From a storytelling perspective, a feudal system works well, because it puts a lot of power and agency in the hands of a few characters. Monumental decisions that reshape the universe can happen in minutes instead of months or years. As the saying goes, nobody sets out to create a feudal system, it is what you get when all others fail. Frank Herbert in Dune went out of his way to find reasons for why the world is the way it is. It wasn't just rule of cool. Technological constraints of space travel and communication affect government. Shields make melee weapons more important and bring back the need for warrior elites because of longer training times.
With the rise of AUTONOMOUS machines in war. I believe we are seeing the end of the citizen soldier that has built republics. The future of war fighting will be held by smaller and smaller elite units. They will likely enhance themselves with genetic modification or cybernetics, bringing in an old warrior class that will hold more strength in civilization.
Another Poul Anderson story, the novella "No Truce with Kings" posits Feudalism is humanity's natural fallback polity. People on the local level can bond fiercely to their locality and customs, and even to their local hereditary lord if he's even halfway competent and decent.
Its mildly Ironic that the Thinking machine techno feudalism spanning the Dune universe of pre history was rebelled against an overthrown for an organic (human) feudalism that's shown to be equally bad if not worse than the thing it replaced...for the average individual not of the ruling class, life remained deeply grim
That's a myth, Empires and kingdoms of medieval Europe had way less centralized powers than modern republics today. A lot of governing and laws are passed took place mostly in the local level the king or Emperor had very little to do with local politics. Also medieval kingdoms and Empires paid way less taxes than modern republics do today or any Republic for that matter. The thing that people think Medieval Europe was was not what it was, they're describing something closer to ancient or medieval China. Because the Kings and Emperors in medieval Europe didn't have the power of dictators, sure they probably have some control over their Elite class but that's about it. Property owners in business owners were just that they own a business a king couldn't take that away from them without proper proceedings and law in European society. We're ancient China and medieval China the emperor owned everything including all properties; this was not the case in Europe. If you're going to have great houses and principalities in an Empire they're going to be mostly operating closer to a Confederacy in a Western modle.
TechnoFeudalism fiction feels like a subconscious counter-reaction to the rapid progress of the last century mixed with the American Western mythos. One person bringing justice to a corrupt/lawless land festering in the shadow of a hubris giant's corpse. A narrative that becomes more tangible by the day.
Almost every story we ever hear reinforces the idea that there are only a small subset of "people who matter" and everyone else are the "little people" who only theoretically exist somewhere off-screen. What's the foundational idea of the Superhero? A person of exceptional ability doing good deeds instead of serving themselves still needs to be *empiracally better* than the average person for there to be a story in the first place.
@@jorel4225 -- given that you haven't provided any evidence to back your flat denial, I'm just going to assume you don't have any and carry on as before.
@@Grizabeebles Stories are told like that because it's the exceptional people with vision who push the rest of us forward. The "little people" are often just the untalented masses, it's no surprise not much change or innovation comes from them.
What is common throughout these technofeudal settings is that they arise through a lack of instantaneous communication and travel. It will take weeks or even longer to travel from one system to another, which means planets are essentially on their own even though they are subordinate to a greater power. A hereditary, feudal power structure makes sense as the imperial authority can create long lasting ties with a planet’s government through royal marriages. The Traveller rpg setting has the same travel constraints and technofeudal set up but is not in a dark age. Perhaps that would be a good comparison to explore.
Yeah, communication speeds basically gatekeep how large an empire can become. Many of the 'great' empires in history ultimately fell due to over-expansion, ending up with holdings so widespread that effective central governance became impossible. Rome and the British Empire are both prime examples of this.
@@jasonblalock4429 'Effective central governance' means something different to people of today than of yesteryear; also worth noting that the British Empire fell less because of communication issues and more the overwhelming expense of two world wars, exacerbated by the losers basically never paying war indemnities, while the British _did_ pay their creditors.
Yea this is significant. Take Battletech for example. Though it's feudal structures are associated with it's dark age, they actually predate it by centuries. They were spawned by humanity's expansion into space and associated lack of instantaneous communications and persisted beyond that point on cultural momentum.
And yet, what of federalism? It was what was used by nations like the US in order to deal with lack of instantaneous communications and easy, speedy travel. Federalism could be also used in such situations that arose in Battletech or Dune.
@@warellis Sure, but federalism requires alot more bureaucracy than feudalism making it less likely to work on such a massive scale. Besides that, feudalism works better from a storytelling perspective. Having fewer people with the power to make decisions isn't great for long term stability but it is great for telling a story.
A crucial factor to keep in mind about the "space feudalism" settings in WH40K and Battletech (and their primary antecedent, Traveller) is that they were originally conceived as game-universes, designed to support gameplay, and there are many aspects of galactic-scale post-utopia medievalism that are very useful for that purpose: lots of room for the players to be self-directing in the absence of dominant higher authority, multiple factions of roughly similar modest power and contrasting motivations to interact with, a baseline tech not too far afield from 20th/21st century capabilities (making it easier for players to conceive of potential actions), lots of well-established narrative tropes lying around to use (merchant caravans, bandit gangs, warring nobles, battle-scarred ronin, weird towers, princesses to save), and a justification for occasional fun but unreproducible artifacts ("magic items" effectively). Basically, it presents a situation where a your average player-character "murderhobo" with nothing more than a decent weapon and a flexible moral compass can easily find ways to keep themselves busy, in ways that feel relevant. This, as much as anything else, is a strong reason why these sorts of settings keep showing up in our IP-driven media. Contrast this with settings first designed as mediums for literature (like Bank's Culture, or Leckie's Radch Empire, even the Imperium of Frank Herbert's later Dune novels) which are fun to read about but don't present ample opportunities to insert an average party of oppurtunistic mercanries (yes I know there are stories in those series which do exactly that, but the context allowing for it are almost always exceptional). Along these lines, I'd like to throw in a mention of Fading Suns, a game series with the most literal version of space-feudalism ever.
@@feralhistorianFading Suns is strange. It has a tech-mix of anything from dirt farmers to orbital bombardment. They pulled a lot of ideas from Dune on a smaller scale. With a handful of feudal houses, a handful of tech-guilds and the anti-tech church. And a minority of colonized aliens. Psionics is taboo while church miracles are okay. A fun sidenote is three outside powers. Two human cultures on similar level, one alien empire of grossly advanced level like sci fi China in It's isolationist years. And one weird zerg-like threat where everyone is allowed to use any forbidden tech as long as they hold the biohorror back.
The typical Old D&D murderhobo to me is Conan. You are the bums who might very well decide to trample a bejewelled throne or two. You carve out a pocket of law in the larger wilderness.
_Contrast this with settings first designed as mediums for literature (like Bank's Culture, or Leckie's Radch Empire, even the Imperium of Frank Herbert's later Dune novels) which are fun to read about but don't present ample opportunities to insert an average party of oppurtunistic mercanries_ I think you may have inadvertently presented a strong argument for the ultimate implausibility of settings like Banks's LOL.
@feralhistorian this is why in say battletech as much as some ask of it nobody plays in the star league era thers little happening that's of interest to pay in. Rebellions and pirates and placing actions not alot to do until it falls in a military sense.
The parallels between the 40k Emperor and the ghost of imperial past haunting today's culture are very well put. I thank the YT algo for handling some of my cognition for me and introducing me to your channel.
Two things that people tend to forget about the tendency for SciFi to include Feudalistic elements: 1.SciFi takes many of it's less hard science tropes from other fiction including fantasy and the historical record, until very recently the latter heavily focused on nobility and the Great Man theory of history which focused on individuals around whom history was said to bend and fiction also tilted back to the medievalist style so too did early sci-fi including the Rocket Punk genre and the entire Swords and Phasers style like Flash Gordon. It was a well established method of influence. 2.From a literary simplicity point of view the tropes of having a handful of influential people be the main movers and shakers of the story are convenient for allowing action as having to deal with single personifications of places and governments is much easier to write and understand than having to depict multiple layers of democratic all elected leaders that may change frequently. Everyone understands that what Space King says is law and he's gonna be around until he dies and his Space Prince takes over, it makes moving along with the rest of the plot much easier.
At the same time, if you want a more complex treatment of politics, especially if you're introducing rubes like the readers to it, it's easy to realistically complicate the 'simplicity' of a feudal system. Although I admit it's at least as often an excuse to avoid the subject, either because the author doesn't want to bother or is just ignorant of how complex such systems actually are.
I think this is why we romanticize it, why it works for stories, and why societies sometimes revert to it (more or less). It's personal. It's not a some nebulous congress of hundreds of people which you at most know one of declaring war on the neighbors for reasons you don't know. It's Lord Henry. You like Lord Henry. He's been around for as long as you have and your life is pretty good. He sent some of his men to help rebuild your barn last summer after it was struck by lightning. I have come to believe that the one major drawback of liberalism (in the classical sense) is that loss of belonging to a group.
The role of corporations as something akin to royal houses in the neo- feudalist post Republic America is a through line in the weirdly prescient 'Network' (1976): From Ned Beatty's ' The World is a Business speech to Robert Duvall's lament at his loss of station ' I'm a man without a corporation!'
The Corporation is an idea that first appeared in the feudal period as a way of running cities or large trading organizations. They actually are a remnant of feudalism in the modern world.
@@AbelMcTalisker one of the most famous (or infamous) corporation from late feudalism is the East india company. that ran is operation like a noble house. Sanction by the brittish empire.which allow it to stretch it holding and its empire. Not to mention the Dutch and other colonial companies.
The Myst series of adventure games had a interesting take on a feudal-style interplanetary empire, one where distance was meaningless because the rulers - the D'ni - could teleport anywhere in their holdings instantly. They also believed themselves to be the literal creators of the worlds they conquered (although they probably weren't), acting like god-emperors over their subjects. Ultimately, their instantaneous travel enabled their downfall, as an engineered deadly plague got set loose, spreading across the entire empire and ending it in a matter of days. Then the games are set in the aftermath, with the player exploring D'ni ruins as well as the works of those who followed in the D'ni's footsteps, almost more like an archaeology / anthropology simulator than an "adventure game."
This sounds interesting, I might take a look at that, I find the idea of xeno-archeology interesting, I think the first evidence of sapient aliens we might see would be finding their ruins.
Battletech mentioned by one of my favorite TH-camrs... Yes, please. Edit: my one comment is that Battletech does have eras where there is technological regression or stagnation, the bar does shift back and there is progress. Unlike Warhammer where it is so hardwired into the setting that you cannot really advance the technology of the Imperium without breaking the setting. Yes there have been updates, but they have not dramatically changed much, other than changing model ranges.
_BattleTech's_ classic setting at the end of the Third Succession War is very much at the bottom of the cycle, so much so that over the next century or so technology within the Inner Sphere (if not society stability) actually surpasses that of the Star League.
Battletech doesn't really posit technology as the major limiting factor for what humans can achieve culturally, I'd say. More like vice versa, if anything. It's not even a dark age, really (except the actual "Dark Age" lore era, of course). I find it more reminiscent of the late 19th/early 20th century (the period where the dominant political systems of the world were still built around medieval ideologies, but these obsolete ideas were in growing conflict with modern reality) than the actual Middle Ages. In any case, the general premise of the Battletech setting is that even if humans are the cleverest monkeys when it comes to inventing more powerful tools, they don't innovate much at all in terms of what goals they want to use their tools to achieve. Future human civilization gets vastly larger in raw physical terms, but all they really do after that is re-enact 20th Century Earth on a larger scale, over and over again.
thats kind of why i prefer things like battletech or warhammer fantasy because there is more of a mixture which is more historically accurate than the grimdark "technology is backwards" type stuff
@@macdeus2601 IDK, it's clear pre 3025 was definitely a Mad Max Dark age at least when not on the major worlds. And that's before we learn more and more of what the Star League was actually up to on its bleeding edge. That's not to say there hasn't been advancements, but even the Clans are mostly just skating on having SL scientists and data and then just focused on advancing weapons tech not being able to recreate some of the greater technological feats of the SL.
Utopianism in fiction presents a Fukuyama style 'end of history' notion that the free bar party of techno-utopian paradise can last forever, and indeed exists as the inevitable end point of the development of civilisation, whereas Post-Utopian settings like Dune and 40K remind us that the hangover is coming sooner or later no matter how shiny and bright the light of your culture and its achievements might seem to be in the moment. That is in some ways an uncomfortable aspect of those settings, and yet at the same time an endlessly fascinating one. Here's hoping it doesn't also prove to be a prophetic sub genre of sci fi for our own times.
The more interesting ones acknowledge that as long as humanity remains; there is hope that the Utopia can come again. Once unified by a conquering element which both provides a shared culture but also a shared trauma to facilitate progress. Much like the trauma of the dark ages leading to the Enlightenment or the trauma of the British Empire leading to so many Constitutional Republics. "This, too, shall come to pass."
It is. Utopia is inherently at adds with human nature and actively bad for us in many ways. Not to mention the whole there really isn't anyway to have utopia with out dystopia
@@mondaysinsanity8193 True, but I was thinking more prophetic in the short to medium term; all civilisations collapse sooner or later, the illusion of ironclad stability created only by our tendency to measure longevity by the standards of our own human lifespans, and there are those who argue that our current socio-cultural paradigm is coming to the end of its lifespan too, its consumption of the world's resources and ravaging of its ecosystems unsustainable, its politics increasingly volatile, and its weaponry heinously apocalyptic. We could, in theory at least, be living in the dying days of the 'high watermark of civilisation' for a near future dark age, with most of us never even considering the notion. I, for one, would rather not bear personal witness to the fall of civilisation.
@@gregorygreenwood-nimmo4954 as a history nerd if youre under 30 you'll certainly see the current order fall. Atleast in the us our politics look near identical to the early 1800s in way to many ways
I love the High Crusade, best line from the book "we kind of stopped looking for Earth when nobody that went looking came back and the war with the space dragons started.
There's also a simple stylistic reason these tropes keep showing up: Royalty has pageantry. Something about lords & ladies, kings & queens & emperors, is just more compelling aesthetically than any prime minister, president, or bureaucrat, no matter how wise or noble. If people don't have kings, they'll emulate the trappings. There's a reason the giant statue of Lincoln in Washington DC sits on a throne.
