How to Enter a City Like a King

https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/how-to-enter-a-city-like-a-king

by crescit_eundo • 9 months ago

73 99 9 months ago

worldhistory.substack.com

rsyring• 9 months ago

How to enter a city like a king?

Humbly, on a donkey. As one who comes to serve instead of one who comes to be served.

What a difference from what we can expect from our current leaders, kings or king wannabees alike.

bigstrat2003• 9 months ago

Yeah but they killed that guy later in the week, so one can understand why other kings declined to follow his example.

xandrius• 9 months ago

Which guy?

bombcar2• 9 months ago

Has someone run the numbers on how likely you are to be murdered/killed in war/assassinated as a King, historically?

WalterBright17• 9 months ago

You can thank George Washington for rejecting the trappings of kings - "your Excellency", sceptres, crowns, robes, palaces, thrones, a chest full of medals, bowing and scraping, heredity succession, etc.

seizethecheese2• 9 months ago

I just read a book on Washington and they were calling him Your Excellency a lot. Did he reject this later, or did you mean this more rhetorically?

nlitened• 9 months ago

“If you want to become a philosopher king, first become a king, then a philosopher”

tooheavy2• 9 months ago

Does anyone know the literature on adding people or individuals to groups, even an individual to a city? And the implications or outcomes of adding individuals of differing characteristics, potential for power, wealth, success, status, displacement, influence, or any number of other qualities, etc. I suspect this highlights fundamental elements of our social nature, our culture and societies, their values and problems. Maybe certain of those with power and influence will never want an honest and revealing evaluation on the matter, especially on specific entities.

dragontamer• 9 months ago

Well this particular instance is about succession, the new king entered the city after the previous monarch died. London needed a new king so everyone was triumphant and celebrated the new replacement.

This isn't quite what you are talking about at all. The number of rich people in this example decreased on a country wide scale, but simultaneously the Nobility system was basically founded upon familial-wealth / dynasty wealth, rather than any individual having wealth. So in the old system the haves-families always had wealth and the have-nots always will not have wealth.

chuckadams• 9 months ago

everyone was triumphant and celebrated the new replacement.

Well, except for the bakers dozen who tried to blow him up, but that was a couple years later.

mmooss2• 9 months ago

Could you give us a concrete example of what you are referring to?

tooheavy2• 9 months ago

There are probably many ways to slice or unpack the topic, and it can probably be approached at least partially from many different perspectives in different disciplines, but it may be captured reasonably well under the study of social dynamics. I will leave specific scenarios to the imagination, experience, or history, however, but I did cite at least one example in the original comment.

martythemaniak• 9 months ago

Quaint. The modern answer is "in a fighter jet, dumping tons of diahrea on your subjects."

quacked4• 9 months ago

I often think about how much human labor there is available at any given moment, and how in any minute some percentage of "available labor" is bound up doing something.

Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat food and run professional sports. And yet a great many of us are still alive, having continued to survive despite our countrymen spending all their available labor on frivolity.

What percentage of that "available labor" is really truly usefully bound up in making sure we don't all starve to death, get violently invaded, or die of exposure?

I wish I could see what kind of society would appear if that pool of "available labor" was turned toward purposes I personally consider worthy--caring for the weak, erecting and protecting great monuments and cities and wild areas, etc. Obviously this has been attempted before in various different regimes--merely having full dominion over all "available labor" and turning it toward "worthy purposes" does not automatically create a great nation, as the USSR and China found out--but it doesn't stop me from wondering, if Man wasn't so busy making gates for the king or increasing user conversion from 17.805% to 17.873%, what would that society look like?

card_zero8• 9 months ago

Nobody knows what percentage. Besides, people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks. Undoubtedly they are often wrong and want ridiculous pointless things, but nobody knows exactly which things are the wrong things. That's why we have a diverse society of idiots, all trying different things.

What intrigues me is that all of it is considered "economic activity", and counts toward GDP and is considered beneficial, even flower arranging and witchcraft accessories and cloud-connected sneakers. Somehow that assessment ends up being correct, because nobody knows for sure which parts are bullshit.

quacked4• 9 months ago

I agree, but surely with some strict definitions, you could get within 5%.

I am intrigued by the same thing you are. How does it all count as economic activity? What percentage of the flower-arranging has to be done to ensure that the medicine-manufacturing can be done? It's such an endless chain--"I pay the credit card fee on my purchase of custom stationary to the credit card company and the credit card company rolls it up in its revenue projections and forecasts a more profitable Q3 so their stock price increases so the portfolio-holding lenders are more lenient with their loan terms so Pfizer takes out a larger loan to build a factory in Bangalore to run the manufacturing lines..."

If the custom-stationary buying stops, so does the factory-loan lending... and vice versa.

fellowniusmonk• 9 months ago

We can't ex ante compute what humans activity is critical for the forward preservation and growth of humanity.

We can do targeted resource allocation for what we deem promising threads.

We can identify simple failure states to avoid for known recurring issues (plant food now or starve next year.)

But for the vast majority of areas a new venture is required by new people creating new things.

