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Given the longevity and frequent re-evolution of Feudal systems throughout history it's worth considering whether Feudalism is the default economic system. Se

• kqr 5y ago
  It's important to account for selection bias here: feudalism generally leaves very obvious archaeological traces, both in terms of infrastructure and bureaucratic artifacts (which in turn tend to be designed for longevity.) Feudalism might not be as common as we think of it; it's simply very visible in the historic record. ---- As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms: because we care. Many forms of organising humans in the past and present have had specific mechanisms installed to prevent single people from getting too much power. (Including preventing them from converting wealth into power -- something we take for granted that one can just do today.) As a case in point: I live in a condo association. We and all our neighbours collectively own and maintain this building. We vote on big issues and elect representatives for everyday duties. It would be very hard to consistently appropriate large amounts of resources over a longer time period, compared to, say, a small business owner. We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out. I strongly recommend reading Graeber's The Dawn of Everything to start out.
  • bee_rider 5y ago
    > We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out. This seems like a pretty reasonable theory, but does indicate a little problem I think -- the people have experienced the feudal system will only be around for a couple generations after the change-over. So, at least to the extent that this is the cause, it would likely be a transitory configuration, right? (ignoring some unusual circumstances, like being neighbors to a particularly unpleasant feudal state and having them as a constant contrast). I wonder what that sort of configuration decays toward.
    • kqr 5y ago
      You'd be surprised how long oral history can live. There are people who tell the same cautionary tales for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. (We know among other things because they clearly reference landmarks that we today find geological traces of that help us date their existence.) But yes, you're onto something with the neighbour hypothesis too -- egalitarian and hierarchical (or beaurocratic and violent) societies often come in pairs, right next to each other.
      • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        'There are people who tell the same cautionary tales for thousands or even tens of thousands of years.' The people retelling the story don't understand it - we have stories and kings and feudalism, go on the street and ask a random person any question about how feudalism works: What rights did peasants have? What right does the lord have over his peasants? could peasants be sold and how are they different from slaves? Which 'levels' of nobility does what? Who pays taxes to whom? If put theae people into a feudal society tomorrow, and just renamed 'baron' and 'lord' to something else, they would not know it. We could call it 'landlord' and 'investor'
      • bee_rider 5y ago
        > But yes, you're onto something with the neighbour hypothesis too -- egalitarian and hierarchical (or beaurocratic and violent) societies often come in pairs, right next to each other. This is going to sound sarcastic or something, but I'm actually curious -- do they? I would tend to assume that they appear to come in pairs, but this is largely because we happened to find history books written by the self-professed egalitarian society, and not their rivals, to whom they allocate every vice.
        • kqr 5y ago
          Visible history is generally written by the beaurocratic/violent society, not their egalitarian neighbour. If you think further back in history, I'm sure you'll recall "the great periods" as we call them, marred with obvious artifacts from oppressive societies. Their egalitarian neighbours where only just starting to discover. In part because their traces are less obvious, and in part because we've had a mental confirmation bias against finding them. I refer back to The Dawn of Everything if you want more details!
  • paisawalla 5y ago
    > As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms The question is not why would people choose to live under supposed egalitarianism, but why would that be the default system. It relies on non-betrayal behavior across multiple actors in whom power is vested, which depends on many non-intuitive cultural innovations in thinking about your peers and social responsibility. Feudalism is at least straightforwardly plausible as the point towards which high entropy systems descend. Conversely, it's very hard to see how democratic communalism would just spontaneously emerge and maintain itself without consistent effort and cooperation, both fragile dependencies.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      Democratic communalism can sustain itself perfectly fine at the scale of a small village, or a neighborhood in a small town, or a single condo/HOA in a big city or suburban area. The whole question is what to do beyond that scale.
      • kqr 5y ago
        We have evidence that communalism (or at least something similar to it) has worked at large scales in the past. In fact, it ought to be one of the easiest things to get to work, because you don't have to coerce anyone of anything.
        • lobocinza 5y ago
          Like if trust wasn't an issue.
          • kqr 5y ago
            Trust is one of the most important issues! I trust my two-year old to carry his glass to the table because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can be trusted with that. I don't trust my two-year old to not fall down stairs because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can be trusted with that and he has failed to show it. That's how it works in an egalitarian society too. You give people a chance to show they can be trusted. If they fail to show that, you stop trusting them.
• convolvatron 5y ago
  surely the space of possible large-scale human social systems is so vast, and so pockmarked with local minima that its absurd to think there is a default, or two or three possible setups
  • kqr 5y ago
    You'd be surprised how limited people's political horizons are.
  • faangiq 5y ago
    It’s likely not that vast. Human character and motivations are pretty simple.
    • kqr 5y ago
      Are humans simple, or is your mental model of them simple? Trying to reduce human character and motivations to something simple is essentially what modern microeconomic theory tried to do and it ends up having to hand-wave away so much real life behaviour that it started to call itself "prescriptive rather than descriptive".
• bwestergard 5y ago
  Which non-European societies were feudal, in your view?
