Decentralization Hidden in the Dark Ages
bionicmosquito.blogspot.com

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36 points

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palmfacehn

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2 days ago

35 comments

oldjim69 ・ 2 days ago

Tough to know where to start. Pretty much every fact asserted in this piece is without any real evidence.

Starting at the end >This change occurred as a result of William the Conqueror’s defeat of Harold Godwinsson at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. As a result of this, William claimed that he had won the whole country by right of conquest. Every inch of land was to be his, and he would dispose of it as he thought fit.

>All land was thereafter owned by the crown. Perhaps in this can be found the seeds of the desire by the lords for the Magna Carta

This is simply not true that William claiming this was somehow new or novel. Lots of kings did this at the time. The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris illustrates this well.

Further, yes the dark ages were decentralized, but not at all because of the reasons in the piece. They were decentralized because the was an era of incredibly high friction. It took forever to get anywhere, to tell anything to anyone, to trade, to make deals, collaborate, to organize people. A bad harvest could wipe out a decade of hard labour building up a community. In that context there were just very few centriphical forces pulling things to the center.

  • TSiege ・ 2 days ago

    It's even worse than this. One of the articles main sources is a Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an Economics Professor, not a historian who is at best cherry picking scholarship from 1914. At worst a bigot who has a history of making ignorant racial and homophobic comments and has a dedicated section in wikipedia just to this. Even worse his anti democratic, neo-feudal beliefs were influential to clowns like Curtis Yarvin and Javier Millei

    • palmotea ・ 2 days ago

      If anyone's interested:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe:

      > Hans-Hermann Hoppe (/ˈhɒpə/;[5] German: [ˈhɔpə]; born 2 September 1949) is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy.[6][7][8][9][10] He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.[11][12]

      • entropicdrifter ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        Anarcho-capitalism: for when you're fine with authoritarianism as long as it's not called a state

        • palmotea ・ a day ago

          > Anarcho-capitalism: for when you're fine with authoritarianism as long as it's not called a state

          It's the ununquadium of political ideologies: if it were ever realized it would immediately decay into something else.

  • neuroelectron ・ 2 days ago

    This is the first I'm hearing about this.

TSiege ・ 2 days ago

This article is not based in much real history. If people would like to learn more about how life was for actual average people in Medieval Europe and how they asserted their own power I recommend this episode on Tides of History: Peasants' Rebellions and Resistance

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3gQ0ECOuDEPGGE5oDRj8g0

here's the blurb for anyone curious > The medieval world relied on peasants. They grew the food, maintained the buildings, produced the craft goods, and made up the vast bulk of the population. But they were never particularly happy with their place in society, and rebellions, revolts, and quieter forms of resistance were ubiquitous.

pcaharrier ・ 2 days ago

> The constitutional form has protected the monarch from the people much more than it has protected the people from the monarch – certainly when compared to earlier mediaeval times. At the same time, the constitutional form has provided virtually no protection of limiting the actions of the monarch – even for those constitutions with some form of rights embedded – for example, the U.S. Constitution with its Bill of Rights.

>It seems, instead of the pinnacle of governance and protection of liberty, the constitutional form represents a significant step back from the liberties afforded to even the lowliest members of early mediaeval society.

This was a really interesting section. It turns the modern conception of a written constitution on its head, but the author makes some compelling points.

  • pjc50 ・ 2 days ago

    No, this is just upside down.

    Various levels of elected monarchy have existed, but the whole reason that Magna Carta is important is that all sorts of abuses of power were going on in the name of the King and the aristocracy were fed up with it.

    Given the full text, it's fairly easy to go through all the "X is not to Y" statements and work out what scenario caused that line to be in it: https://www.archives.gov/files/press/press-kits/magna-carta/... Quite a lot of it is complicated details of inheritance law and workings of courts, but you can take a guess at e.g. "No town or free man is to be distrained to make bridges or bank works save for those that ought to do so of old and by right." -> prohibition on corvee labour, people being press ganged into this kind of work.

