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My class (at least as far as the American half of my family go) is ‘new money’, if anything. Or maybe, if I had to be granular, a yo-yo between rich and poor dating back to our arrival in the country. I’m certainly not a Mayflower descendant. But I like what they did. The Harvard Club is nice. I enjoy the architecture out on Cape Cod. The true, true WASPs I’ve known have exactly the nice-but-middling intellectual energy I like to see in political leaders, who tend to get dangerous if they get too smart, rare exceptions like LKY notwithstanding.
I don’t think there’s any magic in bloodlines. But I think there’s great value in an elite raised with a certain sense of duty and a great sense of luck - that is, with the knowledge that what they have is not the result of their own hard work. This is the critical element, the worst part of the ‘self made man’, that he attributes to ability and skill what should usually be attributed to good fortune. It’s this that Freddie is writing about, because of course ability is luck too.
Strivers who believe that the universe owes them something for their intelligence are often at the heart of culture war debates, they’re the angry journalists at Vice (most of whom aren’t of particularly high birth, contrary to some claims) upset that being a journalist pays so poorly even though they’re smart and graduated from Brown. Compare to me, then, if you want and are interested as you seem to be. I believe that nothing I have is the result of my hard work (though I am in fact in my own right somewhat professionally successful), I have a healthy respect for luck, and I believe it is the duty of people with valuable things (money and talent) to support prosocial causes. To that end I advocate more redistribution from rich to poor, higher taxes on people like me, an end to mass immigration (which pressures working class pay), more police on the streets (disproportionately benefiting the poor), the locking up of the mentally ill homeless (see previous), more discipline in schools (see previous) and the overall beautification of society (benefiting everyone).
Are you trying to butter up your audience, dude? Is it campaigning season for nobility seats already? Your motte-approved opinions, appreciation for wholesome americana, and humble family beginnings are besides the point. No configuration of these parameters would justify that privilege.
You say you want to recognize luck and ‘a sense of duty’(applause), but your method is to recognize blood instead of merit, both subject to luck. Luck is tangential to your argument. If luck was our primary concern, we should forget blood and merit, and draw lots for membership in the ruling class.
The angry journalist at vice also believes he is helping society by supporting opposite causes to your own. In his defense, his self-interest is hidden, he doesn’t nakedly request aristocratic status for his prosocial efforts.
Way too antagonistic, dude. You've been warned about this before. Banned for a week.
Inexorably, the bans get longer and longer. Shouldn’t I get a reset somewhere, I’ve paid my debts to mottiety.
The gradual automatic escalation is stupid, site's getting unusable for me now. Will the garden improve after I leave, weed-puller?
You've drawn three warnings and two bans in the last nine months, uninterrupted by any AAQCs. The easiest "reset" would be for you to stop being unnecessarily antagonistic. We're warning and banning you in hopes of bringing your posts in line with the rules. If you don't want to follow the rules, then yes, your absence would be an improvement.
It is not our goal to chase people away. Quite the contrary. But this is not a clickbait site and no one is running "engagement" metrics and asking how we can get more clicks. We're fully prepared to accept the possibility that the rules suppress engagement; the rules are more important to us than keeping participation high.
If - big if - I write a AAQC, will you stop increasing the bans and go back to warnings?
No--rather, we're more likely to just overlook borderline offenses, and less likely to escalate quickly. Even a pile of AAQCs isn't going to stop you from getting warnings and bans, too--we've handed out months-long bans to some of our best posters, over the years. And it's disappointing when they leave. We want them to stay! But not at the price of allowing them to ignore the rules.
The best way to stop dealing with bans is to stop breaking the rules. Is there some reason you don't consider that a live option? Is there something I could tell you that would get you to consider that a live option?
Regulars get less charity than newbies and private accounts of unknown provenance. This isn’t me flaunting the rules or refusing to recognize your autoritah, we’re talking about effectively banning me for stuff new accounts would barely get warned for , slowly but indelibly added up over years of participation like a kafkaian nightmare.
Imo over that timescale the good washes out the bad. (if there is any. Basically, to answer your question, I’m an innocent man, victim of circumstance, accused by appearance)
For example here, rafa’s the most resilient person on the motte, completely unfazed by antagonism, if what I said even counts. The way I see it, you’re defending people who don’t need defending, enforcing borderline rules for the hell of it.
Anyway, I got your meaning, I should write that QC so I’ll get the benefits, implicitly.
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I don't really see a better proxy for judging a sense of duty to others than blood/nobility. Anecdotally, the people in my family who have inherited their wealth generationally have significantly more sense of responsibility to the community and those around them than the ones on the other side of my family who believe they've earned their wealth and refuse to take care of their homes and barely invest their resources to help themselves, let alone the people in their families or the broader community. I suspect this stems from the sense of fear that those born into no money feel toward money, whereas the family members who always had money were much less fearful about it and happier to spread the wealth around. Frankly I want to be ruled by people who are secure in their wealth and are willing to spend it to improve their lives and the lives of those around them rather than by people who want to hoard their resources out of learned apprehension and fear. Family history of wealth tracks the former better than any other metric I can imagine.