Just as an aside, it's fascinating to me that fiction keeps turning to these themes of civilizational collapse and societal regression. It's almost an article of faith that the end is just round the corner and what's coming is going to be grimdark rather than solarpunk.
Definitely an article of literal intepretation of certain religious texts, even when recent findings demonstrate that people actually writing them suffered long term brain oxygenation deficiency.
I mean look around you. I’m absolutely convinced these cycles exist and that we’re in a downward trend. I’d look at the leadership of America as compared to even 40 years ago. Ours act like children. Unserious, ignorant (and often absolutely proud of it), decadent and arrogant- that’s what modern society produces in the way of leadership. On other fronts, the modern enclosure movement that has allowed housing to be bought up by investors and turned into rental properties such that the vast majority of Americans will never own a home (which is one of the very few ways that a person not wealthy enough to own substantial stocks can build generational wealth) student loans that have grown so fast that most college graduates will spend most of their working lives paying off those loans, and the relative instability of modern jobs (most people get laid off fairly regularly now). Nothing of note in the last 50 years- outside of computers- have really improved. Crime and drug use are common, roads are bad, political parties and the people in them are corrupted and simply looting for themselves. We can’t handle search and rescue stuff anymore.
@@TheresaReichley Also look at the youth. I tried to employ them out of college and gave up as hopeless. I know employ Asians only who are capable, honesty, and trainable. Americans would steal the computers we gave them to work and Asians refund us for hours they didn't work because hurricanes or coups happened. I would have thought it was sci fi 25-25 years ago and it's reality.
@@TheresaReichley While I understand the viewpoint you espouse, I think the conclusion you come to is misleading. Obviously there is a downward trend in some very visible areas, but I think it is possible that these areas are less fundamental to the stability of human civilization as a whole than, say other things that online culture does not bring attention to.
@@DanielPlaceholder people not being able to afford houses and struggling to afford groceries and gas isn’t fundamentally important? The sitting president having pretty clear signs of dementia isn’t fundamentally important? Kids getting into elite college and not being able to read books isn’t fundamentally important? I mean I don’t think it will happen tomorrow, but we are deficient in enough areas of social, political and economic functioning that I’m not convinced my grandkids will live in a society like ours. I expect us to look a lot like Russia in 10-15 years.
Arguably modern professional organizations are the successors of guilds. One cannot be a professional without joining them, they set regulations which have some legal weight, they control the supply of labor in a profession etc etc. They are just national now which has made them more hands off in a lot of aspects
@@feralhistorian:D This is great news! Also he said “cross the Rubicon”, and it always bothered me that 40k uses that to refer to a firstborn astartes becoming a primaris astartes (they must risk their lives returning to the operation table for the extra organs), when there was already a literal cross-the-Rubicon moment where Horus marches his legions back to Holy Terra. No one ever mentions this, please be the one!
Honestly, a feudal future is more realistic than the Post-Scarcity Utopia of Star Trek. Space is big and even with FTL travel, it's gonna take a while to get anywhere. It's easier to delegate control of a planet or solar system to a local ruler than it is to try to directly exert authority from four hundred thousand lightyears away.
Only if we assume the need to delegate authority at all. A planet is a big enough economic entity to do its own thing without the need to formally bind it to some other authority. I suspect what we're most likely to end up if interstellar colonization ever becomes viable is something more like a stripped-down old American federalism with some elements that look vaguely like this kind of space-feudalism but without any real economic interdependence.
@@feralhistorian My "great filter" mindset is tingling again. It'll probably be both. Large corporations or Quadriliionaires feudalistically owning this or that rock and ruling them while some are more or less independent states with some tie to a greater alliance/federation (old-America). The vast majority of government would have to be local either way though unless we build stargates or something.
David Weber's Safehold series is an interesting example of the Space Feudalism trope (close to a swords and spaceships novel of the old days) where Humanity looses the war against the big bad aliens and the last surviving colony reverts to feudal muscle powered civilization with a church to enforce Ludditism (along with an orbital bombardment system to unleash the wrath of god on those who dabble in prohibited knowledge) all to hide from the marauding aliens. The 10 novels in the series then follow the good guys trying to reintroduce technology, reform the church, and prepare humanity for round two against the aliens who are still out there. But the novels cover a 20 year period where society of Safehold goes from Medieval to the Industrial Revolution with all the social disruption that goes along with it.
Love to see Safehold referenced by someone other than myself! It only gets touched on once or twice (so far) but it's also strongly implied that the aliens in question are suffering their own technologically stagnant era except to a degree so severe that their capability to innovate has ground to a dead halt for thousands of years.
@@youtubeisapublisher6407 Going by David Weber's Empire from the Ashes series, where he used many of his Safehold plots because he was worried Safehold might not be purchased, the aliens have been reduced to effectively slaves to a computer that was programed to keep them alive in a hostile universe. Their whole species has been reduced to doing nothing but cruising around the galaxy destroying all competing species before they can develop in to a threat.
@@youtubeisapublisher6407it's been a while since I've read the books, but from what I remember, the aliens have ships that are 10s of thousands of years old that are exactly identical to their brand new ships, while humanity kept innovating during the war. IIRC, it's explicit that the goal is to get human tech to a couple of generations better than pre-Safehold and then wipe out the aliens.
At work but will watch this later. I just wanted to Comment fresh. I found your channel about a month ago and have watched all your videos since then. Some of your back catalogue from the last 2 years has been coming up on my feed. You have such an engaging way of presenting your videos. Fantastic.
@@feralhistorian No issues with sound so far. Speaking about technology reminded me of the trailer for The Creator. I'm a big sci-fi fan but never watched it, it might seem silly but it was one scene that turned me off. They are living with future technology, the soldiers are sent to retrieve an even more advanced piece of technology. This turns out to be an android / robot child who is watching a CRT TV. CRT's are pretty much obsolete to us NOW. I found that juxtaposition visually boring. As much as I loved the show, Stargate SG1 continually found ancient technology which looked like concrete.
@@feralhistorian I also just had one video show up in my recommendations last night, and now I'm shotgunning the whole catalogue. I thoroughly enjoy the way you poke around with each topic. BT and its "historical events with the serial numbers filed off" approach has always been one of my favorites. I would argue that "feudalism" is something of a default setting for humans; you can find strong themes of feudalism even in totalitarian societies, because Big Brother doesn't have the time or personal interest to deal with every little problem, and tends to outsource it to "trusted" (ahem) others, generally nobles/Inner Party members (same thing, really). The Austrian painter and Georgian seminary student both operated governments that were de facto feudal, with their underlings given pieces of power and then pitted against each other in order to keep them from becoming powerful or popular enough to potentially replace the Boss. Some feudal systems operated under cultures that promised certain basic human rights, such as the right to trial or the sanctity of contracts. Others were more totalitarian. Some had direct inheritance of titles, and others (such as the West today) had informal means of assistance for those considered to be "the right sort of people". Some had avenues for upward mobility, some didn't. Some had citizens, some had subjects, some had serfs, and most had a mixture of the three. But the hierarchy and the division of control among a "noble" class/caste that operated with the permission of a singular ruler was always present. Whenever and wherever there is a concentration of power, there will be human conflict over it, and the greater the concentration, the more likely the result is to be some form of de facto feudalism. The only way to minimize the effect is to minimize the power, or disperse it in ways that are difficult for an individual class of would-be nobles to form around it, and then jealously guard that dispersion with laws and culture that resist any such concentration. We still have many such laws on the books today, but the culture has increasingly forgotten why the power was locked away from the "elite" in the first place, leading to their non-enforcement.
Love the use of Dune (2000) footage. The Culture Novels work in a universe that presupposes a Whig View of History is encoded into the laws of the cosmos. The series presumes that civilizations keep progressing forward, occasionally missteping, along the road to transcendence. The Culture is a young and energetic civilization inhabiting a galaxy where most races master the natural world and collectively choose to leave this universe for a higher plane of existence.
Damn my guy. All your videos are 🔥 I need to add the High Crusade to my reading list now you really expanded the scope of a story i have heard about in passing for years.
I kinda had this idea for a sci-fi setting where planets are privately owned by the person (and their descendants) who discovered them, and who basically get to rule over them as absolutist monarchs if they so wish. Planets used to be colonized by nations and international organizations, but as some point the territory became so massive that is became impossible to govern, not to mention it became impossible to communicate with the Earth for many of these new colonies, now referred to as the old worlds. As humanity still needed ever more resources and space to expand to, the "finders keepers" system was established, making each planet in the frontier theoretically its own independent unit.
I love this channel. I also like reading the comments. For the most part folks who enjoy this channel tend to be quiet brilliant, as is our host! Thanks again!
This reminds me of an observation someone had made of humanity in general: that we are essentially still apes with stone age mentality and emotional fragility, organized into feudalistic systems of governance, while using space age technology. I think one of the central themes of each of these fictional works (Dune, Warhammer, Battletech, and more) taps into this sentiment. No matter what technologies we produce, no matter if explore and conquer the stars, we are still flawed humans, and we bring our fears, our shortsighted wants and needs, our paranoia, our anger and hatred, our ignorance, greed, along with us for the ride.
The amount of meaningful, quiet references to politics slipped in is pretty incredible. I am so used to people beating each other over the head with opinions, this was very refreshing.
Great video. Love all the references to Dune, The Culture, Battletech, etc. FYI, Banks said that his writing of the culture series was a response to the glut of pessimistic "conservative" sci-fi that was dominating the market at the time. He wanted to offer an alternative, more optimistic vision. You really should read the whole culture series when you get the chance, it's fantastic.
I think something that technofeudalism as a genre showcases is our tendency to put agency and choice in the hands of a single individual or a small group. Part or that probably comes from our perception of history where it is mostly centered arround men of note achieving things and changing circumstances.
thats why religion is so important in society because it makes that central authority figure not only beyond one singular human, and to a god/force/ideal beyond what is on earth. most religions as well focus on making god(s) to be the moral judge of the universe and/or of one's soul in one way or another. it puts that tendency towards outsourcing agency and control and attempts (and not always suceeds) to turn that tendency into something positive to bring people together in belief. according to some theories this is the reason atheistic countries end up being somewhat authoritarian or having some kind of nanny state, is that the need to have something guiding you isn't directed anywhere else. examples include the very secular countries in southeast asia such as china or japan who had very strong emperor/class systems. compared to the more decentralized monarchy systems in europe after christianity.
The attraction of Space Feudalism is a rhyme to the popularity of Downton Abbey. There's something comforting about a situation where everyone knows their place in it, what role they are to play. Also, those downstairs may not have had spectacular wealth, but they didn't have the problems the people upstairs did. For a person willing to be honest with himself about who he really is, instead of the "hero of his own story," feudalism has its attractions, especially for people who are daunted by the prospect of real freedom.
Very well put. Telling tall tales that anyone can be President, and that the largest Corporations were started by simple hardworking men in their garages, inevitably causes the whole idea to fall down on top of itself. Once people realize the existence of the barriers, the whole illusion breaks, and we find ourselves in a very uncomfortable situation. If everyone realized their situation and then accepted their position. Accepting their bodies. Accepting their height. Accepting their teeth. Accepting their standing in society. Accepting their race. Accepting their wealth. Accepting reality. Then the world would be a much better place. By the way, the first episode of "The Crown" is some of the best television ever created.
It would seem the world of the 70’s Rollerball would also fit into this feudal-style organization as well- Energy, Entertainment, various other commodity-producing cities as the basis for their organization with a mixture of classes.
The Antikythera mechanism shows that with the collapse of the Roman empire, technolgy was lost and forgotten, not just logistics and production capacity. Heron of Alexandria also provides a glimpse into what technology was available back then. This loss of technology happened more than once, apparently. In Europe, Africa, and Asia there are still ancient Roman ruins which could not be explained with medieval technology, and which inspired local legends about their mysterious origins and purposes. But even in late antiquity, people already refered to a lost, more glorious past. As an aside, I find it remarkable that the stories about magic and what can go wrong with it (like literal meanings differing from intended meanings, or enchanted items having unexpected properties) are exactly the things that programmers and roboticists deal with. Dune is the origin of the idea of interstellar feudalism as used in Star Wars, WH40k, and Battletech. Although Asimov's Foundation also has a collapsing galactic empire and a millennium of restoration. Ironically, the claims of legitimacy by the nobility in Dune are fake, they cosplay as feudal lords when actually they are shareholders of the one remaining monopoly; although in practice it makes little difference. It is a future where Fascism eventually won, and plus some millennia more. The other franchises take the feudalism more literally. There are those who would argue that interstellar distances make feudalism the only viable pooitical system, even, which is silly. Most of those franchises have FTL, so distance is not even an issue. Without FTL, I'd argue that distance would even prevent interstellar politics. Heinlein argued that even the moon could easily secede (and therefore inevitably would; Gundam then copied that idea). While Weinersmith argues in A City On Mars that such secession is extremely unlikely given international law and especially the Outer Space Treaty. And also pointless. (Andy Weir has an argument in The Martian how any interplanetary settlers would ipso facto be space pirates.) I would refer to Haldeman's Forever War, in particular the time dilation in interstellar travel, to illustrate why interstellar feudalism couldn't work. I'd go even further and argue that space battles are practically impossible because of orbital mechanics, except maybe for very specific edge cases. Banks' Culture is interesting because it is about settling the unfathomable void of space rather than planets (as earlier science fiction had it, with the conquest of the American West continued in space, the final frontier, because the colonisers ran out of America to conquer). The Minds of the Culture are not servants, Banks repeatedly makes the point that machine inteligences are citizens of the Culture just as much as organics are. However, the largest Minds are strongly implied to secretly manipulate society (and not always successfully; Banks was first and foremost an author of horror). You might also be interested in the lore of Elite (either Frontier or Dangerous), which has different political systems rivaling for interstellar hegemony, only one of them an empire (loosely modelled after the early British empire). The econonic system of the game takes cues from Thatcherism and probably shouldn't be taken too seriously. If you are so inclined, there is a completed web comic named Carboniferous which features an interstellar empire without FTL and with relativistic effects, explictly referencing the Roman empire, and the story is in part about how it doesn't work and how planetary colonists hate the "immortals". Another ongoing web comic named Seekers Log also features Space Romans whom nobody likes because they try to conquer and enslave their neighbours, and FTL technology from a mysterious precursor civilisation. There are also hints at different economic systems dominating different parts of the galaxy.
