance, I consider it a necessary priority to curtail the power of the Patricians even at steep cost, so as to prevent them from entrenching themselves so deeply that they are even more trouble to uproot when the time comes.