I'd like to note the serfs didn't start getting riled until the one-two punch of first the Black Death, which reduced the serf workforce and thus increased the value of the remainders, and then second the printing press making literature and literacy much cheaper and thus more available to masses, which allowed them to develop enough awareness to realize how raw a deal they were getting.Speaker to Animals wrote:DBTrek wrote:Government type probably mattered to the 99.9% of illiterate peasants who dies from exposure, disease, starvation, and infection under medieval monarchies.
Not that they knew any better.
But we do.
As opposed to what? Medieval peasants had more time to themselves than you do as a wage slave today.
Do you remember stories of people rising up because they were made serfs by the new aristocracy? I don't. I seem to recall reading about people happy to be protected from barbarians and provided with a means to subsist.
Was it a shit deal compared to now? Yep. But compared to the alternative? Nope. It was a hell of a better deal than being a Roman prole too. So that theory is crap.
Information and realizing the value of one's own labor, as well as networking with others in a similar situation, changed the world. One of my preferred alt-history thought exercises is what if you could send back Gutenberg printing press plans to the Bronze Age civilizations? Assuming they could get mass printing industries going, I believe human history would've gone down a much different (and more productive and equitable) path than it did.
You say that as if that's not the situation we have now on the global level. That which we call the first/developed world are enclaves of relatively strict law-and-order and protected prosperity. The third-world are impoverished countries of weak and corrupt governments where actual "order" is maintained by competing mafias, cartels, pirates, and warlords. And the developing world are those lucky formerly poor countries who managed to start taking advantage of the benefits of globalization first to try and catch up to the developed world nations.Speaker to Animals wrote:I did not say it will happen right this instant. Wait for central authority to weaken and society to break down around the edges. Think more in terms of the first Mad Max film where you still have government, but it does fuck all for people outside specific zones of control.
If I have to guess, I'd guess it will begin sometime in the 2050s during the height of the demographic winter, when most of the population are totally foreign and trust is absent in what remains of the West. Even then, tjat is judt the beginning. It could take a few generations to get to whatever crisis produces the aristocracy.
You only notice and develop a position about this reality now because you perceive, accurately or not, that your own personal living space might slip out of that cushy protected enclave and into the uncertain lawlessness that much of the rest of the world's population has been existing in all along. Turnabout, as they say, is fair play. He who is first shall then be last, and all that.
