I am surprised that you are so exultant over a political structure that arose from a mix of poorly-thought-out Late Roman economic policies and a quirk of Germanic tribal succession laws. But then, you call yourself a nutjob in your user title and have admitted that none of your political ideas are feasible. Which in itself renders bringing them up for discussion meaningless, except as an act of online LARPing as pointless as pretending to be a modern-day Viking warrior. As Von Bismarck - certainly no rabble-rousing liberal - said, politics is the art of the possible.
@Navarro Do you have any serious points to make towards me, or are you just chock full of hatred towards Catholics?
Ah, we see it again. Waaah waah waah sophist, waaah waaah waaah you're deliberately misrepresenting me, waah waah waah you're intellectually dishonest, waaah waaah waaah evil sophist liars, etc. This is what you always devolve into.
In this case you've gone so far as to accuse me not of hating you, not of hating Catholicism, but of
hating all Catholics. None of which I do.
What's your problem? I suggested four small, tightly-knit, Catholic countries you could live in (which are all very picturesque, three of which are monarchies, and one is in your ancestral Central European homeland), and also several other countries where you could easily live the lifestyle you say you ought to live and would be content with, where many of your co-religionists also live.
But one need not go so far as to Africa to find a country in a state of modern feudalism - there's one right next door, with its weak state divided into the "duchies" of the drug cartels that continuously contend with each other and with the state that's unable to restrain them. I hear the Mexican cartels even engage in selling young women to young men who want sex, as you have said marriage ought to be in your ideal society.
It's like 1215 with iPhones over there.
So, do
you have any serious points to make towards me? All you have done thus far in this thread is follow your continuous pattern of saying outrageous things then repeating your arguments from the same cherry-picked sources, all while insisting that you didn't say what we all know you said and we're in the wrong for "misrepresenting" you. Which you are so addicted to accusing us of, you claimed we did it in a thread that was
supposedly you apologising for being unclear and promising to do better.
You have not done anything at all to disprove or even argue against my thesis, which is that:
Feudalism is not an ordained, ideal form of government but the state a more centralised and politically sophisticated society spirals into as it collapses and which eventually dies when rulers recreate the sophisticated political structures that previously existed; which is marked by the direct association of political power with military force and hence the dominance of a warrior/administrative elite who, lacking accountability, inevitably cause much civil strife which directly harms the wider society. Feudalist societies cannot co-exist with centralised regimes over a long time because said centralised regimes will inevitably overrun them eventually, so they are forced to centralise themselves and become non-feudal, or be destroyed.
We didn't see premodern states engaging in total war or taxing its citizenry to the extent that modern states did.
It was impossible for them to engage in total war or levy taxes on that level, so that doesn't prove that they were morally restrained so as not to do such, merely that the means to do so were not available to them. One might also note that as soon as early modern rulers gained the means to engage in such behaviour, they did so, and they ignored attempts by the Church at the time to limit the damage caused by warfare.
And a major war every few decades or so is far less damaging than perpetual low-level violent conflict, which actually has a far higher death toll per capita.
We can also note that the modern state is "permissive" in that it encourages people to follow their vices a la Brave New World. Do you deny this?
The evidence denies this. We can see very clearly just by walking out the door that the majority of modern states expend a great deal of energy on restricting, propagandising against, discouraging via taxation and outright banning the following vices:
-Use of psychoactive chemicals.
-Use of alcohol.
-Use of tobacco.
-Excess consumption of fat.
-Excess consumption of sugar.
The US Government has spent billions for decades, for instance, on trying to eliminate the use of drugs deemed illegal and a half-century before that expended a great deal of energy and money on enforcing a ban as something so basic and universal to human society as the consumption of alcohol, for a whole decade. These are not the actions of a state which encourages people to follow their vices.
