Queen Story's Mere Servant

Imagine the second Biden admin.

the english rented it from Genoa to get maritime protection in the mediterranean

it is also the flag of Bologna, Milan, Vercelli, Ivrea, Alba, Alexandria and Padua (among others probably)

it stands for "we stan the pope". it is called the Guelph flag after the Welf dynasty, who stanned the pope extra hard.

the english, famously, do not stan the pope anymore.

england has been ruled by a branch of the house of Welf since the 18th century, they chose those as kings because they were protestants

And it's often a valid critique that very few people are actually that rugged or that independent of a broader social structure.

Although compared to a certain very distinct stereotype of urban left-wing subculture, the average vaguely macho blue collar right-winger is a titan of stoicism and self-reliance.

The really distinct thing is, I feel like you rarely have much of a description of what qualifies as "rugged individualism" or why, specifically, it would be bad other than that many people fail to achieve it!

Massive pickup trucks without a speck of mud on them, camo shot glasses, tactical underpants, all these are common signifiers of the "rugged individualist culture." The generous interpretation would be to call these things 'aspirational', but it would be more honest to say that the signifier has eclipsed the signified. There's a massive tendency here for its proponents to care primarily about "rugged individualism, as seen on tv."

This admits of shades of grey, in both directions; militia guys and preppers on the right aren't the only ones to do it, and they don't all do it the same amount. (Famously, top people in the Obama administration would introduce themselves according to which character had their job on the West Wing tv show.) But it's a prominent tendency in those circles- and especially prominent in the "rugged individualists" that a left-winger is most likely to encounter, e.g. the ones who live in urban areas, or argue a bunch on the internet.

And the right (including the moderate right) has had a huge problem with this since... well, Gene Autry, at least? The cowboy-as-media-figure has, for generations now, defined the cowboy, rather than merely representing it. So, too, for its descendants and close relatives: the survivalist, the soldier, and so on. And in turn, an awful lot of people on the right have a kind of fundamentally fandom relationship with their own stated ideals. Recall that Trump and Reagan were both daytime television actors before they were presidents.

It's not that they don't believe what they're saying, exactly. It's that this is something they relate to primarily as consumers, with all the perversions that entail when our values become a statement of identity rather than a motive and source of action. Virtue dissolves into tribe, and tribe dissolves into commodity fetishism.

And in that frame it makes sense for lefties not to worry too much about what rugged individualism 'actually is,' since they're correctly identifying it as primarily a fandom-type subculture. It's like asking what a Brony is: a rugged individualist is just someone who joins the rugged individualism fandom. Not much to it.

You often see people who have these sorts of stereotypes of goobers with lots of fake consumerist signifiers live rent free in their heads. And said people often construct elaborate self-gratifying narratives about how anybody who seems thematically connected is definitely just another one of the goobers.

Honestly, I've kinda come to consider it dross that just kinda gets filtered out. You see the real ones and the people who are making the steps to become real ones.

there's a dude at my job who has a tactical water bottle :/ there's also a dude at my job who is in the national guard in an interesting MOS. not the same dude.

There's a massive tendency here for its proponents to care primarily about "rugged individualism, as seen on tv."

That, on the other hand, is a particular thing I've noticed both on TV (where you have an ouroboros effect) and in Discourse. People assume prepper means bunker, jump straight from "you are going to have to defend yourself if police don't exist" to fantasy total war, seem to envision a concept where it makes sense to wear a gas mask whenever going outside (this doesn't really work).

Individualism with markets is a perfectly cromulent idea, it’s just bog-standard libertarianism or Randian objectivism. And that in turn is perfectly consistent with urban living and a comfortable lifestyle- even with a mostly passive income.

There definitely are shades of grey here. Some people in the space are, for lack of a better word, just posers, while others are not. But the distinction between ‘serious person’ and ‘poser’ is not the only line to be drawn.

This gets back to my focus on homesteading versus markets, I think? And the commensurability of currency in general. If somebody works for a wage, and uses that income to build up supplies of ammo, food, or other supplies that they use to engage with archetypes of rugged individualism, then that person is in a categorically different place than somebody who needs to hunt, grow crops, and chop firewood as a matter of subsistence. To call the former case “mere entertainment” would be too much, and too dismissive. But it’s also true that the stakes are simply *lower* for such people, in a way that’s ~analogous to the ‘amateur’ versus ‘pro’ distinction. And that’s just as important to the dynamic as any distinction between serious people and posers. Anybody who uses their wage as a primary source of income, to support a hunting practice, in a word where markets provide cheap meat in supermarkets, is fundamentally a hobbyist.

US climate with equivalent cities from around the world.

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

Okay honestly 476 is not a terrible date for this, but just to be contrarian I will pick the Battle of Soissons in 486, when the last Roman rump state was destroyed by the Franks.