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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28333 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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I know George R. R. Martin gets a lot of flack now as being Reddit trash for midwits, but I think his parable of the sellsword is a really excellent and pithy little exploration of the nature of power and political legitimacy. I will post a variation of it below:

In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies? "The king, the priest, the rich man — who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It's a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword. "And yet he is no one," Varys said. "He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel." "That piece of steel is the power of life and death." "Just so … yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Tyrion cocked his head sideways. “Did you mean to answer your damned riddle, or only to make my head ache worse?” Varys smiled. “Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.” “A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”

That's why stratocracy (the army is the government) is the only sane form of government, I think.

We could fix the problem of democracy (ostensible rulers are people elected on basis of popularity) but bureaucracy/NGOs actually running things by instituting a cooperative/competitive meaningful state-wide MMO wargame simulating industrial warfare, and people who do really well in it can be voted in into representative positions..

E.g. you start playing as a kid riding in a virtual tank or sailing a boat, shooting other kids doing the same, obeying orders from someone older,. Or for girls, running an open pit mine, taking care of a cotton farm or clearing out ancient bunkers looking for valuable trash or keeping a small refinery or factory running. All these are fun computer games requiring thought.

As people get older they take on more responsible tasks in the game, leaders get voted in. Running a war is one of the hardest tasks out there, and although the stakes are low (how +-5% much tax you pay next year as adult), pocket money as kids, so I'd expect after someone has taken parts in dozens of virtual campaigns you're going to end up with some pretty smart people in the more complex parts of the game - unit command, industrial coordination, strategy, logistics etc..

instituting a cooperative/competitive meaningful state-wide MMO wargame simulating industrial warfare, and people who do really well in it can be voted in into representative positions

This is called "capitalism", and that effect is why the most capitalist countries have been the most powerful ever since it was invented (pre-empire Romans, Dutch, English, Americans). The accumulation of capital is fundamentally the accumulation of power; when people pay you to do something they want, that is them casting their vote to a much larger degree than their actual vote in a ballot box is.

Because capitalism directly rewards people for serving others in the most advanced way they can, it is only natural that those who cannot or will not serve seek to destroy it (forced redistributionism and creating an artificial scarcity of resources are the two most popular ways); it also runs into a problem where automation can obsolete (and thus bankrupt) so many people at the same time that a socialist revolution occurs in lieu of civil war (US, 1934).

This (reality based learning and selection through mmo) is a really fun idea. Has this been described further elsewhere I could I nerdsnipe you into more detail?

Banks, Iain M. 1988. The Player of Games.

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