Interesting take, I always thought it was kind of ridiculous that feudalism could ever encompass the galaxy or even several worlds seeing as it wasn't until centralized imperialism that places like the British Isles and Germany were "properly" unified. Had an idea a while ago to write a tribalistic sci fi setting with planets ruled by space faring chieftains. Seeing sci fi cultural equivalents of the Gaels, Norse, Rus, Bedouin, and Mongols slowly spread out across the galaxy engaging in non total warfare against each other in order to settle disputes, gain legitimacy, earn resources, etc.
If space colonisation became economically feasible and there was a large expanse of available planets, then many groups might seek to form their own New Edens. Arguably the history of the American West including Mormon migrations points to this.
Feudalism, and hereditary aristocracy more broadly, is the single most common and stable social-political system in human history. Given how frequently democracies and republics unravel into chaos or decay into decadence it makes a great deal of sense for a stable long running society in the future to follow a feudal/aristocratic pattern. A dark age is not necessary to sustain it, but a social awareness of the decadence and instability of the past would help.
A fun watch and I like your Jinbei top! I rock one too! My friend said this about modern humans: Caveman brains, medieval morality and Star Trek tools.
I appreciate this video a lot. As a writer with stories set in a big feudal space world myself, it is incredibly relieving to hear all the points I mulled over in its creation laid out in such an articulate manner. In fact in my universe things were very much like the Culture, but now they find themselves in a regressed feudal mire fighting over the scraps of that high technology. I chose feudalism as one of the main methods BY which their regression is shown, a warning of the consequences of fantastic technology wielded by cultures who are not mature enough to use them responsibly.
Sometimes I wonder if the whole idea of a "mature" culture capable of responsibly using extremely powerful technology is just wishful thinking. Sort of a cyclical model of history where we're constantly chasing ourselves trying to become this better, more rational and more responsible culture but always ending up with broken societies and wondering where we went wrong before starting again.
@@feralhistorian I've always approached the idea as being a culture which went through the long growing pains that resulted from the gradual development of the technological advents in question. Those which gradually learned how to handle them properly through stumbles and bruises as opposed to a warrior king who was suddenly handed destructive artifice.
You only briefly touched on one of the most important reasons feudal societies rise after a collapse. A military vacuum. The reason Europe turned into a patchwork quilt of small baronies and fiefdoms was simply because nobody had sufficient military force to hold bigger domains. Without a strong central authority its possible to have a country, but, only if all the smaller local rulers give allegiance to the central lord. These local warlords pledge their swords to a more powerful lord for mutual defense. Lord is after all simply a contraction of warlord. And whoever has the weapons, makes the rules. But, those rules only apply as far as you can project your army and no further.
Your reference to that Knights vs Aliens book by Poul Anderson. I listened to it as an audiobook and as a Welshman who lives only a few miles from the ancient castle of Kidwelly. I was pleased with the narrative style.
I don't know how it might have fit into your discussion here, but it does feel a bit odd that foundation wasn't mentioned. The feudal aspects of those stories may have been less at the forefront as the contemporaries you mentioned. Foundation is in many ways the catalyst which directly or indirectly inspired most neofeudalistic fiction and the hierarchical structures of nobility which followed it. Then there is of your closing comment and how foundation wrestles with that very idea. In that struggle the focus of the foundation itself is also interesting in what it inspired. It represents the other closely entwined half of mostly Europe's but sometimes other culture's feudal ruling structures. The church. They and their struggle against collapse is also echoed in many entries to neofeudalistic sci-fi. The foundations own predictive ability, attempts at preservation and restoration, and the use of religion to both bring social influence and intergenerational stability to the institution. Battletech's Comstar is the most comparable, but it rejects the assumptions of benevolence and good intent in favor of a callous and dogmatic orginization willing to commit the worst of atrocities for a vision which is incoherent at best and malevolent at worst. Though, notably, both fundamentally fail to avert the civilizational collapse they forsee. The others also have their techno religious cults, multiple in fact which focus on different aspects, but these are primarily groups that arise not as an attempt to address forseen events, but but are spawned by their unforseen occance.
Foundation is in many ways a great counterpoint to these later space-feudalism examples. Especially Dune and 40K where there’s an implied institutional pressure to maintain stability through stagnation. Foundation approaches it like a straight-up Dark Age, a miserable thing we have to get through as quickly as possible to bring back the Empire. I find it interesting that highest authorities (the ever-declining Emperors and the leaders of the Foundation) don’t want the feudalism that emerged. It’s all the little lords and barons that fight to maintain their fiefdoms while the Foundation is working to roll everything into a new Empire that comes across as some weird federal neo-Roman thing. Yeah, this is a topic that could go a long way.
I always looked at 40k and Dune with a perverse sense of longing. It isn't a pleasant world and every human is only a speck of light in vast, dark galaxy, but everything there just "hits" much harder, feels more worthwhile and meaningful than the real world. I sometimes feel I'd rather die for a god who doesn't know I exist than live for nothing at all. I want to be a part of a grand narrative, to stand defiant against the odds. I want all the inconveniences and horrors and pains and misery to loosely paraphrase Huxley.
i feel that way about star wars, and some other sci-fi genres that are not quite as utopian as others like star trek - but then again, neither are they as gleefully dystopian as others, like 40k and Dune. A balance of utopian vs dystopian is good, IMO.
You can do that right now, in the current world. Just replace "God" with "Money" and you've got you're purpose. Raise capital for you spawn to enjoy, and strive to teach your children the worth of having power through "Money" so that their generation doesn't squander your toil. How is dying for "Money" --which in this case would be the power over your socio economic environment--, be any different than dying for a "God" that doesn't even know you exist? At least "Money" is tangible, you can hold it in your hands and you can perform action with it. You can control it. You cannot control god. But your problem most likely isn't being without purpose, but most likely something else.
@@verigumetin4291 What do you mean "dying for a 'God" that doesn't even know you exist?" Most religions believe their creator created them, so they would have to know of our existence. Especially the Christian God that I believe in who created us and gave us a will to create, nurture, grow, and prosper. You seem to be speaking of a Deistic version of God. Anyways, I believe money is a great tool that can empower one, but to treat it as an idol well we Christians have a word for that, "Mammon." Money is a tool, nothing more nothing less.
You would just love the Fading Suns RPG franchise from the late 90s. Not widespread knowledge, but brings back some real techno-feudal memories to me. A set of wonderful world-building.
The Culture is pretty much exactly the sort of future I’d be willing to do almost anything to reach, but with the caveat that I’m opposed to the intellectual off-shoring to machines for precisely the reason mentioned in the video. There’s no time to rest or relax. There is more to be done.
When I was young I'd think about myself living in the dark ages. In the shadows of the giants of the past. What a horrifying concept. A subsistence level life surrounded by the stone architecture of what must have seemed liked wizards. That knowledge and organization out of my grasp. I hope humans are spared this in the future. We'll see.
Classic Traveller had a discussion about how communication distance can promote feudalism instead if central rule on a galactic scale. The fastest means of communication is a courier ship, either carrying mail or a courier. FTL travel us fast but not so fast that relating a message from one end of a stellar realm to another doesn't take a year. The local representatives of both government, companies, NGOs, armed forces etc are therefore almost as appointed viceroys. They have leeway to react to local issues within the scope of their mandate. Classic Traveller is otherwise not technically ir socially stagnant. Local level can run on many other principles.
I've always though that early American federalism is a more likely model for an interstellar civilization than feudalism. Though in either case they illustrate that the concern over communication delays hindering centralized governance is a recent issue.
@@feralhistorian All institutions spanning the empires of Traveller have these issues. A company in Traveller will have empowered local managers. The imperial army is a selection of somewhat autonomous garrisons. The navy and its marines in Traveller is one of the more centralized institutions. They are not so far that they are completely autonomous, more like viceroys up for appointment and replacement. Traveller has an aristocratic class for other reasons as well. This is even more extreme in Warhammer where events move by the decade at most.
@@feralhistorian I'm not sure that it is a recent issue? I have heard, though I suppose its possible that it isn't true, that Rome and other large empires in history ultimately collapsed because they expanded beyond their capacity to manage. Essentially, the edges of the empire were too far for communications to reach the decision makers in a timely enough fashion. In fact, I would posit a second great contributor to historical empire size constraints is mobilization speed, which is itself also impacted by comms speed. And it doesnt have to be mobilization for war, it could also be mobilizing an effort to deal with some crisis or disaster localized to some region of your empire. Comms speed and mobilization speed are effectively the reason why ww1 actually came to blows, the decision makers didn't have enough time to figure out how to not go to war.
@@feralhistorian Has anyone done a study on the addition of new States to the Union compared to the speed of travel/communications between DC and their capitols/major cities? I'd be interested to see if there was any measurable correlation there.
Aye man... someone should point out the absolute beauty of a background for when he is shown speaking to the camera this man probably had to hike miles and miles with heavy camera equipment just to get such a minute detail to not even be talking about. All that just to talk about dune which is already a kinda complicated fictional story. My hats off to you my friend. As someone in my late 20's i wish i had friends like this guy to just go and fart around with.
@@feralhistorian "Town". How disappointing. I was hoping you were (officially) living in a yurt in very rural Montana, while actually residing in Bunker 14 Charlie Purple, 600 ft below said yurt.
Pausing halfway through to mention I technically "studied" under Kevin J. Anderson in grad school for my MFA, a degree I never finished for reasons that don't relate to this, yet a point I feel obligated to mention upfront. For context, this was the summer of 2023. Based on the panel discussion I went through (where I irritated him a lot with specific questions) and a presentation of *his* grad school work at the same university, I can offer this about the man, at least from my perspective. None of it necessarily means anything, but by understanding the author, I believe you can comprehend their work far better, which, funny enough, was a major source of contention between me and my professors (not Anderson). 1. His pitch about "success as a writer" was very much a "just do stuff and something will work." 2. To contrast that point, I implied (before he cut me off) that his bootstrapping approach in genre fiction was conditional, especially in Star Wars, where he really got established as a writer. This was due to Anderson being noticed and elevated by LucasFilm in the early 1990s, around the Thrawn Trilogy, where they realized that books were a lucrative and efficient way to capitalize on an IP while test-firing new or potential story arc ideas. It is *critical* (in my opinion, at least) for people to grasp that with writers like Anderson. It seems to me that his Star Wars EU work had very little staying power, as it lacks controversy or general acclaim. However, in a personal and professional sense, Anderson's timing and connections made him a bankable author, as he was on the ground floor of LucasFilm's first generation of publishing, which was a major benefit when that industry was only in its infant stages. 3. Though I mentioned this in point 2, I want to clarify that Anderson scowled at me before I reached my point and cut me off, doubtless because he knew what I was about to say. There was a bit of "just try harder" in his response, but the truth (as I have seen from him and several other successful writers) was the process of "cutting the ladder on your way up," which is to say that authors in genre fiction often find a path to success, then block/gatekeep anyone else from using the same method. 4. He was very keen on talking about the new Dune films, which he swung between calling his or "Frank's" depending on how he wanted to present the point. 5. For his mandatory staff reading, Anderson wrote (and read before the students) a story about a maid in a medieval setting poisoning the duke and his retinue during a feast, then running away with a serving boy. This was for his mandatory "romance story" during his time as a former student. For what it is worth, I didn't like it. To show my hand and reveal my bias, here, I will make it transparent I didn't much care for the man, and I was never much of a Dune fan to begin with. Either way, he was a physicist, something of an intellectual, and whenever he was in a room, the other professors and students were kind of expected to treat him like a superior life form. I suspect this was due to our university seeing him as a major catch for a new and untested genre fiction masters program. And I also suspect that if anyone was asked if they acted that way, they'd vehemently deny it. So, take that as you will. All I can offer is the perspective of a guy who met him, spoke with him professionally, and saw how other people did during our million mandatory "social events" during a week-long retreat on-campus.
As a sidenote to a sidenote; you may want to read 'Against a Dark Background' also by Iain Banks. Its status as a 'CULTURE' book is debatable, but let's just say it doesn't matter from a narrative standpoint. I would be interested in your opinion on whether it could be counted as a 'post-utopian' story or not.
"Using calculators for simple math we really should be able to do in our heads..." I don't remember signing any contract with math that made it entitled to use my head.
It’s strange, because in a certain way, I see the sort of near feudal settings and a bit more not utopian, but overall better in the long run. Yes that are solidified social classes, added many cases, conflict and war, but barring Warhammer the settings to me at the very least, seem to have more honesty about the nature of their societies. In our current society we live with this set of elites, who will do everything in their power to say that they’re not, and we’re actually all free agent capable of making our own decisions, and who should be in charge. Many of us know that’s not really the case in the settings it’s more honest. These people rule, but at the very least for the most part take on the responsibilities of rulership, and they are subject to creeds overs and honours, and know that I content population at the very least works harder. The main benefit of these kind of near feudal settings at the very least. The people with power and wealth are under the watchful eye of whatever authority is Bob above them, whether that be a king or whatever funny title they have come with. They need to honour their obligations to their state or they are to be removed. Unlike today were megarich CEOs 10 pocket millions, and for the most part, we have no bloody idea who any of these people are, or even their businesses, not to mention, at least in the case of Dune and BattleTech. Truly evil oppressive leaders seem to be quite rare. The fact that House Atreides, for example, is growing popular in the Empire, implies that their idealised method of rulership is something to be followed an idealised, or at the very least many in the Empire, follow them leading to me to guest at the houses of horror like the Harkonans are not as common. As I’ve said it’s not that the societies are without issue, but at least for me I respect the fact they’re more honest in the display of Power and who is in charge and that overall people seem to be better off in many places because of it, for after all the enlightened despot is democracies, greatest adversary.