  • Attrecomet ・ a day ago

    It's mainly really, really bad history

    > Each lord had a veto power over the king and over each other law (I will use the term “lord” for those landed free men. Even the serfs could not be denied their right without adjudication. Land was not held as a favor from the king; title was allodial. A man’s home truly was his castle.

    This is so bad it's basically a total lie. Let's start with how he does not discern between free, landholding men, minor nobility and great aristocrats, three classes of men who would have absolutely no problem realizing that their lives, political power and the law that actually was applied to them were very different from each other.

    The vast majority of men living in the middle ages did NOT actually have a fortified private manor aka castle, but a hovel that was protected from violation by other people most probably by the local lord or gentry, who as it happens was the biggest danger to your freedom as well as the judge over what rights you had.

    >It seems, instead of the pinnacle of governance and protection of liberty, the constitutional form represents a significant step back from the liberties afforded to even the lowliest members of early mediaeval society.

    That's not a point, that's straight up pure fantasy. The lowliest member of mediaeval society, unfree people, had more rights than we do now the same way that chattel slaves in the American South had more freedom then than as black people today, shoulders brutally weighed down with responsibility for their own life instead of a simple pleasure of having a master take on that dastardly responsibility.

    The author has cherry picked data points, badly misunderstood concepts used in those cherry picked points, and then wildly conflated vaguely related things to create a utopian version of his entirely unhistorical mediaeval heaven.

  • TSiege ・ 2 days ago

    The author makes vague claims and provides no evidence for them. And the sources he does site are questionable at best and purposefully dishonest at worst. No where does the author say what freedoms people actually had or how we know they were followed and enforced. There is no first hand source for ANY of his claims except the Magna Carta, which undercuts his own, that is that the past had some glorious freedoms that were around and freely followed. From the Magna Carta

    > THE City of London shall have all the old Liberties and Customs which it hath been used to have. Moreover We will and grant, that all other Cities, Boroughs, Towns, and the Barons of the Five Ports, and all other Ports, shall have all their Liberties and free Customs.

    Just from a superficial reading this implies that "Liberties and Customs" were afforded to London but then revoked and now formally reapplied.

    The Magna Carta, and other historical documents like the Assize of Clarendon, are important because they formalized unwritten codes into laws, expanded rights, and set up a legal system that allows for non violent means of dealing with conflict. Without them we wouldn't have things like Habeas Corpus and instead be defending against arbitrary decision making by people like kings

hosh ・ 2 days ago

From my reading of Frankopan's The Silk Roads:

1. The Romans did not collapse and disappear. They had became obsessed with the Silk Roads, established a second political capital at Constantinople. When the steppe nomads pushed into the European provinces and Roman rule collapsed in Europe, there wasn't a strong political will from Constantinople to recapture it because the Silk Roads had a lot more wealth to offer.

2. During this period, the former Roman provinces had very little in the way to offer for trade. Groups that were stronger, such as the Viking Rus' or groups that had founded the city-states of the Italian peninsula, raided for people for slaves and traded them down into the Middle East.

3. At some point, the raiding groups figured out that it was more productive to force the people on the land to harvest and work the land than to trade them as slaves. The deal became, "we won't take slaves, but in return, you will give us a portion of what you harvest in the land as tribute". Thus, serfdom, taxes, and the idea of rent was born from this.

In other words, the basis for this form of decentralization was between the lords and the king, on the backs of slavery or serfdom.

  • achierius ・ 2 days ago

    You should not take The Silk Roads too seriously as a book about history. Frankopan is a legitimate historian, but his focus is on the near-east, and that book is essentially an attempt to create a 'universal history' that just happens to center entirely on his personal area of focus. It's not garbage, but many of the key points it makes, and that you cite, are totally off base.

    For example, luxury goods did not dominate trade -- bulk goods like grain, wool, and slaves did. So the idea that luxury trade could somehow dominate the history of these whole regions is fanciful -- luxury trade couldn't even dominate trade!

