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I enjoyed this, wish it got more interaction. I'll say that in response to:
Absolutely not! In my opinion we got a worse system in many ways. Yes there is mobility for the few people who can hack it, but overall our leaders are worse. Instead of having a small political and intellectual elite who are trained from birth to lead, and have severe social consequences for screwing up, we instead have a class of politicians that can vie for power with little real consequence to themselves if they make mistakes.
There's no sense of noblesse oblige from the rich anymore either. In fact it's the opposite - many rich people in America take a sort of "fuck you, I've got mine" attitude where instead of giving back, they try to turn and kick the ladder down. With a bloodline based aristocracy this behavior was minimized because there was no way for the peasantry to meaningfully try and climb the ladder.
Unlike @2rafa, I'm not necessarily saying we need a return to the aristocratic days. I do however think we should take a hard look at the cons of our current arrangement and see if there are ways to engender or enforce a sense of societal responsibility in the modern rich, especially billionaires and others with absurd amounts of wealth.
Much appreciated.
I have a lot of trouble evaluating whether the pre-capitalist leadership was genuinely better. I think the question for me kind of is: even if they were better at leadership, would that outweigh the economic growth we got under the new order? Competition leading to lower prices and maximizing consumer surplus and growth seems to have really not been a component of the old system at all. A lot of aristocrats did decide to go into business eventually as they lost their other privileges, but it seems like they really didn't make that transition till they were forced into it by new entrepreneurs. Would the industrial revolution still have happened if no one shattered that stasis? Capitalists might be selfish "I've got mine" types but they did produce benefits for the overall society - an excerpt about the Gilded Age, likely the height of the capitalist dominion:
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Noblesse didn’t oblige them to anything. They treated commoners like they were ten levels of shit below friendly human contact. They’d steal from them every day of the week and kill them for a slight. And when this degenerate elite was finally replaced, economic and, ironically, military performance instantly improved ten-fold. The leadership they provided, if any, was of very low quality. They didn’t produce anything. The people were starving. In what ways were they giving back?
During some time periods nobles were terrible yes, especially right before the revolutions. Before that though they contributed to art, religious theory and knowledge. The Renaissance and the enlightenment both directly came from noble classes pursuing knowledge, and at least in the case of Alexander vin Humboldt and Darwin, they claimed that giving back and helping society were a strong motivation.
From a consequentialist point of view even if they didn’t care they drastically improved the lives of peasants over the long run.
Anachronistic justification. They didn’t think their station in life was justified by scientific, philosophic or artistic accomplishments. When they dabbled in those things, it was more often as patrons than practitioners.
Not nobles: erasmus, spinoza, leonardo, luther, shakespeare.
How are nobles responsible for the renaissance and the enlightenment?
Maybe I’m just romanticizing the past, fuckduck. I’m simply deeply disappointed in the political class of today.
Indeed Dag, that would be my guess. Alhough I can’t entirely exclude the hypothesis that the french education system did such a great propaganda job on me that rolling back the revolution seems inconceivable. Clearly peasants now are better off, but it's hard to disentangle that from technological progress. That leaves us with concurrent societies and, all else being equal, imo societies with entrenched blood-based 'sword aristocracy' didn't do well against more liberal competitors (best example being india).
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