But your post introducing that idea was v. interesting, because it helps reveal the way you think. You said that the obesity crisis is not due to an increase in sedentary lifestyles, a cultural desire to protect children from dangerous situations growing too strong and preventing them from exercising, the current push by a group of communists to push "fatness" as an oppressed substitute for the proletariat, and all the other factors that all add up to create a major public health problem. No - you surmise that it must be because "liberal states" (which must include notably illiberal states such as modern Russia, where 23% of the population is obese; and which is trying to restore its old military prowess, which a high obesity rate is counter-productive towards) are deliberately getting people fat as a means of social control.
No, democracy is built with factionalism at its core.
This is true, but only insofar as all societies are inevitably divided into factions. The HRE had Guelphs and Ghibbelines, Rome had Optimates and Populares, Byzantium Blues and Greens etc. Factionalism is a result of fallen human nature and thus will always exist in institutions made up of fallen humans.
What else can we call it but imperium in imperio?
The existence of factions within a state is not the case of a state existing within a state, but of factionalism within the state. Factionalism in which violence breaks out is rare and generally a sign that the state is starting to fail, or is in dire straits, in a democratic society. In the societies you previously said were harmonious and now admit were run by warlords who constantly fought each other, it happened (and happens) all the time.
A constant war between the Left (which is the force of centralization) and the Right (whatever is trying to resist centralization) is ever-present in such societies.
I thought you weren't a nominalist. War is the use of violence by designated soldiers of a political body to achieve the political goals of said body. Democratic societies may suffer civil unrest, may have rebellions, may fall into civil war. But they are not "constantly at war" except in the metaphorical sense of the "culture war". Which is not strictly speaking war in the commonly understood sense.
If every country that has internal political factions that strive against each other for power and influence is in a state of constant war, every country in the world is in a state of constant war. "Constant war" thus becomes a meaningless phrase.
And if one sought to resist centralisation - one, noting that the more centralised side almost always wins a direct military confrontation (English Cavaliers vs Roundheads, Russian Whites vs Reds, Spanish Nationalists vs Republicans) might seek to achieve a political order in which political success is not directly tied to military might.
You may be entirely right about feudalism being a band of warlords. But has the alternative been better? A class of unaccountable bureaucrats wielding all of the power, killing everything in their way? This is somehow better? I don't see it.
Would you rather have a Los Zetas boss or Joseph Kony running your hometown, or your local mayor elected by the democratic process? Because the Los Zetas capo and the African warlord are feudalism as it manifests in the modern day.
And if your mayor is corrupt, pushes bad policies etc. in a democratic society, you can move. If you're a serf and your feudal lord is corrupt and pushes bad policies ... tied to the land, baby. Tied to the land.
I don't see how "greater wealth" and "better military capacity" is somehow better
So you would rather have a country that was dirt-poor and unable to defend itself from foreign powers if it absolutely and unquestionably enforced your political ideals (and being dirt-poor and unable to defend itself from foreign powers, was unable to sustain said ideals), than a more prosperous country able to defend itself that compromised on them? How is the state supposed to enforce virtue, when the state is a playground for foreign armies?
even if I were to ignore that these things are a function of better technology and thus unimportant to what I was saying earlier.
But you see, the point is that it isn't the result of better technology, but of better ability to organise and better infrastructure. Poland-Lithuania had the same technological level as Prussia and Austria and Russia, but they still ate it alive with a minimum of resistance by essentially bribing its feudal lords to continuously sabotage the government then to hand over the country bit-by-bit.
The HRE had the same technology as the rest of 17th-century Europe, but the centralised states that surrounded it still used it as a playground for their armies for 30 years until they got bored, then in the 18th century (again, with technological equivalence!) it was nothing but the battlefield between the centralised states of Austria and Prussia until Napoleon waltzed in and ended the fiction that it was a polity, leading the rulers of Austria to get honest with themselves and start calling their country the Austrian Empire (which it de facto had been for a long time, the rest of the HRE being largely irrelevant to them).