    > During this period, the former Roman provinces had very little in the way to offer for trade.

    This is not true. They had plenty to offer, from wool to precious metals to grain and more. The slave trade was also not some "Europe -> Middle East" highway: Muslim slaves were also sold into Europe, often by steppe nomads who had more ability to raid those regions.

    This is another key flaw in Frankopan's book: he assumes an ultimately colonialist perspective wherein Europe has no choice but to parasitize on the East, having no capacity to produce anything of its own -- a view which can be easily dispelled by recognizing that the literal Silk Road was largely a mutually beneficial trade of goods between two regions that both had things that the other wanted. Wealth flowed both from East to West and from West to East.

    > or groups that had founded the city-states of the Italian peninsula, raided for people for slaves

    I don't know what you're referring to here -- those people were largely Christian Romans/Italians, and they did not go about habitually enslaving other Christians. The Goths and later Lombards who invaded Italy mostly occupied inland areas, they did not generally found new cities.

    > At some point, the raiding groups figured out that it was more productive to force the people on the land to harvest and work the land than to trade them as slaves. The deal became, "we won't take slaves, but in return, you will give us a portion of what you harvest in the land as tribute". Thus, serfdom, taxes, and the idea of rent was born from this.

    That is just flatly not how serfdom developed. If you're interested in the post-Roman transitional period, I would suggest Theoderic the Great: King of Goths, Ruler of Romans by Hans-Ulrich Wiemer; some of the later chapters (I believe Chapter 9?) go into detail on the economic development of what later became feudalism/serfdom. In brief though, the coloni who later became serfs were not enslaved by marauding foreigners -- as early as Diocletian, their ability to move from the land was restricted, and in time this evolved (while still totally under the Roman law) into a status of "servi terrae", i.e. slaves of the land. Their landlords, in many/most cases just post-Roman aristocrats, were the ones who squeezed them into a servile state -- not some imagined band of marauders. Indeed, many of the places where feudalism/manoralism was weaker were exactly those which had more Germanic influence -- e.g. Anglo Saxon England, where the Romano-British landlords were largely displaced (and were never that well established anyways), had no concept of feudal relations and had relatively weak restrictions on peasant rights, thus the whole adage about the Normans bringing their system over during the conquest.

    I hate to nit-pick, but when you're making historical allegories with the present day and age, I think it's very important to do so based on the actual facts of history.

    • hosh ・ 2 days ago

      I appreciate this. If there is one thing I learn from reading about history is that there's always something that can pop up as counter-examples to a narrative.

      > he assumes an ultimately colonialist perspective wherein Europe has no choice but to parasitize on the East, having no capacity to produce anything of its own -- a view which can be easily dispelled by recognizing that the literal Silk Road was largely a mutually beneficial trade of goods between two regions that both had things that the other wanted. Wealth flowed both from East to West and from West to East.

      I don't think I represented his ideas very well because I do remember his books talked about the two-way trade that happened. It wasn't necessarily just about two regions, unless North Africa was included in that. I remembered from other histories about trade routes going deep into Africa.

      > Muslim slaves were also sold into Europe, often by steppe nomads who had more ability to raid those regions.

      This one is really interesting for me, so I'll be on the lookout for that.

      > For example, luxury goods did not dominate trade -- bulk goods like grain, wool, and slaves did. So the idea that luxury trade could somehow dominate the history of these whole regions is fanciful -- luxury trade couldn't even dominate trade!

      It would be interesting to see how far certain commodities are carried. If trade routes are described as a directed graph, would commodities such as wool, grain, and slaves be carried between two extremes, or would they tend to be traded more regionally? If I remember this correctly, Constantinople didn't have much in the way of farmlands and depended on being supplied for food from further out. Frankopan did also gave examples of food items that were traded as exotic goods, even if they were not considered luxury goods locally.

