you know historically, centralizing power into the hands of an absolute monarch used be considered the "progressive" thing to do. The logic was that a local lord could be much more cruel and abusive than one single ruler far away who is ruling the whole country.
Also concidering how Louis the sun king fucked with all his lordlings by esotericizing court customs and dress styles to flex on everyone is a funny fucking way to centralize power to yourself
If you get a good ruler, they can do a lot of good for their people in a very short amount of time compared to liberal democracies. The tradeoff for that is if you get a bad ruler, well.... it’s a roll of the dice and you crit fail on 3 or lower.
I mean, that’s semantics. Same is true of any centralized authority. You need to delegate and adapt policies to local conditions, allowing people sufficient freedom to benefit you. I’m not saying that monarchy has ever been preferable to egalitarian anarchy or something like that. Just that democracy tends to have a narrower range of outcomes because the risk of incompetence is spread among more people. I suppose I’ve never tried to identify a particular monarch who made more improvements for their people during their reign than the average democratic government has. That would be an interesting problem to try and quantify
The middle ages, broadly speaking, were a period of reaction. Not that the Roman Empire was a great place to be for the average proleterii, but it was a lot nicer than what came after - and the unified proto-states that emerged from the fuedal system were a lot nicer than what came before. Then colonialism starts, and the whole thing becomes fucked for an entirely new reason.
you know historically, centralizing power into the hands of an absolute monarch used be considered the "progressive" thing to do. The logic was that a local lord could be much more cruel and abusive than one single ruler far away who is ruling the whole country.
Also concidering how Louis the sun king fucked with all his lordlings by esotericizing court customs and dress styles to flex on everyone is a funny fucking way to centralize power to yourself
William the conqueror disproved that one pretty well
If you get a good ruler, they can do a lot of good for their people in a very short amount of time compared to liberal democracies. The tradeoff for that is if you get a bad ruler, well.... it’s a roll of the dice and you crit fail on 3 or lower.
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I mean, that’s semantics. Same is true of any centralized authority. You need to delegate and adapt policies to local conditions, allowing people sufficient freedom to benefit you. I’m not saying that monarchy has ever been preferable to egalitarian anarchy or something like that. Just that democracy tends to have a narrower range of outcomes because the risk of incompetence is spread among more people. I suppose I’ve never tried to identify a particular monarch who made more improvements for their people during their reign than the average democratic government has. That would be an interesting problem to try and quantify
The middle ages, broadly speaking, were a period of reaction. Not that the Roman Empire was a great place to be for the average proleterii, but it was a lot nicer than what came after - and the unified proto-states that emerged from the fuedal system were a lot nicer than what came before. Then colonialism starts, and the whole thing becomes fucked for an entirely new reason.