I agree completely. Today, when a Corporate CEO commit a crime, they get a hefty bonus and retire in Belize. If you did this in Feudal England, or afterwards in Tudor England, you would be held personally responsible for your actions. If something like Deepwater Horizon would have happened with the United States being a Tudor Monarchy, confiscations would happen to pay for the damages, and the men clearly responsible would have paid with their lives. With the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the same thing. The people responsible would have their entire fortunes confiscated and their lives would be forfeit. (Although note: The Tudor Period was after Feudalism. But the early modern era was still run on a person-to-person level). With this, you need less written laws. Preventing you from becoming a Bureaucratic State. As the "Spirit of the Law" still ruled. No lawyer no matter their skills would have been able to save the lives of the people responsible for the two examples I gave. Not even Saul Goodman would have a chance. And this serves as a massive good reason for the Corporate CEOs and the wealthy to NOT do such nonsensical things. As they will be held personally responsible, they will not dump the toxic waste in the local river. Even from a position of Psychopath Pride that these Wall Street megaminds often hold. They too would be incentivized to "Fake it until they make it". They would patron the arts. Not for profit, but to show off. Take William Shakespeare. He was a Tudor propagandist. Every work he did served a political goal. And yet, we still talk about him today. His art was not meant to make money. His art existed for other reasons. Imagine if we had a similar situation today, with a Shakespeare-esque situation, where people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. They would all patron mega projects and movies. Not for profit, but to show off. Elon Musk funding a Billion Dollar Epic for the sake of showing off and to provide beautification. Where instead of having a Hollywood monopolizing the market for its own benefit, you would have Billionaires competing against each other with the arts they produce. Allowing us, the people, to be dazzled and blown away by what they create. Imagine projects like the Lord of the Rings trilogy coming out every single year. Imagine a Sistine Chapel, but made today. Pushed to the very limit of what was possible to awe the world. The Barons of old were personally invested in how their Baronages looked. As neighbors today compete about having the nicest laws, they too competed over who had the nicest Counties. His personal Pride was tied to how well his people had it. Which in turn, means he would be personally invested in getting as good of a County as possible. If his lands are shoddy and his people are all leaving, he would lose all respect among his peers. And most likely, the King would seize the lands. Just as you yourself stated in your comment. Take a look at the Olympics as an example. All of a sudden the streets of France were cleaned and done up. Look at when Xi went to California. All of a sudden Newsom cleaned up the streets. Once upon a time, that policy was permanent. With a Feudal to Tudor-esque system today, the homeless would be housed for the simple fact that having a bunch of homeless makes the person in charge look bad. Functional drug policy and laws would be implemented, as what we see today would have been personally embarrassing to the people in charge.
The Feudalism in both Battletech and Dune are products of the history of the setting, a history created to explain the reasons the governing system is how it is in the setting, a choice made by the author of said setting. Feudalism in WH40K is however much simpler to explain and I think you're a little confused on how it exists, it is complicated. You see, prior to recent lore, as in stuff written in the past 10 odd years, the Feudal worlds were simply one of many government types which exist within the Imperium, simply there for gameplay setting choices, it is only recently it has become more ingrained in the setting. In WH40K the Imperium is more Byzantine than Feudal and doesn't much care for how each planet under it's umbrella is ruled, only that there is a representative, a planetary governor in charge, doesn't matter to the Imperium if they are a king or a president, dictator or chief, to whom they can keep on contact with, of whom provides the required tithe of the planet to the Imperium. All the Imperium cares about is loyalty and macro resource management; No one cares about the individual well being of each planet, as most planets are left to manage themselves and their well being is entirely up to them to maintain trade relations with other planets and systems, the Imperium is too complex for there to be any oversight, only management of resources required for it's war machine to defend itself.
I think part of the appeal of these "Space Feudalism" settings is that the story is always about a King, or Noble Duke, or the brave Knight Sir Who'sit of Whocares. This causes the audience/reader to empathize and identify with the top 1% of a feudal society. None of these stories (with the possible exception of Warhammer) are told from the perspective of the poor peasant farmer who's left to fertilize his crops with his own "night soil" and just trying to stay alive day to day.
warhammer fantasy actually does a good job of mixing both perspectives to make it actually interesting. yes you do have corrupt noblesand those that infight endless, but you also have people like karl franz and even earlier sigmar himself genuinely trying to help humanity and their common man despite their wealthy upbringings. its honestly a more balanced approach compared to 40k's "everyone in charge is evil AF" and the appeal of the heroic noble
If you ever decide to dig deeper into Battletech, I'd recommend talking with Tex of the BlackPantsLegion, hes an expert in the lore of Battletech to the point that the authors of the setting included him as a in universe character, Randolf P Checkers, a Periphery historian.
I like the newer interpretation of the era leading up to the “Time of Titans” in the Dune backstory, that the neofeudalism that came to dominate, via the League of Nobles’ resistance to the Titans, was psychologically ready to take over almost immediately by the survivors of the Titans’ first salvo against the Couch Potato Republic that they were rebelling against, precisely because the vast majority of of those couch potatoes had been living their entire waking lives in full immersion RPG VR fantasies for over a 1000 years! “Fake it until you make it”, writ large for a trillion people. In one sense, the Titans won no matter the outcome, because ending the era of indefinite meaningless laziness was their most important goal. The problem with Frank’s original conception of the Decadent Era, is he didn’t have a good theory for how decadence of that magnitude could be sustainable for such a massive amount of time. But modern video games gave Brian Herbert the inspiration to fill his dad’s gap on this matter.
if fantasy becomes indistinguishable from reality why does living in one become bad..and the other good? in other words what if I could prove *this* reality was just a fiction that you could be freed from to the *real* world...would that invalidate all your triumphs and successes within this one or lessen all the sadness and loss you'd experienced within this artificial reality? if all that has changed is your awakening to the fact another realm sits atop this one?
@@johntowers1213 Well, I utterly reject almost all aspects of Gnosticism, culturally, philosophically & metaphysically. It has some metaphorical utility now that getting lost in fantasy game worlds is possible, but that’s as far as it goes. I am an Orthodox Christian so I have to draw a hard line there. Besides, the gnostic denominational infighting of the last 150 years has left over a billion people dead, especially since I count all the abortions that resulted from Gnosticism’s anti-natal influences.
It's probably been said already but battletech's interspersed not only gets back to were it was but has surpassed the fallen empire in technology and prosperity
Please checkout Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium stories! It covers the Russian / American alliance which dominated earth. It's expansion out into the stars. And it's eventual collapse and following dark age. The surviving CoDominium remnants would then go on to form the 1st Empire of Man centered on the planet Sparta. The later War World books would cover the 1st Empire's destruction and subsequent collapse; after a genocidal war with the Sauron "Supermen" and their Coalition. These remnants or Outies would plague the 2nd Empire's attempts to consolidate and re-conquer known human space. Pournelle's & Nivens' - Mote in the Eye of God takes place hundreds of years later during the 2nd Empire. And their discovery of sentient alien life - The Moties. I definitely recommend it to any Hard Sci-fi / Military Sci-fi fan.
I read one of the War World books way back and remember liking it but I didn't pick up any more. But now the whole CoDo series is sitting there rapidly approaching on the reading list. I think there's going to be a lot to talk about.
I feel like even making stories about dark age is too heavily tied to idolization of rome. No more aquaducts? No more gigantic slavery population to build them also. No more expensive trade? You wouldn't be able to afford it anyway. Noblemen aristocracy? Atleast they are nowhere near the oligarchs like Crassus. Quality of life for normal people is higher in middle ages than roman era. Rome wouldn't have its own enlightenment, capitalism or industrial revolution. It itself was the dark stagnant imperium era that had to collapse, a burden on the europe sucking it dry. Free buffet with parallels to capitalism.
I very much enjoyed the Dune prequel trilogy - House.... I don't know what happened, but I found the Butlerian Jihad unreadable. I enjoyed Poul Anderson's, The Long Way Home. Lous McMaster's Bujold's, Vorkosigan Saga series of books are outstanding. This is (at least with the Barrayaran Imperium) Feudalism. With an Emperor, Lords, etc with Vor being some version of the German Von. The early settlers were of Russian stock and it has a, pre soviet era, Russian Empire flavour to it.
"...it raises the issues of human thought becoming dependent on machines and therefore controllable by those who control the machines...." Here's a thought: what if no one controls the ruling machine?
Yes, it is presented as a solution to the problem that communication between systems can only be as fast as a ship travels. Ships have jump drives, making a jump locks you into jump space for around 6-8 days. There are ships that can travel vast distances in a jump, they are expensive and have to be almost entirely fuel, so ships with shorter jump capabilities predominate. This means it takes weeks to get to seemingly nearby systems, months to reach the edges of the imperium from the capital. Direct control is impossible. So power is devolved to archdukes and dukes, even then, most planets have a large degree of autonomy (the 'cannon' Imperium only claims dominion over the space between worlds because the trade must flow). Whole wars have been fought and resolved on the Imperium's edges before the capital even knew there was a problem.
Repost Comment Hope You See This I Immensely Enjoy Your Videos! Honestly I would love to hear your analysis or meditative thoughts on the Xeelee Sequence and The Culture series of books. As I think they make a great contrast between each other with one I think being a somewhat outlandishly speculative (in terms of technology) but realistically cynically pessimistic perspective. While the other is a bit more grounded (at least less technologically theoretical) but also an overly optimistic utopian libertarian socialist outlook on humanity’s future.
I mean think about it, isn't we already have lords and kings nowadays who run the big companies? If they fully take some essential technology, isn't they functionally became kings ?
You should read Asimov's foundation series if you haven't. He was one of the first to build a collapse narrative like this in a science fiction narrative.
And one of the few to show us the civilization before its collapse, which makes it even more interesting. Of course, he based a lot of it on the Western Roman Empire and its aftermath, so he was working from a very solid, ahem, foundation.
I'm with @melvinlemay7366 on this one. You shouldn't have broached this topic without discussing Foundation. Yes, the tone and result are different, but the deliberate pessimism of DuneBattleHammer is much more significant when seen in context. Asimov's introduction to Foundation also explains the original genesis of the concept-basically, he'd just finished reading Gibbon.
I know this isn’t a particularly a dystopian centric video, but id love if he ever covered half life. The combine system isn’t the most in depth I suppose, but over time I’ve given it thiught and imo it’s one of the best depictions of a dystopia at least in gaming. It’s a bit more than I want to describe in a comment but after kinda thinking about the motives of the combine, their art design, how they occupy earth, and comparing it with their more dark and stylish beta counterparts and I’ve just come to appreciate them more for how they present dystopia
Oh-oh, I grieve in stereo, the stereo sounds strange I know that if you hide, it doesn't go away If you get out of bed and find me standing all alone Open-eyed, burn the page, my little dark age
Recommend you read the later Culture books they include the idea of intelligent opting out where small groups can tryout alternative culture and politics (splinter sects, ascended and the forgotten) or drop out of the Culture to join other civs at will rejoining if and when you like, remembering a significantly extended life span let’s you do different things as you age - I particularly like the idea that any one of the thousands of GSVs housing millions is a microcosm of the Culture and if catastrophe strikes can effectively re-start civ at the same level. I also like the 25,000 year old man obsessed with sound or the option to move your mind into different forms (whale, cloud, bush, alien floating chlorine breather) to explore a different experience. The point being unlike scarcity based polities (ie pre jihad dune) an advanced post scarcity civ can afford dissidents without collapse and is not at risk of ‘stagnation’
Part of the rejection of thinking machines wasnt just to benefit certain people or groups in a social or power sense. It was partly a rejection of unintentional action. How many things do you do in a day without thinking? How often to just pick up the device and do a bunch of small but ultimately useless actions? Part of the rejection of thinking machines was also a rejection on being too reliant on them and to make people live more intentional lives.
My own head cannon for Dune is that machines brought utopia and only when machines, not humans, took control of machines and thus man did the jihad begin, to put humans back in control of themselves and their thinking, yet of course some humans took power and thus humans were just free to be enslaved by themselves once more. The theme was that man must be in control, not machines even if in the likeness of man or pursing the program of humanity to its benefit. Perhaps the fear is that humans will submit to machines controlled by us but ultimately we must lose control over them and then we are obsolete. I see that always in the background but often blurred in fiction, Dune has technology but always subservient and never thinking, that is the stagnation, yet humans are navigators and mentats and sisters who can accomplish super human feats yet the bulk of humanity is just labor or fodder or serfs or slaves.
From a storytelling perspective, a feudal system works well, because it puts a lot of power and agency in the hands of a few characters.
Monumental decisions that reshape the universe can happen in minutes instead of months or years.
As the saying goes, nobody sets out to create a feudal system, it is what you get when all others fail.
Frank Herbert in Dune went out of his way to find reasons for why the world is the way it is. It wasn't just rule of cool.
Technological constraints of space travel and communication affect government. Shields make melee weapons more important
and bring back the need for warrior elites because of longer training times.
With the rise of AUTONOMOUS machines in war. I believe we are seeing the end of the citizen soldier that has built republics. The future of war fighting will be held by smaller and smaller elite units. They will likely enhance themselves with genetic modification or cybernetics, bringing in an old warrior class that will hold more strength in civilization.
Another Poul Anderson story, the novella "No Truce with Kings" posits Feudalism is humanity's natural fallback polity. People on the local level can bond fiercely to their locality and customs, and even to their local hereditary lord if he's even halfway competent and decent.
@@robertlehnert4148 Tribalism is humanities actual 'fall back' polity, feudalism is just the logical follow-through.
Its mildly Ironic that the Thinking machine techno feudalism spanning the Dune universe of pre history was rebelled against an overthrown for an organic (human) feudalism that's shown to be equally bad if not worse than the thing it replaced...for the average individual not of the ruling class, life remained deeply grim
That's a myth, Empires and kingdoms of medieval Europe had way less centralized powers than modern republics today. A lot of governing and laws are passed took place mostly in the local level the king or Emperor had very little to do with local politics.
Also medieval kingdoms and Empires paid way less taxes than modern republics do today or any Republic for that matter.
The thing that people think Medieval Europe was was not what it was, they're describing something closer to ancient or medieval China. Because the Kings and Emperors in medieval Europe didn't have the power of dictators, sure they probably have some control over their Elite class but that's about it. Property owners in business owners were just that they own a business a king couldn't take that away from them without proper proceedings and law in European society. We're ancient China and medieval China the emperor owned everything including all properties; this was not the case in Europe.
If you're going to have great houses and principalities in an Empire they're going to be mostly operating closer to a Confederacy in a Western modle.
"Using calculators for simple math we really should be able to do in our heads" damn that hits a little close to home
Absolutely based pfp
You and me both.
If God wanted me to do math, I’d have been born a calculator.
In my particular case, I’m painfully slow at mathematics. It’s because I grew up with learning difficulties.
@Hexterguard99 I was just dumb, I got no excuse.