  • miltondts 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#See_also Indian feudalism Feudal Japan Feudalism in Pakistan Fengjian (Chinese) Etc This is so easy to find that I can't understand how people on the internet make these kind of questions and even add the "in your view".
    • peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      Feudalism in Japan was similar to the European one in many ways (but not all) so it's used to describe a similar system, that lasted 6-7 centuries just like the European one. But it started late in the 11th century, 6 centuries after what happened in Europe, hardly the "default economic system"
    • bwestergard 5y ago
      If you actually read that Wikipedia article, you will see that many eminent historians do not apply the term "feudalism" outside of Europe at all, and of those that do, qualify that application heavily to emphasize the peculiarity of the social formations of Europe in the middle ages. For a view of feudalism that treats it as distinctively European, below is a quote from Perry Anderson in "Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism" (p19). If you doubt the relevance of Anderson, consider that he is not just quoted in the article linked above, but that he edits the journal in which it was published. > The dual predecessors of the feudal mode of production were, of course, the decomposing slave mode of production on whose foundations the whole enormous edifice of the Roman Empire had once been constructed, and the distended and deformed primitive modes of production of the Germanic invaders which survived in their new homelands, after the barbarian conquests. These two radically distinct worlds had undergone a slow disintegration and creeping interpenetration in the last centuries of Antiquity.
      • 5y ago
• goodpoint 5y ago
  If we go by longevity, food gatherers living communally without money is the default economic system.
  • MithrilTuxedo 5y ago
    While some of us might try to gain power within our groups, the rest of the group is responsible for making sure they don't have too much power. It's when those checks against individual power fail that those ways of organizing ourselves fail. Elinor Ostrom got an economics Nobel in what I think is the economic side of this.
    • joejerryronnie 5y ago
      As a group expands in size, don’t the opportunities for an individual to amass wealth, and then translate that to power, also increase significantly?
      • kqr 5y ago
        There is nothing inherent about wealth that grants the owner power over many other people. The owner, if very skilled in combat, might be able to physically defend their wealth against three? Five? Eight? Other people. Beyond that they have no chance. In any system where wealth converts to power, it does because the majority of people implicitly agree with playing the game that way. In a practical egalitarian society, if the person with all the furs decided one day to not share, then the people would stop sharing their food, tools, building skills, childcare, medicinal treatments, fire, feasts, etc. with this person. They wouldn't have any choice but to rejoin society or try to go truly independent.
        • cnelsenmilt 5y ago
          Sure, and this is why the wealthy always use some of their wealth protecting themselves. In a society where physical violence is an immanent possibility they hire some kind of bodyguards; in a society like ours where the main threats are not physical in nature, they employ lawyers.
• hef19898 5y ago
  With incredible amounts of wealth, and the control of workers, I'd argue we already had capitalist frudalism during the industrial revolution. And we only got rid of that by the 40-50s of the 19th century with the development of social safety nets.
• frazbin 5y ago
  This surprises no one. It's the whole reason statecraft is worthwhile (cause feudalism and being beholden to the local boss sucks).
• zozbot234 5y ago
  > When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum. This is a bit of a fallacy since productivity and efficiency are just as important in a steady-state economy as a growing one, and perhaps more so. The inefficiency of large politically-enforced monopolies would merely turn zero into negative growth.
  • elcritch 5y ago
    It's a fallacy, but one that many people perceive as true in a steady state economy. Or rather there's enough greedy people that tend to work their way into positions of power in order to extract for themselves. Bribery at every bureaucratic level is the norm in most third world countries.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      Most third world countries are poor because of their low-quality institutions. To be sure, bribery used to be just as common in the pre-modern West; norms against bribery are a key part of what we think of as "modernity", "the Enlightenment" etc.
• ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Given the longevity and frequent re-occurance of extinction events, it's worth considering whether being extict is the default state of a life-form in this universe.
• sershe 5y ago
  I feel like many people don't use the term feudalism quite correctly... working for a powerful person describes many systems, not just feudalism. Manoralism is a key characteristic of feudalism, and is generally the consequence of failure of trade. Trade and strong "middle classes"/"cities" were the key to many less-feudal societies, from Rome to modern day. I am also pretty sure ancient (pre-classical) world with its massive centralized empires do not count as feudal, or otherwise the term becomes so broad as to be meaningless...
• peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system and all the empires that lasted millenia before feudalism emerged stretching its duration from inception to fall, feudalism lasted around 7 centuries, after the fall of the western roman empire it's never been the default system throughout history For comparison Egyptian civilization lived and prospered for more than 30 centuries, not accounting for ancient Egyptian settlements and the long tail of its complete demise.
• rolandog 5y ago
  > Given the longevity and frequent re-evolution of Feudal systems throughout history it's worth considering whether Feudalism is the default economic system. Why do we have laws that punish robbery and murder? Because it may be the easiest path to solve a perceived urgent need (and it comes at the expense of others). It takes much more self-control and effort to "pull oneself by the bootstraps". So, at least some forms of advancing one's position while harming others' is codified in most laws. These laws protect what we, as a society, consider valuable. Like property, and not being murdered. So, too, is Feudalism a quick and easy fix to maintain the status quo of leadership, but it comes in a way that harms society.