      • drewcoo ・ a day ago

        I would object to regarding history as a narrative rather than a coherent body of evidence. Stories tend to misrepresent, manipulate, and outright lie. They encourage us to "fill in the gaps" with our own biases. In fact, "just so stories" (from a Kipling book, a kind of Ovid's Metamorphoses for little kids) is now a mostly a derogatory term for narrative instead of evidence (and is applied to entire subfields like Evolutionary Psychology which do the same).

GuB-42 ・ 2 days ago

What I understand the "dark" in "dark ages" mean is that not much came out of it, in particular in terms of historical records, not that life during that time was particularly terrible.

It is dark in the "hard to see" sense, not in the "evil" sense.

Or at least, that's the idea now, it possible that the term "dark ages" acquired a new meaning over time.

  • jagged-chisel ・ 2 days ago

    “Dark” as opposed to “enlightened.” It was a dark time for knowledge and education.

    I mean, IMO - that’s how I’ve always understood it.

    • drewcoo ・ a day ago

      This. It was a retconning of history by "enlightenment" scholars.

    • lo_zamoyski ・ 2 days ago

      Yes, that's the reason the early Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages (Petrarch is credited with this name), but it is simplistic.

rmah ・ 2 days ago

This article is full of guesswork and supposition unsupported by evidence. I don't understand why people upvoted it.

Further, the author doesn't seem to understand that "the state", with its institutions, legal systems, etc as we understand it simply did not exist in Europe during medieval times. Or even during the Roman empire era. For example, he writes "taxes were voluntary". It's just laughable. Moreover, during that era, "tax" was synonymous with "rent". It's where the term "landlord" comes from, after all. Even concepts of ownership were somewhat different from today.

Was society decentralized during the so-called "dark ages" of europe? Sure. But it was also decentralized during the Roman era and pretty much all eras before high speed communications. It sorta had to be for society to work.

  • Attrecomet ・ a day ago

    It does read like a teenage anarchist (edit: sorry, anarcho-capitalist, which is worse by far) just discovered that medieval Europe was decentralized and spun a wild fanatasy about how that was actually anarchist around it, yes.

    >Was society decentralized during the so-called "dark ages" of europe? Sure. But it was also decentralized during the Roman era and pretty much all eras before high speed communications. It sorta had to be for society to work.

    In a way you are not wrong, state capacity has been far higher for quite a while now than the Romans or ancient Chinese could ever hope to reach, but in a way that detracts from how much more decentrantralized Europe during the Middle Ages was. The collapse of urbanisation and bureaucracy, and the rise of fortified manors meant that power really fractured.

lou1306 ・ 2 days ago

The entire premise that "Examples of decentralized society [...] are hidden because those in decentralized societies never bothered to keep records" is bizarre, especially when applied to the Middle Ages.

As soon as the barbarian kindgom stabilised after the immediate aftermath of 476 AD, they started bookkeeping again. The truly "dark" ages in terms of scarce surviving records lasted maybe 250 years, but already by the 7th century you have surviving law codes that tell quite a bit about the societial structure of the time.

And specifically, decentralized power-sharing in the Middle Ages is so not-hidden there is even a videogame about it, called Crusader Kings II.

jongjong ・ 2 days ago

The stuff about laws no longer being aligned with shared ethics makes sense. Nowadays, there seems to be a lot of focus on the wording of the law rather than intent or ethical principles. This focus on wording reflects a lack of moral grounding and it is the source of loopholes. I doubt such word 'loophole' would even have existed in medieval times. It's an absurd concept, just like the concept of 'limited liability' or the concept of 'corporate personhood'...

Just try to explain out loud what 'limited liability' actually means... Imagine the damage you inflict on others vs the liability you incur is a pie graph. Who is paying for that slice of damage you did which you did not pay for? Somebody is paying. Limited liability is a corrupt philosophy. There is no excuse. Economies of scale, efficiency, blabla, invalid excuses and impossible to actually prove as beneficial by all definitions, from all perspectives.

The coercive coupling of state and money, the concept of limited liability and the concept of corporate personhood have created a society which is deeply corrupt but which maintains a superficial veneer of civility.