TechnoFeudalism fiction feels like a subconscious counter-reaction to the rapid progress of the last century mixed with the American Western mythos. One person bringing justice to a corrupt/lawless land festering in the shadow of a hubris giant's corpse. A narrative that becomes more tangible by the day.
Dunno... All the space feudal worlds I can think of are clearly Dystopian. So it's kind of hard to think of them as aspirational.
Almost every story we ever hear reinforces the idea that there are only a small subset of "people who matter" and everyone else are the "little people" who only theoretically exist somewhere off-screen.
What's the foundational idea of the Superhero? A person of exceptional ability doing good deeds instead of serving themselves still needs to be *empiracally better* than the average person for there to be a story in the first place.
@@Grizabeebleswrong
@@jorel4225 -- given that you haven't provided any evidence to back your flat denial, I'm just going to assume you don't have any and carry on as before.
@@Grizabeebles Stories are told like that because it's the exceptional people with vision who push the rest of us forward. The "little people" are often just the untalented masses, it's no surprise not much change or innovation comes from them.
What is common throughout these technofeudal settings is that they arise through a lack of instantaneous communication and travel.
It will take weeks or even longer to travel from one system to another, which means planets are essentially on their own even though they are subordinate to a greater power. A hereditary, feudal power structure makes sense as the imperial authority can create long lasting ties with a planet’s government through royal marriages.
The Traveller rpg setting has the same travel constraints and technofeudal set up but is not in a dark age. Perhaps that would be a good comparison to explore.
Yeah, communication speeds basically gatekeep how large an empire can become. Many of the 'great' empires in history ultimately fell due to over-expansion, ending up with holdings so widespread that effective central governance became impossible. Rome and the British Empire are both prime examples of this.
@@jasonblalock4429 'Effective central governance' means something different to people of today than of yesteryear; also worth noting that the British Empire fell less because of communication issues and more the overwhelming expense of two world wars, exacerbated by the losers basically never paying war indemnities, while the British _did_ pay their creditors.
Yea this is significant. Take Battletech for example. Though it's feudal structures are associated with it's dark age, they actually predate it by centuries. They were spawned by humanity's expansion into space and associated lack of instantaneous communications and persisted beyond that point on cultural momentum.
And yet, what of federalism? It was what was used by nations like the US in order to deal with lack of instantaneous communications and easy, speedy travel.
Federalism could be also used in such situations that arose in Battletech or Dune.
@@warellis Sure, but federalism requires alot more bureaucracy than feudalism making it less likely to work on such a massive scale. Besides that, feudalism works better from a storytelling perspective. Having fewer people with the power to make decisions isn't great for long term stability but it is great for telling a story.
A crucial factor to keep in mind about the "space feudalism" settings in WH40K and Battletech (and their primary antecedent, Traveller) is that they were originally conceived as game-universes, designed to support gameplay, and there are many aspects of galactic-scale post-utopia medievalism that are very useful for that purpose: lots of room for the players to be self-directing in the absence of dominant higher authority, multiple factions of roughly similar modest power and contrasting motivations to interact with, a baseline tech not too far afield from 20th/21st century capabilities (making it easier for players to conceive of potential actions), lots of well-established narrative tropes lying around to use (merchant caravans, bandit gangs, warring nobles, battle-scarred ronin, weird towers, princesses to save), and a justification for occasional fun but unreproducible artifacts ("magic items" effectively). Basically, it presents a situation where a your average player-character "murderhobo" with nothing more than a decent weapon and a flexible moral compass can easily find ways to keep themselves busy, in ways that feel relevant. This, as much as anything else, is a strong reason why these sorts of settings keep showing up in our IP-driven media. Contrast this with settings first designed as mediums for literature (like Bank's Culture, or Leckie's Radch Empire, even the Imperium of Frank Herbert's later Dune novels) which are fun to read about but don't present ample opportunities to insert an average party of oppurtunistic mercanries (yes I know there are stories in those series which do exactly that, but the context allowing for it are almost always exceptional).
Along these lines, I'd like to throw in a mention of Fading Suns, a game series with the most literal version of space-feudalism ever.
Certainly a fair point. And I'll have to look into the Fading Suns setting down the line.
@@feralhistorianFading Suns is strange. It has a tech-mix of anything from dirt farmers to orbital bombardment. They pulled a lot of ideas from Dune on a smaller scale. With a handful of feudal houses, a handful of tech-guilds and the anti-tech church. And a minority of colonized aliens. Psionics is taboo while church miracles are okay.
A fun sidenote is three outside powers. Two human cultures on similar level, one alien empire of grossly advanced level like sci fi China in It's isolationist years. And one weird zerg-like threat where everyone is allowed to use any forbidden tech as long as they hold the biohorror back.
The typical Old D&D murderhobo to me is Conan. You are the bums who might very well decide to trample a bejewelled throne or two. You carve out a pocket of law in the larger wilderness.
_Contrast this with settings first designed as mediums for literature (like Bank's Culture, or Leckie's Radch Empire, even the Imperium of Frank Herbert's later Dune novels) which are fun to read about but don't present ample opportunities to insert an average party of oppurtunistic mercanries_
I think you may have inadvertently presented a strong argument for the ultimate implausibility of settings like Banks's LOL.
@feralhistorian this is why in say battletech as much as some ask of it nobody plays in the star league era thers little happening that's of interest to pay in. Rebellions and pirates and placing actions not alot to do until it falls in a military sense.
The parallels between the 40k Emperor and the ghost of imperial past haunting today's culture are very well put. I thank the YT algo for handling some of my cognition for me and introducing me to your channel.
Two things that people tend to forget about the tendency for SciFi to include Feudalistic elements:
1.SciFi takes many of it's less hard science tropes from other fiction including fantasy and the historical record, until very recently the latter heavily focused on nobility and the Great Man theory of history which focused on individuals around whom history was said to bend and fiction also tilted back to the medievalist style so too did early sci-fi including the Rocket Punk genre and the entire Swords and Phasers style like Flash Gordon.
It was a well established method of influence.
2.From a literary simplicity point of view the tropes of having a handful of influential people be the main movers and shakers of the story are convenient for allowing action as having to deal with single personifications of places and governments is much easier to write and understand than having to depict multiple layers of democratic all elected leaders that may change frequently.
Everyone understands that what Space King says is law and he's gonna be around until he dies and his Space Prince takes over, it makes moving along with the rest of the plot much easier.
At the same time, if you want a more complex treatment of politics, especially if you're introducing rubes like the readers to it, it's easy to realistically complicate the 'simplicity' of a feudal system. Although I admit it's at least as often an excuse to avoid the subject, either because the author doesn't want to bother or is just ignorant of how complex such systems actually are.
I think this is why we romanticize it, why it works for stories, and why societies sometimes revert to it (more or less). It's personal. It's not a some nebulous congress of hundreds of people which you at most know one of declaring war on the neighbors for reasons you don't know. It's Lord Henry. You like Lord Henry. He's been around for as long as you have and your life is pretty good. He sent some of his men to help rebuild your barn last summer after it was struck by lightning.
I have come to believe that the one major drawback of liberalism (in the classical sense) is that loss of belonging to a group.
The role of corporations as something akin to royal houses in the neo- feudalist post Republic America is a through line in the weirdly prescient 'Network' (1976): From Ned Beatty's ' The World is a Business speech to Robert Duvall's lament at his loss of station ' I'm a man without a corporation!'
The Corporation is an idea that first appeared in the feudal period as a way of running cities or large trading organizations. They actually are a remnant of feudalism in the modern world.
@@AbelMcTalisker one of the most famous (or infamous) corporation from late feudalism is the East india company. that ran is operation like a noble house. Sanction by the brittish empire.which allow it to stretch it holding and its empire. Not to mention the Dutch and other colonial companies.
The Myst series of adventure games had a interesting take on a feudal-style interplanetary empire, one where distance was meaningless because the rulers - the D'ni - could teleport anywhere in their holdings instantly. They also believed themselves to be the literal creators of the worlds they conquered (although they probably weren't), acting like god-emperors over their subjects.
Ultimately, their instantaneous travel enabled their downfall, as an engineered deadly plague got set loose, spreading across the entire empire and ending it in a matter of days. Then the games are set in the aftermath, with the player exploring D'ni ruins as well as the works of those who followed in the D'ni's footsteps, almost more like an archaeology / anthropology simulator than an "adventure game."
This sounds interesting, I might take a look at that, I find the idea of xeno-archeology interesting, I think the first evidence of sapient aliens we might see would be finding their ruins.
Battletech mentioned by one of my favorite TH-camrs... Yes, please.
Edit: my one comment is that Battletech does have eras where there is technological regression or stagnation, the bar does shift back and there is progress. Unlike Warhammer where it is so hardwired into the setting that you cannot really advance the technology of the Imperium without breaking the setting. Yes there have been updates, but they have not dramatically changed much, other than changing model ranges.
_BattleTech's_ classic setting at the end of the Third Succession War is very much at the bottom of the cycle, so much so that over the next century or so technology within the Inner Sphere (if not society stability) actually surpasses that of the Star League.
Battletech doesn't really posit technology as the major limiting factor for what humans can achieve culturally, I'd say. More like vice versa, if anything.
It's not even a dark age, really (except the actual "Dark Age" lore era, of course). I find it more reminiscent of the late 19th/early 20th century (the period where the dominant political systems of the world were still built around medieval ideologies, but these obsolete ideas were in growing conflict with modern reality) than the actual Middle Ages.
In any case, the general premise of the Battletech setting is that even if humans are the cleverest monkeys when it comes to inventing more powerful tools, they don't innovate much at all in terms of what goals they want to use their tools to achieve. Future human civilization gets vastly larger in raw physical terms, but all they really do after that is re-enact 20th Century Earth on a larger scale, over and over again.
@@macdeus2601Agreed.
thats kind of why i prefer things like battletech or warhammer fantasy because there is more of a mixture which is more historically accurate than the grimdark "technology is backwards" type stuff
@@macdeus2601 IDK, it's clear pre 3025 was definitely a Mad Max Dark age at least when not on the major worlds. And that's before we learn more and more of what the Star League was actually up to on its bleeding edge. That's not to say there hasn't been advancements, but even the Clans are mostly just skating on having SL scientists and data and then just focused on advancing weapons tech not being able to recreate some of the greater technological feats of the SL.
Utopianism in fiction presents a Fukuyama style 'end of history' notion that the free bar party of techno-utopian paradise can last forever, and indeed exists as the inevitable end point of the development of civilisation, whereas Post-Utopian settings like Dune and 40K remind us that the hangover is coming sooner or later no matter how shiny and bright the light of your culture and its achievements might seem to be in the moment. That is in some ways an uncomfortable aspect of those settings, and yet at the same time an endlessly fascinating one. Here's hoping it doesn't also prove to be a prophetic sub genre of sci fi for our own times.
The more interesting ones acknowledge that as long as humanity remains; there is hope that the Utopia can come again. Once unified by a conquering element which both provides a shared culture but also a shared trauma to facilitate progress. Much like the trauma of the dark ages leading to the Enlightenment or the trauma of the British Empire leading to so many Constitutional Republics.
"This, too, shall come to pass."
Humans are legitimately super cockroaches. Civilization may ebb and flow, but humans will find a way..
It is. Utopia is inherently at adds with human nature and actively bad for us in many ways. Not to mention the whole there really isn't anyway to have utopia with out dystopia
@@mondaysinsanity8193 True, but I was thinking more prophetic in the short to medium term; all civilisations collapse sooner or later, the illusion of ironclad stability created only by our tendency to measure longevity by the standards of our own human lifespans, and there are those who argue that our current socio-cultural paradigm is coming to the end of its lifespan too, its consumption of the world's resources and ravaging of its ecosystems unsustainable, its politics increasingly volatile, and its weaponry heinously apocalyptic. We could, in theory at least, be living in the dying days of the 'high watermark of civilisation' for a near future dark age, with most of us never even considering the notion. I, for one, would rather not bear personal witness to the fall of civilisation.
@@gregorygreenwood-nimmo4954 as a history nerd if youre under 30 you'll certainly see the current order fall. Atleast in the us our politics look near identical to the early 1800s in way to many ways
I love the High Crusade, best line from the book "we kind of stopped looking for Earth when nobody that went looking came back and the war with the space dragons started.
There's also a simple stylistic reason these tropes keep showing up: Royalty has pageantry. Something about lords & ladies, kings & queens & emperors, is just more compelling aesthetically than any prime minister, president, or bureaucrat, no matter how wise or noble. If people don't have kings, they'll emulate the trappings. There's a reason the giant statue of Lincoln in Washington DC sits on a throne.
Just as an aside, it's fascinating to me that fiction keeps turning to these themes of civilizational collapse and societal regression.
It's almost an article of faith that the end is just round the corner and what's coming is going to be grimdark rather than solarpunk.
Definitely an article of literal intepretation of certain religious texts, even when recent findings demonstrate that people actually writing them suffered long term brain oxygenation deficiency.
I mean look around you. I’m absolutely convinced these cycles exist and that we’re in a downward trend. I’d look at the leadership of America as compared to even 40 years ago. Ours act like children. Unserious, ignorant (and often absolutely proud of it), decadent and arrogant- that’s what modern society produces in the way of leadership. On other fronts, the modern enclosure movement that has allowed housing to be bought up by investors and turned into rental properties such that the vast majority of Americans will never own a home (which is one of the very few ways that a person not wealthy enough to own substantial stocks can build generational wealth) student loans that have grown so fast that most college graduates will spend most of their working lives paying off those loans, and the relative instability of modern jobs (most people get laid off fairly regularly now). Nothing of note in the last 50 years- outside of computers- have really improved. Crime and drug use are common, roads are bad, political parties and the people in them are corrupted and simply looting for themselves. We can’t handle search and rescue stuff anymore.
@@TheresaReichley Also look at the youth. I tried to employ them out of college and gave up as hopeless. I know employ Asians only who are capable, honesty, and trainable. Americans would steal the computers we gave them to work and Asians refund us for hours they didn't work because hurricanes or coups happened.
I would have thought it was sci fi 25-25 years ago and it's reality.
@@TheresaReichley While I understand the viewpoint you espouse, I think the conclusion you come to is misleading. Obviously there is a downward trend in some very visible areas, but I think it is possible that these areas are less fundamental to the stability of human civilization as a whole than, say other things that online culture does not bring attention to.
