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For example an armed mob* coming to your flat, stealing all your stuff, burning building where you lived, maybe also raping you and enslaving? Or just flat-out murdering you for one reason or another?
*with uniforms or not, there are variants of it from Hutu, Hitler and Pol-Pot through Red Army to basically all factions in Syrian War
Also, while you describe pretty fucked up society, basically nowhere situation is as bad or mandatory. And places where situation is worse - that is because they have far too much of virility and violence.
Oh, go away with such redefinitions. Or at least propose new ones to allow distinguishing Los Angeles from what happened in Aleppo and Mariupol and Grozny.
And "civilization" surely includes polities where government did horrible things, if rulers decided to enslave/murder 10% of population it does not imply that we do not live in civilization. In fact civilization is needed for major projects, including "hey, lets murder 10 000 000 people".
You are complaining about badly setup civilisation, if someone promised you that civilisation is cuddly or nice to all population - then you should read something about world.
Which ones you think that fit? For me at least "being enslaved" seems to make it basically impossible. And just lack of material comfort AKA starving to death if things went wrong is in a fact major issue to people. Maybe I am extrapolating too much, but I really appreciate that starving to death is not a real risk to me.
Yes, we can. At cost of things getting far worse. No idea why this would be preferable - I would prefer neither, but I will take fucked up dating market over being murdered by rampaging vikings or starving to death or being oppressed by feudal lord worse than being oppressed now.
I guess that some people imagine themself to be doing the looting and raping or ruling as new lords. In such case, I wish them utter failure of all their plans and deranged imaginations.
I hope this will not happen in lifetime mine, my children or grandchildren - as plan minimum.
Free men are not guaranteed food and shelter.
Worse for who? At cost to whom?
Your personal welfare is immaterial if it's creating people with nothing to lose. And I'm not saying this because I enjoy that this is the case, but because it's the plain truth.
Empires have a natural tendency to do this which is why they're precarious affairs that always seem to create feudal societies in their wake once the source of the advantage that saw them rise dries up.
This is what is happening to our society. You may not live to see the most dramatic of consequences, you may even be able to shelter yourself from much of it, but you are living the consequences all the same.
Really? That is supposed to be benefit over modern citizen?
For start, slaves were not guaranteed food and shelter.
And maybe technically free men are not having such guarantees nowadays, but in practise they have them.
In functional modern societies free men get better food and shelter than slaves in past, even utterly useless ones and criminals. Maybe being slave in some societies was better than being beggar in modern Somalia and Syria but only for some of slave-owning societies.
Minimally competent free men get vastly better food and shelter.
Of all things, social support is not thing that was better for slaves than typical people nowadays. You even initially excluded "that are not commodified material comfort" from supposed benefits.
For anyone not preferring to risk dying from starvation or from raving bandits or being brutally oppressed by local lord.
For whom "post-industrial and back to virility and violence" would be better?
This was broadly understood for thousands of years to be the one advantage of servitude and the one disadvantage of freedom. People with no duties to others are offered no protection.
Free men.
Are you aware about food production nowadays and how it compared to past? And how starvation used to be far more common?
You even claim that benefit of slavery is that you were more likely to eat.
Who you count here? Noble elite class? Rampaging neovikings? Starving peasantry?
Yes I am indeed aware of the industrial revolution.
Anyone who is capable of violence and not beholden to a master usually has a lot to gain in feudal transitions.
Think of Li Zongren and his men, and all his and their peers.
Of course this is also risky, but that's the nature of such times.
whole point of feudal societal setup is that basically everyone has feudal lord above them and they are beholden to someone (and in some cases have people beholden to them)
so I guess you argue that whoever ends being king would benefit? That is likely true, but it is remarkably small group of people, and given that others are going to lose, I have no idea who would prefer such setup
You overestimate the rigidity of allegiances in such a setup because like many you confuse absolutism with feudalism.
It's true that eventually things do concentrate among a defined set of winners as empire sets in again but it can take decades or centuries to materialize.
And it is infinitely better to be a professional soldier in a feudal system than a NCO in an imperial army in terms of prestige, personal power, etc.
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