Humans don't simply find, but generate meaning (some that coheres only in imagination, some that coheres to facts in the larger world, some that do both over time.) human meaning generation is a kind of random walk where each human is the write head for a path, the causal chain is too complex for any given discovery or "economically" useful thing to be easily predicted.

Destroy art and maybe people will become too depressed to do anything, or will lack enough noise/inspiration in their thinking to have an insight.

Many of these things are impossible to unwind.

jerlam• 9 months ago

In a very broad sense, essentials like health care and transportation also dramatically increase GDP. In the US, going to the doctor costs a lot more money and dozens of people get paid for coding, insurance, billing, and payments which all do not directly improve the patient's health. People are required to buy cars, fill them with gas, pay for storage, pay tolls, and pay to fix them are also contributing to economic activity.

But these costs are basically taxes in a different form.

There is a slight truth to the conspiracy theory that "doctors keep people sick because it's good for business", in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy.

WalterBright17• 9 months ago

people want more than to be fed, sheltered, and protected from violent attacks

People want to be free. Being infantilized by being fed, sheltered, and protected by others rots the soul.

One of the proudest days of my life was when I told my dad I no longer needed any support from him. Unexpectedly, my relationship with him suddenly changed. He started treating me like a man, rather than a child.

sunrunner2• 9 months ago

nobody knows for sure which parts are bullshit

I'm pretty sure it's all bullshit and the universe is just random chaos, unless you could convince everyone that there's some kind of objective higher purpose that they all should be striving towards. People just figure out which things they believe to be non-bullshit and go in that direction. Perhaps the only guaranteed purpose for life is to continue itself, which seems awkwardly recursive.

Or as Terry Pratchett put in Hogfather:

"Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet," Death waved a hand, "And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged."

moffkalast• 9 months ago

About 1% of people are involved in farming, add a few more percent for food distribution, building maintenance and water bottling and you have your rough answer. Pretty much all of us are doing frivolous nonsense in survival terms.

card_zero8• 9 months ago

[Something about supply chains.] Who makes bottles? Do the farmers have plows, or just pointy sticks? I guess it could look like the neolithic, if you allow them pottery, and that's a kind of survival, but do you also want to protect them from invasion and diseases? How much survival is the aim? Wouldn't science, and innovation, and creativity, help improve survival? So ... imagination? Comic books? Pets? Poodle manicurists? But of course survival ceases to be the main goal by this point.

WalterBright17• 9 months ago

That frame doesn't account for all the technology and logistical support for farming. For example, where does his tractor come from? You need an industrial society to be able to build tractors, fuel them, etc. You need a transportation network to import oranges from Mexico. And so on.

Without a tractor, there'd be a major percentage of the population working on farms.

IAmBroom7• 9 months ago

Survival also requires medicines, trained doctors and nurses, and medical devices. For starters.

techdmn• 9 months ago

Speaking as a U.S. citizen, I think the problem should not be approached as "stop people from doing frivolous things", but rather "government should fund the commons". Of course this doesn't make government perfect, but generally it appears to be the most successful way to achieve things like caring for the elderly and disabled, building monuments, protecting wild areas, etc. Turns out we do all these things to some extent, just not as much as some (myself included) might like.

Which is to say, a well run society should have room for BOTH frivolity AND supporting the general welfare of its people. Perhaps our current troubles are the result of many people thinking that supporting the general welfare IS frivolous.

paddleon2• 9 months ago

"We the People of the United States, in Order to

- form a more perfect Union,

- establish Justice,

- insure domestic Tranquility,

- provide for the common defence,

- promote the general Welfare, and

- secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,

do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Yeah, seems like a good idea to me

spencerflem4• 9 months ago

Something like 30% of our GDP is advertising - a pursuit I’d claim not just worthless but actively making everyone else’s life just a little worse.

Sports are part of what makes life worth living though :)

dragonwriter2• 9 months ago

Something like 30% of our GDP is advertising

It peaked at under 2.5% of GDP in the late 1990s, and is significantly less now.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/oct/rise-digi...

WalterBright17• 9 months ago

Without advertising, how would you know what products were available? How would you know where to obtain them?

FabHK2• 9 months ago

Somewhat related thought:

World power consumption is around 20 TW (of which around 3 TW electricity), that's very roughly 2 kW per person (obviously not equally distributed).

A human consumes around 8600 kJ of energy in their food per day, or roughly 100 W (search for "basal metabolic rate"). Most of that is needed just to keep the body running, but around a quarter or so can be converted to physical work: an average human can perform some 75 W of physical work over an 8h shift (75 W for 1/3 the time, so 25 W on average).

That means that everyone has (on average) around 80 "people" worth of energy working for them (2000 W of energy consumption per person / 25 W of average usable energy output per person).

IAmBroom7• 9 months ago

It took me a reread to realize what you were saying.

If 745 is one horsepower, is 25 W one personpower?

xenonite• 9 months ago

Specifically w.r.t to advertising: In socialist contries there is often only one single brand of a certain product. This removes the need for advertising. But without competition, productivity goes south with time.

WalterBright17• 9 months ago

Socialist products never seem to be competitive in the world market. Nobody wanted to buy Soviet cars outside of the USSR, for example.