I have a hard time thinking of a worse one. The history of "nobility" is largely one of forcefully looting as much wealth as possible from what are effectively slaves, held in place with military force. What was the nobility's reaction to the peasantry being able to demand higher wages after the Black Death, or move to cities for the same end? Was it to encourage this natural economic development which improved productivity even at their own cost? Of course not, they passed laws prohibiting peasants from leaving so that they could not get those higher wages.
The feeling of societal obligation you're talking about--and in particular, a feeling of societal obligation that actually helps other people and does not consider the rigid maintenance of the existing order for the sake of "stability" to be the primary obligation--is extremely rare.
Communism. Like, it's not even close.
For most of that history, wealth as we understand the term effectively didn't exist, because there wasn't a workable way to create it. Most people were subsistence farmers, and the military force was necessary to prevent the next guy over from rolling through and looting all the portable goods. Anything better than that required a level of structure and coordination that no one involved could maintain.
You understand that food has to be made, a process that takes a lot of work with a lag-time of several months to a year? If everyone abandons the fields to go chase better wages in the cities, where does the next harvest come from? What happens to the people in those newly crowded cities?
Communism is a system; blood/nobility is a personal characteristic. This feels like a category error. I agree that "need" (as in, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need") manages to be worse than blood, but this is quite a low bar and they're both so bad it feels pointless to ask which is worse.
Indeed, wealth creation jumped massively right as inherited power and nobility-based political systems were starting to be replaced! I wonder if there could be a connection between these events? Maybe such a confiscatory tax regime discouraged higher production? Perhaps nobles are effectively of random competence and random (or worse) moral character? Possibly such a rigid hierarchy discouraged innovation?
I think it was quite far from "everyone" who wanted/tried to move, and some of those still planned to farm, just under someone who would pay them more. In any event, if nobles can foresee this happening, there's an obvious solution: Pay the peasants more! In this situation, their work is clearly valuable, so that shouldn't be an issue. It's not like no one except nobility is capable of understanding that food will need to be harvested 6 months out! This is exactly the kind of problem that markets are wonderful at solving and central planning is terrible at. Obviously if too many people start to move to the cities, wages drop because of supply effects, because there's limited capital, and because the productivity of the marginal migrant goes down, which discourages more migration.
Speaking of central planning, I find it rather bizarre that you pointed out how terrible communism was, then immediately suggested that some of the things the Soviets did, such as preventing peasants from moving to the city and engaging in confiscatory levels of taxation, all enforced by military strength, which demonstrably destroyed the economic productivity of huge swaths of land (most notably Ukraine) and lead to mass famine, were somehow good when implemented under feudalism?
I lost two posts replying to you and @fuckduck9000 on this, but the short version is that your arguments are persuasive. There's a number of details I'd be interested in arguing further given the time, but your point:
And duck's similar point:
There were other points I'd like to pursue, but I'm sure we'll get back to it sooner or later. For now, consider me educated.
Sure, and I appreciate your willingness to be persuaded (and to admit to it!).
To hopefully try to give you a few more specifics:
I don't think the portion of peasants trying to move into cities (many just wanted to move to a better paying farm) was ever like 30% post-Black Death. The population of London was probably not much more than 100,000 around this time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_cities_in_history#Timeline:Roman_Empire%E2%80%93Modern_Age(1%E2%80%931800_A.D.)) while the total population of England was around 2 million (https://brewminate.com/the-collapse-of-the-middle-ages/) even after the plague decimated it. It was never going to be remotely feasible for 7x the population of the largest city to just move in all at once even if they wanted to; you don't have to ban that. My understanding is that somewhere around a few percent of the population would have left agriculture. Prior to the plague, average productivity had been declining as more and more marginal land was being ploughed, so the reduction in population probably allowed for a little bit of breathing room.
Also, there were options to improve productivity at the time. To give a few examples, oxen were being replaced by horses as draft animals (20 percent in England in 1086, 60 percent by 1574). Watermills were also being constructed at a quick pace, one for every 50 people in Southern England in 1086 and twice that 200 years later. Nothing revolutionary, but it was certainly feasible to absorb a minor decline in agricultural labor, especially if some of that decline is being invested in things that increase productivity.
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I think you and Freddie are in agreement on that point: that believing you did it all yourself by hard work and native ability, without factoring in luck (being in the right place at the right time) or other elements that helped you along means that there is an attitude of "I deserve all this" and concurrently "If you don't have anything, that's your own fault for being stupid/lazy and I certainly have no duty to help you; I got all this by my own merits".
A lack of charity, if you will. It's not that those who achieve shouldn't get high rewards, it's that those who are left behind should also be considered, and a 'pure meritocracy' then puts the blame for failure on 'not being good enough'. I think Freddie is arguing, and maybe you as well, that there are people who will never be 'good enough' through no fault of their own; they didn't choose their genetics which make them 'just ordinary people' in an economy that increasingly has no place for 'just ordinary people', or their circumstances, or "a drunk driver smashed into my car and gave me traumatic brain injury". What do we do for them or about them, then?
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