People's happiness and sense of justice in this system depends entirely on their ignorance of the functioning of the system. I suppose this hasn't really changed much since the times of slavery. The slave owners were often religious and often saw themselves and their society as highly moral. It all rested on a small number of self-serving assumptions.

The unjust social order used to be held together by false narratives around racial differences. Nowadays it's held together by false narratives around arbitrary social achievements which any intelligent person would realize aren't worthy of regard once analyzed properly through the lens of justice and ethics. Modern achievements barely even deserve regard from an amoral game theory point of view because the playing field is so extremely asymmetric.

The whole modern system is held together by empty superficial ideas; words not backed by real meaning and numbers not backed by real value. It's a hollow scheme. It's probably why the feeling of 'emptiness' permeates every facet of our existence as individuals in this society, it is its foundation. The taller the pillar, the more hollow it has to be.

  • TeMPOraL ・ 2 days ago

    > Who is paying for that slice of damage you did which you did not pay for? Somebody is paying.

    Lots of somebodies, possibly - after limit is reached, and company is stripped down and sold into pieces, victims and creditors might still be left with uncompensated damage or debt that cannot be collected. Some of them knew the risks and factored it into their businesses; then there's insurance, and ultimately taxpayers and the state programs.

    So, as I understand it, things add up properly in the end. Limiting liability creates additional risk, which is accepted by the parties involved and then mitigated, passed around and distributed the usual way companies do it.1

    Maybe I'm just a modern economy apologist, but it kinda makes sense to me. A lot of things in economy started making sense to me once I realized that risk is something that can be priced and managed. Market runs on probabilities, even if regular people rarely see it.

    • staplers ・ 2 days ago 

        things add up properly in the end
      Via inflation. The printed debt will already be circulating through the economy by the time the bank writes off the loan.
rimbo789 ・ 2 days ago

Every ruler in this period would have centralized as much as Stalin if they had had the means

  • lo_zamoyski ・ 2 days ago

    Why do you say that? This just sounds like lazy cynicism and prejudice.

    • oldjim69 ・ 2 days ago

      Because of their behavior? Violence was one of the main ways actors resolved conflicts in this period. Didn't like a new tax or that the King appointed his cousin or not your cousin Bishop? Revolt! Have a battle, whoever wins the fight gets his way.

      Clovis I the would have absolutely used centralizing tools like railways and the telegraph to enforce his rule more uniformly and ensure his dynasty's success. He only reason why he didn't was because he couldn't.

      Dark ages monarchs spent all their time trying to stabilize their regime and enforce their will on the society. We know this because we know how much time they spent marching around their areas putting down revolts and fighting off invasions.

      • drewcoo ・ a day ago

        > Violence was one of the main ways actors resolved conflicts in this period

        Violence or threat of violence are still powerful tools.

        > because we know how much time they spent marching around their areas putting down revolts and fighting off invasion

        Medieval war was mostly seasonal. Also, war was mostly fought against neighbors or sometimes in the holy land. as far as revolts go, post-enlightenment slave revolts were much more common than revolts in the middle ages, though they're often not well-taught in schools. In today's world, my country is involved in hot and cold conflicts all over the world. I'd claim we're more warlike now because we can be.

dunkeltaenzer ・ 2 days ago

Bookmarked it for later full reading. I'm venturing into the same realm from a different perspective these days. The shift to centralisation, away from those decentralized ways, was pretty much the purpose of the witch-hunts and Inquisition era. Those old societies all revolved around the idea of having druids, shamans, witches or other cosmic bridge roles in their tribal structures. Those people have a simple role and responsibility. Observing and guiding the tribal balance and wellbeing. Based on the idea of enabling and balancing the members of the tribe into sovereign beings, who all serve their tribe and each other. That's why kings weren't rulers. They were servants of their subjects.