Nifty3929• 9 months ago

Indeed - I often feel like the vast majority of the internet is effectively our pyramids.

How many very smart, motivated folks do we have working on essentially ads and related indirect monetization strategies for the very small amount of the internet is the "good stuff"

lo_zamoyski4• 9 months ago

Don't insult the pyramids.

WalterBright17• 9 months ago

The most productive societies are ones where the people are free to do what they want. The more people are regimented and taxed, the less productive they are.

quacked4• 9 months ago

Undoubtedly, but productivity does not directly equate to beauty, health, happiness, satisfaction, morality, civic engagement, justice, etc.

bluGill• 9 months ago

Why is useful important? Back in the day residents would sometimes get a western good and they would save the packaging (think plastic spray can lids) because it was color unlike the soviet versions. Both worked (well we will assume though cheating putting water in in a cleaning bottle was not unknown when quotas were not met), but consumers want that beauty.

which is to say a lot of needless things are still highly desired.

card_zero8• 9 months ago

I don't know about useful, but right is important. You could imagine if everybody spontaneously started going around doing wrong. To some unclear extent this is what normally happens, and those people doing wrong should stop. It's not even entirely their own business, right and wrong: even when they have property rights on their side, it's still OK for other people to pass comment. And it could be that colored bottle caps are a waste of time and attention, and wrong, and that can be an opinion. But morality doesn't respond well to central management.

quacked4• 9 months ago

There's a certain percentage of "available labor" spending that, if it goes away, causes death directly. Maintaining the power grid and the cold storage network comes to mind, although of course both of those resources are massively overpowered if you're thinking "survival only" and not "make sure gas stations have Klondike bars".

lo_zamoyski4• 9 months ago

I would make two points.

The first is that where labor is allocated is a function of culture. We currently live in a consumerist culture. Consumerist culture wants cheap stuff and lots of it and it wants it now. Convenience is god. And we want money so we can keep buying more things and newer things, so we work and work to make that money. Old things are frozen into museum pieces alien to everyday life instead of undergoing use and development and enrichment, because they make no sense to us and we can't develop things as we don't have a direction. So whereas a gothic church may have previously received baroque spires if the gothic was meager, today, most modifications are bound to look like a downgrade. Think of the really awful proposals for the rebuilding of Notre Dame. Save for a few brain damaged architects, nobody liked them.

The second is that leisure is the source of all culture. I'm not talking about recreation or relaxing by the pool with a piña colada (nothing wrong with that per se, but this is not what leisure means). Leisure is activity that isn't oriented toward practical ends, at least not in the intention. They are the activity of a free man, at least at that moment. This spirit of leisure was at times festive, at times contemplative and worshipful (the highest form of leisure), at times something artistic and musical. Today, we live in a world of total work. Work defines us. Whereas the cultures that produced the beautiful architecture we all admire today worked for the sake of leisure, today we work for the sake of work. We are engines running in a parking lot. We can rev them at high horsepower, perhaps even move aimlessly around the parking lot, but we aren't going anywhere. We don't have an address to go to.

The word "culture" is related to the word "cult" and "cultivation". Whereas in previous ages people believed in the transcendent end of human persons, a belief that ordered their lives and generated their culture, what does a consumerist culture take as the highest good? What is the end of our lives if not the ash heap? This can only produce weariness and distraction and entertainment that has no patience for authentic play or for the kinds of efforts that outlive us. There is no love in consumerism. There is no heroism. There is no genuine awe inspired by a great, honest-to-God promise. There is no festivity or celebration. The salt has lost its flavor and is good for nothing except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

renewiltord• 9 months ago

Probably society would look worse. Almost everything in the world is search-dominated. E.g. one might as well say “if I didn’t have to inspect every element in arrays imagine how much faster I can sort them”. Well then there are lots of arrays you can’t sort. That’s life.

A large amount of labour is dedicated to the search problem. “What is valuable?” is a tough question. Pepper, nutmeg, mace made us a seafaring people. Easy to think “what if we only did the stuff we need” but is meaningless sentence. “What we need” is not something someone can state.

deadbabe• 9 months ago

Don’t enter a city like a king, enter a city like Prince Ali.

Pinus• 9 months ago

I thought there was something about the king of the UK having to ask permission to enter the City of London, but apparently that is a misunderstanding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation#Tem...). Pity, it would have been a good story of even monarchy bowing to finance! =)

IAmBroom7• 9 months ago

The Sovereign does have to ask permission to enter Parliament, however. It's observed in a ritual, twice-repeated refusal before every speech before Parliament.

lo_zamoyski4• 9 months ago

Before I read the article, I was reminded of a somewhat relevant quote attributed to Vincent Scully lamenting the replacement of old Penn Station with MSG.

"One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat."

What an insult to human dignity ugly architecture is. You can infer the manner in which human life is valued in a culture by the architecture and the art it produces, especially relative to its means.

fsckboy• 9 months ago

is the timing of this from some in the body politic reacting to "No Kings Day" by expressing some deeper, truer yearning?

How to Enter a City Like a King

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