@@DanielPlaceholder people not being able to afford houses and struggling to afford groceries and gas isn’t fundamentally important? The sitting president having pretty clear signs of dementia isn’t fundamentally important? Kids getting into elite college and not being able to read books isn’t fundamentally important? I mean I don’t think it will happen tomorrow, but we are deficient in enough areas of social, political and economic functioning that I’m not convinced my grandkids will live in a society like ours. I expect us to look a lot like Russia in 10-15 years.
Our Feral Historian has gone interstellar. Mobilise the Fleets
I don't think the large companies are deviations from "neofeudalism", they resemble guilds like Hansa quite closely.
Arguably modern professional organizations are the successors of guilds. One cannot be a professional without joining them, they set regulations which have some legal weight, they control the supply of labor in a profession etc etc. They are just national now which has made them more hands off in a lot of aspects
Feral Historyman, we patiently await your take on the Horus Heresy. Cross that Rubicon son!
All in due time. Want to get it right.
@@feralhistorian:D This is great news! Also he said “cross the Rubicon”, and it always bothered me that 40k uses that to refer to a firstborn astartes becoming a primaris astartes (they must risk their lives returning to the operation table for the extra organs), when there was already a literal cross-the-Rubicon moment where Horus marches his legions back to Holy Terra. No one ever mentions this, please be the one!
Honestly, a feudal future is more realistic than the Post-Scarcity Utopia of Star Trek. Space is big and even with FTL travel, it's gonna take a while to get anywhere. It's easier to delegate control of a planet or solar system to a local ruler than it is to try to directly exert authority from four hundred thousand lightyears away.
Only if we assume the need to delegate authority at all. A planet is a big enough economic entity to do its own thing without the need to formally bind it to some other authority.
I suspect what we're most likely to end up if interstellar colonization ever becomes viable is something more like a stripped-down old American federalism with some elements that look vaguely like this kind of space-feudalism but without any real economic interdependence.
@@feralhistorian My "great filter" mindset is tingling again. It'll probably be both. Large corporations or Quadriliionaires feudalistically owning this or that rock and ruling them while some are more or less independent states with some tie to a greater alliance/federation (old-America). The vast majority of government would have to be local either way though unless we build stargates or something.
David Weber's Safehold series is an interesting example of the Space Feudalism trope (close to a swords and spaceships novel of the old days) where Humanity looses the war against the big bad aliens and the last surviving colony reverts to feudal muscle powered civilization with a church to enforce Ludditism (along with an orbital bombardment system to unleash the wrath of god on those who dabble in prohibited knowledge) all to hide from the marauding aliens. The 10 novels in the series then follow the good guys trying to reintroduce technology, reform the church, and prepare humanity for round two against the aliens who are still out there. But the novels cover a 20 year period where society of Safehold goes from Medieval to the Industrial Revolution with all the social disruption that goes along with it.
Love to see Safehold referenced by someone other than myself! It only gets touched on once or twice (so far) but it's also strongly implied that the aliens in question are suffering their own technologically stagnant era except to a degree so severe that their capability to innovate has ground to a dead halt for thousands of years.
@@youtubeisapublisher6407 Going by David Weber's Empire from the Ashes series, where he used many of his Safehold plots because he was worried Safehold might not be purchased, the aliens have been reduced to effectively slaves to a computer that was programed to keep them alive in a hostile universe. Their whole species has been reduced to doing nothing but cruising around the galaxy destroying all competing species before they can develop in to a threat.
@@youtubeisapublisher6407it's been a while since I've read the books, but from what I remember, the aliens have ships that are 10s of thousands of years old that are exactly identical to their brand new ships, while humanity kept innovating during the war. IIRC, it's explicit that the goal is to get human tech to a couple of generations better than pre-Safehold and then wipe out the aliens.
@@williammagoffin9324 Yeah, the last book in the Ashes series was basically a compacted prototype for the Safehold books.
At work but will watch this later. I just wanted to Comment fresh. I found your channel about a month ago and have watched all your videos since then. Some of your back catalogue from the last 2 years has been coming up on my feed. You have such an engaging way of presenting your videos. Fantastic.
Thanks, I appreciate it. And I apologize for the horrendous audio in the first few.
@@feralhistorian No issues with sound so far. Speaking about technology reminded me of the trailer for The Creator. I'm a big sci-fi fan but never watched it, it might seem silly but it was one scene that turned me off. They are living with future technology, the soldiers are sent to retrieve an even more advanced piece of technology. This turns out to be an android / robot child who is watching a CRT TV. CRT's are pretty much obsolete to us NOW. I found that juxtaposition visually boring. As much as I loved the show, Stargate SG1 continually found ancient technology which looked like concrete.
@@feralhistorian I also just had one video show up in my recommendations last night, and now I'm shotgunning the whole catalogue. I thoroughly enjoy the way you poke around with each topic. BT and its "historical events with the serial numbers filed off" approach has always been one of my favorites. I would argue that "feudalism" is something of a default setting for humans; you can find strong themes of feudalism even in totalitarian societies, because Big Brother doesn't have the time or personal interest to deal with every little problem, and tends to outsource it to "trusted" (ahem) others, generally nobles/Inner Party members (same thing, really). The Austrian painter and Georgian seminary student both operated governments that were de facto feudal, with their underlings given pieces of power and then pitted against each other in order to keep them from becoming powerful or popular enough to potentially replace the Boss. Some feudal systems operated under cultures that promised certain basic human rights, such as the right to trial or the sanctity of contracts. Others were more totalitarian. Some had direct inheritance of titles, and others (such as the West today) had informal means of assistance for those considered to be "the right sort of people". Some had avenues for upward mobility, some didn't. Some had citizens, some had subjects, some had serfs, and most had a mixture of the three. But the hierarchy and the division of control among a "noble" class/caste that operated with the permission of a singular ruler was always present.
Whenever and wherever there is a concentration of power, there will be human conflict over it, and the greater the concentration, the more likely the result is to be some form of de facto feudalism. The only way to minimize the effect is to minimize the power, or disperse it in ways that are difficult for an individual class of would-be nobles to form around it, and then jealously guard that dispersion with laws and culture that resist any such concentration. We still have many such laws on the books today, but the culture has increasingly forgotten why the power was locked away from the "elite" in the first place, leading to their non-enforcement.
One of the only channels that is must watch every time.
*FOR THE EMPEROR!!*
Gloria militarium.
FOR DARKSEID!
Love the use of Dune (2000) footage.
The Culture Novels work in a universe that presupposes a Whig View of History is encoded into the laws of the cosmos. The series presumes that civilizations keep progressing forward, occasionally missteping, along the road to transcendence. The Culture is a young and energetic civilization inhabiting a galaxy where most races master the natural world and collectively choose to leave this universe for a higher plane of existence.
This is rapidly becoming my favorite channel for when I want to be a ponderin'.
It blows my mind how you consistently make absolute bangers of content. And they all involve shows/media I grew loving. Keep at it.
Damn my guy. All your videos are 🔥 I need to add the High Crusade to my reading list now you really expanded the scope of a story i have heard about in passing for years.
Feral Historian will eat ze bug and live un ze pod!!
You will eat the spice and be happy
Nice work with the planets in the background. Visually enjoyable and appropriate use.
An interested, broad analysis. It's fine to not have a lot of answers. It's more important to have questions when beginning these endeavors.
I kinda had this idea for a sci-fi setting where planets are privately owned by the person (and their descendants) who discovered them, and who basically get to rule over them as absolutist monarchs if they so wish.
Planets used to be colonized by nations and international organizations, but as some point the territory became so massive that is became impossible to govern, not to mention it became impossible to communicate with the Earth for many of these new colonies, now referred to as the old worlds.
As humanity still needed ever more resources and space to expand to, the "finders keepers" system was established, making each planet in the frontier theoretically its own independent unit.
I love this channel. I also like reading the comments. For the most part folks who enjoy this channel tend to be quiet brilliant, as is our host! Thanks again!
This reminds me of an observation someone had made of humanity in general: that we are essentially still apes with stone age mentality and emotional fragility, organized into feudalistic systems of governance, while using space age technology. I think one of the central themes of each of these fictional works (Dune, Warhammer, Battletech, and more) taps into this sentiment. No matter what technologies we produce, no matter if explore and conquer the stars, we are still flawed humans, and we bring our fears, our shortsighted wants and needs, our paranoia, our anger and hatred, our ignorance, greed, along with us for the ride.
Aim high we mon’keigh.
The amount of meaningful, quiet references to politics slipped in is pretty incredible. I am so used to people beating each other over the head with opinions, this was very refreshing.
Great video. Love all the references to Dune, The Culture, Battletech, etc. FYI, Banks said that his writing of the culture series was a response to the glut of pessimistic "conservative" sci-fi that was dominating the market at the time. He wanted to offer an alternative, more optimistic vision. You really should read the whole culture series when you get the chance, it's fantastic.
I think something that technofeudalism as a genre showcases is our tendency to put agency and choice in the hands of a single individual or a small group. Part or that probably comes from our perception of history where it is mostly centered arround men of note achieving things and changing circumstances.
thats why religion is so important in society because it makes that central authority figure not only beyond one singular human, and to a god/force/ideal beyond what is on earth. most religions as well focus on making god(s) to be the moral judge of the universe and/or of one's soul in one way or another. it puts that tendency towards outsourcing agency and control and attempts (and not always suceeds) to turn that tendency into something positive to bring people together in belief.
according to some theories this is the reason atheistic countries end up being somewhat authoritarian or having some kind of nanny state, is that the need to have something guiding you isn't directed anywhere else. examples include the very secular countries in southeast asia such as china or japan who had very strong emperor/class systems. compared to the more decentralized monarchy systems in europe after christianity.
The attraction of Space Feudalism is a rhyme to the popularity of Downton Abbey. There's something comforting about a situation where everyone knows their place in it, what role they are to play. Also, those downstairs may not have had spectacular wealth, but they didn't have the problems the people upstairs did.
For a person willing to be honest with himself about who he really is, instead of the "hero of his own story," feudalism has its attractions, especially for people who are daunted by the prospect of real freedom.
Very well put. Telling tall tales that anyone can be President, and that the largest Corporations were started by simple hardworking men in their garages, inevitably causes the whole idea to fall down on top of itself. Once people realize the existence of the barriers, the whole illusion breaks, and we find ourselves in a very uncomfortable situation.
If everyone realized their situation and then accepted their position. Accepting their bodies. Accepting their height. Accepting their teeth. Accepting their standing in society. Accepting their race. Accepting their wealth. Accepting reality.
Then the world would be a much better place.
By the way, the first episode of "The Crown" is some of the best television ever created.
real freedom means anarchy and chaos.
It would seem the world of the 70’s Rollerball would also fit into this feudal-style organization as well- Energy, Entertainment, various other commodity-producing cities as the basis for their organization with a mixture of classes.
I would definitely classify Rollerball's world as techno-feudal.
The Antikythera mechanism shows that with the collapse of the Roman empire, technolgy was lost and forgotten, not just logistics and production capacity. Heron of Alexandria also provides a glimpse into what technology was available back then. This loss of technology happened more than once, apparently.
In Europe, Africa, and Asia there are still ancient Roman ruins which could not be explained with medieval technology, and which inspired local legends about their mysterious origins and purposes. But even in late antiquity, people already refered to a lost, more glorious past.
As an aside, I find it remarkable that the stories about magic and what can go wrong with it (like literal meanings differing from intended meanings, or enchanted items having unexpected properties) are exactly the things that programmers and roboticists deal with.
Dune is the origin of the idea of interstellar feudalism as used in Star Wars, WH40k, and Battletech. Although Asimov's Foundation also has a collapsing galactic empire and a millennium of restoration. Ironically, the claims of legitimacy by the nobility in Dune are fake, they cosplay as feudal lords when actually they are shareholders of the one remaining monopoly; although in practice it makes little difference. It is a future where Fascism eventually won, and plus some millennia more.
The other franchises take the feudalism more literally. There are those who would argue that interstellar distances make feudalism the only viable pooitical system, even, which is silly. Most of those franchises have FTL, so distance is not even an issue. Without FTL, I'd argue that distance would even prevent interstellar politics. Heinlein argued that even the moon could easily secede (and therefore inevitably would; Gundam then copied that idea). While Weinersmith argues in A City On Mars that such secession is extremely unlikely given international law and especially the Outer Space Treaty. And also pointless. (Andy Weir has an argument in The Martian how any interplanetary settlers would ipso facto be space pirates.)
I would refer to Haldeman's Forever War, in particular the time dilation in interstellar travel, to illustrate why interstellar feudalism couldn't work. I'd go even further and argue that space battles are practically impossible because of orbital mechanics, except maybe for very specific edge cases.
Banks' Culture is interesting because it is about settling the unfathomable void of space rather than planets (as earlier science fiction had it, with the conquest of the American West continued in space, the final frontier, because the colonisers ran out of America to conquer). The Minds of the Culture are not servants, Banks repeatedly makes the point that machine inteligences are citizens of the Culture just as much as organics are. However, the largest Minds are strongly implied to secretly manipulate society (and not always successfully; Banks was first and foremost an author of horror).
You might also be interested in the lore of Elite (either Frontier or Dangerous), which has different political systems rivaling for interstellar hegemony, only one of them an empire (loosely modelled after the early British empire). The econonic system of the game takes cues from Thatcherism and probably shouldn't be taken too seriously.
If you are so inclined, there is a completed web comic named Carboniferous which features an interstellar empire without FTL and with relativistic effects, explictly referencing the Roman empire, and the story is in part about how it doesn't work and how planetary colonists hate the "immortals".
Another ongoing web comic named Seekers Log also features Space Romans whom nobody likes because they try to conquer and enslave their neighbours, and FTL technology from a mysterious precursor civilisation. There are also hints at different economic systems dominating different parts of the galaxy.
Interesting take, I always thought it was kind of ridiculous that feudalism could ever encompass the galaxy or even several worlds seeing as it wasn't until centralized imperialism that places like the British Isles and Germany were "properly" unified.
Had an idea a while ago to write a tribalistic sci fi setting with planets ruled by space faring chieftains. Seeing sci fi cultural equivalents of the Gaels, Norse, Rus, Bedouin, and Mongols slowly spread out across the galaxy engaging in non total warfare against each other in order to settle disputes, gain legitimacy, earn resources, etc.
If space colonisation became economically feasible and there was a large expanse of available planets, then many groups might seek to form their own New Edens. Arguably the history of the American West including Mormon migrations points to this.
Feudalism, and hereditary aristocracy more broadly, is the single most common and stable social-political system in human history. Given how frequently democracies and republics unravel into chaos or decay into decadence it makes a great deal of sense for a stable long running society in the future to follow a feudal/aristocratic pattern. A dark age is not necessary to sustain it, but a social awareness of the decadence and instability of the past would help.
A fun watch and I like your Jinbei top! I rock one too! My friend said this about modern humans: Caveman brains, medieval morality and Star Trek tools.
I appreciate this video a lot. As a writer with stories set in a big feudal space world myself, it is incredibly relieving to hear all the points I mulled over in its creation laid out in such an articulate manner. In fact in my universe things were very much like the Culture, but now they find themselves in a regressed feudal mire fighting over the scraps of that high technology. I chose feudalism as one of the main methods BY which their regression is shown, a warning of the consequences of fantastic technology wielded by cultures who are not mature enough to use them responsibly.
Sometimes I wonder if the whole idea of a "mature" culture capable of responsibly using extremely powerful technology is just wishful thinking. Sort of a cyclical model of history where we're constantly chasing ourselves trying to become this better, more rational and more responsible culture but always ending up with broken societies and wondering where we went wrong before starting again.
@@feralhistorian I've always approached the idea as being a culture which went through the long growing pains that resulted from the gradual development of the technological advents in question. Those which gradually learned how to handle them properly through stumbles and bruises as opposed to a warrior king who was suddenly handed destructive artifice.
Asimov's Foundation trilogy is a nice counterpoint to this thought vlog. Do cyberpunk next.
You only briefly touched on one of the most important reasons feudal societies rise after a collapse. A military vacuum. The reason Europe turned into a patchwork quilt of small baronies and fiefdoms was simply because nobody had sufficient military force to hold bigger domains. Without a strong central authority its possible to have a country, but, only if all the smaller local rulers give allegiance to the central lord. These local warlords pledge their swords to a more powerful lord for mutual defense. Lord is after all simply a contraction of warlord. And whoever has the weapons, makes the rules. But, those rules only apply as far as you can project your army and no further.
So, money.
Once again, I'm impressed by the narrator's insight.
Your reference to that Knights vs Aliens book by Poul Anderson. I listened to it as an audiobook and as a Welshman who lives only a few miles from the ancient castle of Kidwelly. I was pleased with the narrative style.
The Excalibur Alternative by David Weber has similar elements to Poul Andersons The High Crusade and is a lot of fun.
Yes! Haven’t watched this yet, but I’m super excited to hear what you have to say
I don't know how it might have fit into your discussion here, but it does feel a bit odd that foundation wasn't mentioned. The feudal aspects of those stories may have been less at the forefront as the contemporaries you mentioned. Foundation is in many ways the catalyst which directly or indirectly inspired most neofeudalistic fiction and the hierarchical structures of nobility which followed it.
Then there is of your closing comment and how foundation wrestles with that very idea. In that struggle the focus of the foundation itself is also interesting in what it inspired. It represents the other closely entwined half of mostly Europe's but sometimes other culture's feudal ruling structures. The church. They and their struggle against collapse is also echoed in many entries to neofeudalistic sci-fi. The foundations own predictive ability, attempts at preservation and restoration, and the use of religion to both bring social influence and intergenerational stability to the institution. Battletech's Comstar is the most comparable, but it rejects the assumptions of benevolence and good intent in favor of a callous and dogmatic orginization willing to commit the worst of atrocities for a vision which is incoherent at best and malevolent at worst. Though, notably, both fundamentally fail to avert the civilizational collapse they forsee. The others also have their techno religious cults, multiple in fact which focus on different aspects, but these are primarily groups that arise not as an attempt to address forseen events, but but are spawned by their unforseen occance.
Foundation is in many ways a great counterpoint to these later space-feudalism examples. Especially Dune and 40K where there’s an implied institutional pressure to maintain stability through stagnation. Foundation approaches it like a straight-up Dark Age, a miserable thing we have to get through as quickly as possible to bring back the Empire. I find it interesting that highest authorities (the ever-declining Emperors and the leaders of the Foundation) don’t want the feudalism that emerged. It’s all the little lords and barons that fight to maintain their fiefdoms while the Foundation is working to roll everything into a new Empire that comes across as some weird federal neo-Roman thing.
Yeah, this is a topic that could go a long way.
I always looked at 40k and Dune with a perverse sense of longing.
It isn't a pleasant world and every human is only a speck of light in vast, dark galaxy, but everything there just "hits" much harder, feels more worthwhile and meaningful than the real world.
I sometimes feel I'd rather die for a god who doesn't know I exist than live for nothing at all. I want to be a part of a grand narrative, to stand defiant against the odds.
I want all the inconveniences and horrors and pains and misery to loosely paraphrase Huxley.
I think a lot of people have a sense of wanting purpose in a meaningless world.
i feel that way about star wars, and some other sci-fi genres that are not quite as utopian as others like star trek - but then again, neither are they as gleefully dystopian as others, like 40k and Dune. A balance of utopian vs dystopian is good, IMO.
You can do that right now, in the current world. Just replace "God" with "Money" and you've got you're purpose. Raise capital for you spawn to enjoy, and strive to teach your children the worth of having power through "Money" so that their generation doesn't squander your toil.
How is dying for "Money" --which in this case would be the power over your socio economic environment--, be any different than dying for a "God" that doesn't even know you exist? At least "Money" is tangible, you can hold it in your hands and you can perform action with it. You can control it. You cannot control god.
But your problem most likely isn't being without purpose, but most likely something else.
@@verigumetin4291 What do you mean "dying for a 'God" that doesn't even know you exist?" Most religions believe their creator created them, so they would have to know of our existence. Especially the Christian God that I believe in who created us and gave us a will to create, nurture, grow, and prosper. You seem to be speaking of a Deistic version of God.
Anyways, I believe money is a great tool that can empower one, but to treat it as an idol well we Christians have a word for that, "Mammon." Money is a tool, nothing more nothing less.
@@crusader2112 You missed his point, and therefore, mine subsequently.
Another great video. However, you failed to articulate why only House Kurita is fit to rule the Inner Sphere. The Coordinator is displeased.
Cappies or Kuties....dunno whome is less suited to rule.
He didn't explain why the Amaris coup was totes justified, either.
You would just love the Fading Suns RPG franchise from the late 90s. Not widespread knowledge, but brings back some real techno-feudal memories to me. A set of wonderful world-building.
Fear is the algorithm killer
Come one bro Battletech needs a god damn video.
The Battletech rabbithole is vast and full of possibilities . . .
Meanwhile, somewhere within the 200+ novel hole:
"Hello? Can anyone here me? It's so cold down here. So lonely. So poorly written..."
@@feralhistorian haha! Just like my last girlfriend.
Exceptional storytelling.
criminally undersubbed
That opening monologue equally describes the Empire of Man in The Mote in God's Eye.
The Culture is pretty much exactly the sort of future I’d be willing to do almost anything to reach, but with the caveat that I’m opposed to the intellectual off-shoring to machines for precisely the reason mentioned in the video.
There’s no time to rest or relax. There is more to be done.
When I was young I'd think about myself living in the dark ages. In the shadows of the giants of the past. What a horrifying concept. A subsistence level life surrounded by the stone architecture of what must have seemed liked wizards. That knowledge and organization out of my grasp. I hope humans are spared this in the future. We'll see.
Classic Traveller had a discussion about how communication distance can promote feudalism instead if central rule on a galactic scale. The fastest means of communication is a courier ship, either carrying mail or a courier. FTL travel us fast but not so fast that relating a message from one end of a stellar realm to another doesn't take a year.
The local representatives of both government, companies, NGOs, armed forces etc are therefore almost as appointed viceroys. They have leeway to react to local issues within the scope of their mandate.
Classic Traveller is otherwise not technically ir socially stagnant. Local level can run on many other principles.
I've always though that early American federalism is a more likely model for an interstellar civilization than feudalism. Though in either case they illustrate that the concern over communication delays hindering centralized governance is a recent issue.
@@feralhistorian All institutions spanning the empires of Traveller have these issues. A company in Traveller will have empowered local managers. The imperial army is a selection of somewhat autonomous garrisons. The navy and its marines in Traveller is one of the more centralized institutions. They are not so far that they are completely autonomous, more like viceroys up for appointment and replacement. Traveller has an aristocratic class for other reasons as well.
This is even more extreme in Warhammer where events move by the decade at most.
@@feralhistorian I'm not sure that it is a recent issue? I have heard, though I suppose its possible that it isn't true, that Rome and other large empires in history ultimately collapsed because they expanded beyond their capacity to manage. Essentially, the edges of the empire were too far for communications to reach the decision makers in a timely enough fashion.
In fact, I would posit a second great contributor to historical empire size constraints is mobilization speed, which is itself also impacted by comms speed.
And it doesnt have to be mobilization for war, it could also be mobilizing an effort to deal with some crisis or disaster localized to some region of your empire.
Comms speed and mobilization speed are effectively the reason why ww1 actually came to blows, the decision makers didn't have enough time to figure out how to not go to war.
@@feralhistorian Has anyone done a study on the addition of new States to the Union compared to the speed of travel/communications between DC and their capitols/major cities? I'd be interested to see if there was any measurable correlation there.
Aye man... someone should point out the absolute beauty of a background for when he is shown speaking to the camera this man probably had to hike miles and miles with heavy camera equipment just to get such a minute detail to not even be talking about. All that just to talk about dune which is already a kinda complicated fictional story. My hats off to you my friend. As someone in my late 20's i wish i had friends like this guy to just go and fart around with.
Most of the time I only hike a few miles out of town and (so far) everything has been shot on a ten year old GoPro. But there are plans . . .
@@feralhistorian "Town". How disappointing. I was hoping you were (officially) living in a yurt in very rural Montana, while actually residing in Bunker 14 Charlie Purple, 600 ft below said yurt.
A Republic, if you can keep it.
the key is that all the other works are adaptation of dune. dune was the source material for 40k without a doubt.
Pausing halfway through to mention I technically "studied" under Kevin J. Anderson in grad school for my MFA, a degree I never finished for reasons that don't relate to this, yet a point I feel obligated to mention upfront. For context, this was the summer of 2023.
Based on the panel discussion I went through (where I irritated him a lot with specific questions) and a presentation of *his* grad school work at the same university, I can offer this about the man, at least from my perspective. None of it necessarily means anything, but by understanding the author, I believe you can comprehend their work far better, which, funny enough, was a major source of contention between me and my professors (not Anderson).
1. His pitch about "success as a writer" was very much a "just do stuff and something will work."
2. To contrast that point, I implied (before he cut me off) that his bootstrapping approach in genre fiction was conditional, especially in Star Wars, where he really got established as a writer. This was due to Anderson being noticed and elevated by LucasFilm in the early 1990s, around the Thrawn Trilogy, where they realized that books were a lucrative and efficient way to capitalize on an IP while test-firing new or potential story arc ideas. It is *critical* (in my opinion, at least) for people to grasp that with writers like Anderson. It seems to me that his Star Wars EU work had very little staying power, as it lacks controversy or general acclaim. However, in a personal and professional sense, Anderson's timing and connections made him a bankable author, as he was on the ground floor of LucasFilm's first generation of publishing, which was a major benefit when that industry was only in its infant stages.
3. Though I mentioned this in point 2, I want to clarify that Anderson scowled at me before I reached my point and cut me off, doubtless because he knew what I was about to say. There was a bit of "just try harder" in his response, but the truth (as I have seen from him and several other successful writers) was the process of "cutting the ladder on your way up," which is to say that authors in genre fiction often find a path to success, then block/gatekeep anyone else from using the same method.
4. He was very keen on talking about the new Dune films, which he swung between calling his or "Frank's" depending on how he wanted to present the point.
5. For his mandatory staff reading, Anderson wrote (and read before the students) a story about a maid in a medieval setting poisoning the duke and his retinue during a feast, then running away with a serving boy. This was for his mandatory "romance story" during his time as a former student. For what it is worth, I didn't like it.
To show my hand and reveal my bias, here, I will make it transparent I didn't much care for the man, and I was never much of a Dune fan to begin with. Either way, he was a physicist, something of an intellectual, and whenever he was in a room, the other professors and students were kind of expected to treat him like a superior life form. I suspect this was due to our university seeing him as a major catch for a new and untested genre fiction masters program. And I also suspect that if anyone was asked if they acted that way, they'd vehemently deny it. So, take that as you will. All I can offer is the perspective of a guy who met him, spoke with him professionally, and saw how other people did during our million mandatory "social events" during a week-long retreat on-campus.
Thanks for posting that, it does give a little more perspective in some ways.
Fading Suns is an interesting ttrpg with similar concepts for anyone interested.
What beautiful view.
As a sidenote to a sidenote; you may want to read 'Against a Dark Background' also by Iain Banks. Its status as a 'CULTURE' book is debatable, but let's just say it doesn't matter from a narrative standpoint. I would be interested in your opinion on whether it could be counted as a 'post-utopian' story or not.
Added to the list. Looks like I've got a lot of reading to do this summer.
"Using calculators for simple math we really should be able to do in our heads..."
I don't remember signing any contract with math that made it entitled to use my head.
It’s strange, because in a certain way, I see the sort of near feudal settings and a bit more not utopian, but overall better in the long run. Yes that are solidified social classes, added many cases, conflict and war, but barring Warhammer the settings to me at the very least, seem to have more honesty about the nature of their societies. In our current society we live with this set of elites, who will do everything in their power to say that they’re not, and we’re actually all free agent capable of making our own decisions, and who should be in charge. Many of us know that’s not really the case in the settings it’s more honest. These people rule, but at the very least for the most part take on the responsibilities of rulership, and they are subject to creeds overs and honours, and know that I content population at the very least works harder. The main benefit of these kind of near feudal settings at the very least. The people with power and wealth are under the watchful eye of whatever authority is Bob above them, whether that be a king or whatever funny title they have come with. They need to honour their obligations to their state or they are to be removed. Unlike today were megarich CEOs 10 pocket millions, and for the most part, we have no bloody idea who any of these people are, or even their businesses, not to mention, at least in the case of Dune and BattleTech. Truly evil oppressive leaders seem to be quite rare. The fact that House Atreides, for example, is growing popular in the Empire, implies that their idealised method of rulership is something to be followed an idealised, or at the very least many in the Empire, follow them leading to me to guest at the houses of horror like the Harkonans are not as common. As I’ve said it’s not that the societies are without issue, but at least for me I respect the fact they’re more honest in the display of Power and who is in charge and that overall people seem to be better off in many places because of it, for after all the enlightened despot is democracies, greatest adversary.
I agree completely. Today, when a Corporate CEO commit a crime, they get a hefty bonus and retire in Belize. If you did this in Feudal England, or afterwards in Tudor England, you would be held personally responsible for your actions.
If something like Deepwater Horizon would have happened with the United States being a Tudor Monarchy, confiscations would happen to pay for the damages, and the men clearly responsible would have paid with their lives.
With the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the same thing. The people responsible would have their entire fortunes confiscated and their lives would be forfeit.
(Although note: The Tudor Period was after Feudalism. But the early modern era was still run on a person-to-person level).
With this, you need less written laws. Preventing you from becoming a Bureaucratic State. As the "Spirit of the Law" still ruled.
No lawyer no matter their skills would have been able to save the lives of the people responsible for the two examples I gave. Not even Saul Goodman would have a chance.
And this serves as a massive good reason for the Corporate CEOs and the wealthy to NOT do such nonsensical things.
As they will be held personally responsible, they will not dump the toxic waste in the local river.
Even from a position of Psychopath Pride that these Wall Street megaminds often hold. They too would be incentivized to "Fake it until they make it".
They would patron the arts. Not for profit, but to show off.
Take William Shakespeare. He was a Tudor propagandist. Every work he did served a political goal. And yet, we still talk about him today.
His art was not meant to make money.
His art existed for other reasons.
Imagine if we had a similar situation today, with a Shakespeare-esque situation, where people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. They would all patron mega projects and movies. Not for profit, but to show off.
Elon Musk funding a Billion Dollar Epic for the sake of showing off and to provide beautification.
Where instead of having a Hollywood monopolizing the market for its own benefit, you would have Billionaires competing against each other with the arts they produce.
Allowing us, the people, to be dazzled and blown away by what they create.
Imagine projects like the Lord of the Rings trilogy coming out every single year.
Imagine a Sistine Chapel, but made today. Pushed to the very limit of what was possible to awe the world.
The Barons of old were personally invested in how their Baronages looked. As neighbors today compete about having the nicest laws, they too competed over who had the nicest Counties.
His personal Pride was tied to how well his people had it. Which in turn, means he would be personally invested in getting as good of a County as possible.
If his lands are shoddy and his people are all leaving, he would lose all respect among his peers. And most likely, the King would seize the lands. Just as you yourself stated in your comment.
Take a look at the Olympics as an example. All of a sudden the streets of France were cleaned and done up.
Look at when Xi went to California. All of a sudden Newsom cleaned up the streets.
Once upon a time, that policy was permanent.
With a Feudal to Tudor-esque system today, the homeless would be housed for the simple fact that having a bunch of homeless makes the person in charge look bad.
Functional drug policy and laws would be implemented, as what we see today would have been personally embarrassing to the people in charge.
Such wise words. Very insightful.
The Feudalism in both Battletech and Dune are products of the history of the setting, a history created to explain the reasons the governing system is how it is in the setting, a choice made by the author of said setting.
Feudalism in WH40K is however much simpler to explain and I think you're a little confused on how it exists, it is complicated. You see, prior to recent lore, as in stuff written in the past 10 odd years, the Feudal worlds were simply one of many government types which exist within the Imperium, simply there for gameplay setting choices, it is only recently it has become more ingrained in the setting. In WH40K the Imperium is more Byzantine than Feudal and doesn't much care for how each planet under it's umbrella is ruled, only that there is a representative, a planetary governor in charge, doesn't matter to the Imperium if they are a king or a president, dictator or chief, to whom they can keep on contact with, of whom provides the required tithe of the planet to the Imperium. All the Imperium cares about is loyalty and macro resource management; No one cares about the individual well being of each planet, as most planets are left to manage themselves and their well being is entirely up to them to maintain trade relations with other planets and systems, the Imperium is too complex for there to be any oversight, only management of resources required for it's war machine to defend itself.
I think part of the appeal of these "Space Feudalism" settings is that the story is always about a King, or Noble Duke, or the brave Knight Sir Who'sit of Whocares. This causes the audience/reader to empathize and identify with the top 1% of a feudal society. None of these stories (with the possible exception of Warhammer) are told from the perspective of the poor peasant farmer who's left to fertilize his crops with his own "night soil" and just trying to stay alive day to day.
warhammer fantasy actually does a good job of mixing both perspectives to make it actually interesting. yes you do have corrupt noblesand those that infight endless, but you also have people like karl franz and even earlier sigmar himself genuinely trying to help humanity and their common man despite their wealthy upbringings. its honestly a more balanced approach compared to 40k's "everyone in charge is evil AF" and the appeal of the heroic noble
If you ever decide to dig deeper into Battletech, I'd recommend talking with Tex of the BlackPantsLegion, hes an expert in the lore of Battletech to the point that the authors of the setting included him as a in universe character, Randolf P Checkers, a Periphery historian.
Can you do a video on the challenges of becoming spacefaring
2:37 And still uses the concept of 'felony' (an offence ranking feudal commits against next higher rank) to designate more significant crimes...
I like the newer interpretation of the era leading up to the “Time of Titans” in the Dune backstory, that the neofeudalism that came to dominate, via the League of Nobles’ resistance to the Titans, was psychologically ready to take over almost immediately by the survivors of the Titans’ first salvo against the Couch Potato Republic that they were rebelling against, precisely because the vast majority of of those couch potatoes had been living their entire waking lives in full immersion RPG VR fantasies for over a 1000 years!
“Fake it until you make it”, writ large for a trillion people.
In one sense, the Titans won no matter the outcome, because ending the era of indefinite meaningless laziness was their most important goal.
The problem with Frank’s original conception of the Decadent Era, is he didn’t have a good theory for how decadence of that magnitude could be sustainable for such a massive amount of time. But modern video games gave Brian Herbert the inspiration to fill his dad’s gap on this matter.
if fantasy becomes indistinguishable from reality why does living in one become bad..and the other good? in other words what if I could prove *this* reality was just a fiction that you could be freed from to the *real* world...would that invalidate all your triumphs and successes within this one or lessen all the sadness and loss you'd experienced within this artificial reality? if all that has changed is your awakening to the fact another realm sits atop this one?
@@johntowers1213
Well, I utterly reject almost all aspects of Gnosticism, culturally, philosophically & metaphysically. It has some metaphorical utility now that getting lost in fantasy game worlds is possible, but that’s as far as it goes. I am an Orthodox Christian so I have to draw a hard line there. Besides, the gnostic denominational infighting of the last 150 years has left over a billion people dead, especially since I count all the abortions that resulted from Gnosticism’s anti-natal influences.
My Battletech senses were tingling
Adding to your space feudalism kick: the RPG _Traveller_ for one, and kinda-sorta Glen Cook's _The Dragon Never Sleeps_.
It's probably been said already but battletech's interspersed not only gets back to were it was but has surpassed the fallen empire in technology and prosperity
Please checkout Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium stories!
It covers the Russian / American alliance which dominated earth. It's expansion out into the stars. And it's eventual collapse and following dark age.
The surviving CoDominium remnants would then go on to form the 1st Empire of Man centered on the planet Sparta.
The later War World books would cover the 1st Empire's destruction and subsequent collapse; after a genocidal war with the Sauron "Supermen" and their Coalition.
These remnants or Outies would plague the 2nd Empire's attempts to consolidate and re-conquer known human space.
Pournelle's & Nivens' - Mote in the Eye of God takes place hundreds of years later during the 2nd Empire. And their discovery of sentient alien life - The Moties.
I definitely recommend it to any Hard Sci-fi / Military Sci-fi fan.
I read one of the War World books way back and remember liking it but I didn't pick up any more. But now the whole CoDo series is sitting there rapidly approaching on the reading list. I think there's going to be a lot to talk about.
@@feralhistorian King David's Spaceship is a quick read. Lots of complex topics to explore there.
I feel like even making stories about dark age is too heavily tied to idolization of rome.
No more aquaducts? No more gigantic slavery population to build them also.
No more expensive trade? You wouldn't be able to afford it anyway.
Noblemen aristocracy? Atleast they are nowhere near the oligarchs like Crassus.
Quality of life for normal people is higher in middle ages than roman era.
Rome wouldn't have its own enlightenment, capitalism or industrial revolution. It itself was the dark stagnant imperium era that had to collapse, a burden on the europe sucking it dry. Free buffet with parallels to capitalism.
I'll give The High Crusade a read, it sounds like fun.
This guy is excellent.
I very much enjoyed the Dune prequel trilogy - House.... I don't know what happened, but I found the Butlerian Jihad unreadable. I enjoyed Poul Anderson's, The Long Way Home. Lous McMaster's Bujold's, Vorkosigan Saga series of books are outstanding. This is (at least with the Barrayaran Imperium) Feudalism. With an Emperor, Lords, etc with Vor being some version of the German Von. The early settlers were of Russian stock and it has a, pre soviet era, Russian Empire flavour to it.
It makes sense.
Because travel time is a thing.
Took me way too long to notice the two moons in the background 😂 But I am mostly listening.
I enjoyed Ian Bank's "Use of Weapons" the most.
"...it raises the issues of human thought becoming dependent on machines and therefore controllable by those who control the machines...."
Here's a thought: what if no one controls the ruling machine?
Travller/MegaTravller/TNE by FFE for an other look at Feudalism in Space, in this case a Feudal-Technocracy in the case of the Third Imperium.
Yes, it is presented as a solution to the problem that communication between systems can only be as fast as a ship travels. Ships have jump drives, making a jump locks you into jump space for around 6-8 days. There are ships that can travel vast distances in a jump, they are expensive and have to be almost entirely fuel, so ships with shorter jump capabilities predominate. This means it takes weeks to get to seemingly nearby systems, months to reach the edges of the imperium from the capital. Direct control is impossible. So power is devolved to archdukes and dukes, even then, most planets have a large degree of autonomy (the 'cannon' Imperium only claims dominion over the space between worlds because the trade must flow). Whole wars have been fought and resolved on the Imperium's edges before the capital even knew there was a problem.
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Honestly I would love to hear your analysis or meditative thoughts on the Xeelee Sequence and The Culture series of books. As I think they make a great contrast between each other with one I think being a somewhat outlandishly speculative (in terms of technology) but realistically cynically pessimistic perspective. While the other is a bit more grounded (at least less technologically theoretical) but also an overly optimistic utopian libertarian socialist outlook on humanity’s future.
I mean think about it, isn't we already have lords and kings nowadays who run the big companies?
If they fully take some essential technology, isn't they functionally became kings ?
You should read Asimov's foundation series if you haven't. He was one of the first to build a collapse narrative like this in a science fiction narrative.
And one of the few to show us the civilization before its collapse, which makes it even more interesting. Of course, he based a lot of it on the Western Roman Empire and its aftermath, so he was working from a very solid, ahem, foundation.
I'm with @melvinlemay7366 on this one. You shouldn't have broached this topic without discussing Foundation. Yes, the tone and result are different, but the deliberate pessimism of DuneBattleHammer is much more significant when seen in context. Asimov's introduction to Foundation also explains the original genesis of the concept-basically, he'd just finished reading Gibbon.
I wonder if the rise, fall and rise again of the Systems Commonwealth from Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda is applicable here.
I know this isn’t a particularly a dystopian centric video, but id love if he ever covered half life. The combine system isn’t the most in depth I suppose, but over time I’ve given it thiught and imo it’s one of the best depictions of a dystopia at least in gaming. It’s a bit more than I want to describe in a comment but after kinda thinking about the motives of the combine, their art design, how they occupy earth, and comparing it with their more dark and stylish beta counterparts and I’ve just come to appreciate them more for how they present dystopia
The Combine is definitely worth a look. I'm going to have to do some retro gaming one of these days.
@@feralhistorian awesome awesome
Oh-oh, I grieve in stereo, the stereo sounds strange
I know that if you hide, it doesn't go away
If you get out of bed and find me standing all alone
Open-eyed, burn the page, my little dark age
Playing a ttrpg with FH would be interesting
Recommend you read the later Culture books they include the idea of intelligent opting out where small groups can tryout alternative culture and politics (splinter sects, ascended and the forgotten) or drop out of the Culture to join other civs at will rejoining if and when you like, remembering a significantly extended life span let’s you do different things as you age - I particularly like the idea that any one of the thousands of GSVs housing millions is a microcosm of the Culture and if catastrophe strikes can effectively re-start civ at the same level. I also like the 25,000 year old man obsessed with sound or the option to move your mind into different forms (whale, cloud, bush, alien floating chlorine breather) to explore a different experience. The point being unlike scarcity based polities (ie pre jihad dune) an advanced post scarcity civ can afford dissidents without collapse and is not at risk of ‘stagnation’
Part of the rejection of thinking machines wasnt just to benefit certain people or groups in a social or power sense. It was partly a rejection of unintentional action. How many things do you do in a day without thinking? How often to just pick up the device and do a bunch of small but ultimately useless actions?
Part of the rejection of thinking machines was also a rejection on being too reliant on them and to make people live more intentional lives.
My own head cannon for Dune is that machines brought utopia and only when machines, not humans, took control of machines and thus man did the jihad begin, to put humans back in control of themselves and their thinking, yet of course some humans took power and thus humans were just free to be enslaved by themselves once more. The theme was that man must be in control, not machines even if in the likeness of man or pursing the program of humanity to its benefit. Perhaps the fear is that humans will submit to machines controlled by us but ultimately we must lose control over them and then we are obsolete. I see that always in the background but often blurred in fiction, Dune has technology but always subservient and never thinking, that is the stagnation, yet humans are navigators and mentats and sisters who can accomplish super human feats yet the bulk of humanity is just labor or fodder or serfs or slaves.