The Roman Path of Life, was an offspring of Egypt. Egypt had created karmic entanglements around the concept of rulers abusing their power to serve themselves, by demanding their subjects to serve THEM and not their tribe. On top, the women in Egypt failed themselves. Society had developed towards wisdom and understanding, while warriors got still trained into brutal men (Ladies, the creation of a knighthood, to elevate your warriors frequency would have solved that). Women didn't enjoy sharing beds with those guys, so they started to refuse and ridicule them, dropping the frequency even more, instead of elevating it. Ended in a historically documented break, where those guys started raping women in general and Isis priestesses in special. They got exiled by the Pharaoh and culture branched into different karmic playgrounds.

If you have a look at the development of cultural archetypes, stored in myths, legends and religions of the cultures after that, you can see how that karmic energy evolved as cultural trauma. In Babylon the exiled God of Egypt started to get turned into a warmongering tyrant and rapist on the male side and women turned into birth machines and property of men, while taking up a role as manipulative, scheming creatures, lurking in the shadows to plot on how to make their men's lives miserable. And then we spin everything into stories that romanticise that BS, because otherwise it would require introspection to find healthier ways.

The final iteration of that development is Christianity, where we have a tyrant father (Yahweh defeats El somewhere in the bible and "inherits his titles and blah". That's Yahweh becoming the last offspring of that exiled God, unmasking him for the curious folks as a distorted service to self entity in plain sight.), the mother has become a holy ghost, because she's to embarrassed to be mentioned, the daughter exists as Schrödinger's virgin or as a whore and the oldest son who left the family (Jesus isn't connected to Yahweh in any way, except for Christianity's choice to glue his stories to theirs, so bible is 50-50 service to self/others and doesn't implode after some centuries, like the previous iterations without "balance through a good guy".) chose to lead a good and honest life, got nailed to a cross for it and people kept following the guy who swung the hammer.

Humans are amazingly ridiculous. But the good news is, since we don't know what we do, some have conserved that old wisdom in dances and songs, that the people still remember without understanding their memory, so that someone like me can come and reconnect humans to their memories of ways that worked amazingly well. They just didn't give someone power over other's, so people building pyramids of human power didn't like those ideas and tried to bury them, by killing everyone who spreads those ways.

Good thing they forgot in their hubris, that someone else had GIVEN them that power in the first place. And that guy understood the nature of that power, while they only understood the ceremonies, songs and dances, they were taught. And he promised to come back and clean the mess up, after giving Humans ample time to explore the consequences of their choices. So he did as promised. Because he always had.

Life is an amazing quantum-stabilised playground to explore possibilities. Before we can explore them truly, we have to learn about our own possibilities and how our choices and actions shape the world.

Having a Mother close her eyes to the reality in front of her, because her role would include being balance and justice, can create millennia of mothers creating completely unbalanced and unjust societies and come out on the other side, rejecting all responsibility for all of their choices and summing up their problems as "It's all men".

Isn't that the pinnacle of divine comedy, we have been promised?

But on a serious note, if you need bridges to connect ideas and thoughts around the topic of free human societies, hmu. They call my kind a bridge builder for a reason. The Pontifex Maximus has forgotten that honour and duty, but Saint Peter was awake enough to notice that comedy, when he received his old key back last month, to hand it to the next bridge builder. Took me a month to figure out where that amazing key came from, that unlocked an old Seal on Saturn and triggered the rollback of all that karmic BS, so it becomes more easy to spot it. For everyone. God always had a knack for "Power to the People". It was just People, who chose, they deserve more power than others with the intent of abusing that power to gain control over those others. That way can work too. But it's super volatile and in most cases simply ends up in planets getting blown up by people who need violence to find out, who is stronger, while the answer to their question is hidden in the an saying.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent

  • hosh ・ 2 days ago

    Hacker News is not really the venue for this.

    I'll just say this based on what I think is your thesis here:

    "Those old societies all revolved around the idea of having druids, shamans, witches or other cosmic bridge roles in their tribal structures."

    - Shamans originated out among the Mongolian and Manchu people, and not the universal role that anthropologists like to make it out to be. While their role does include being a cosmic bridge, they do have practices working with wrathful spirits that they send to kill their enemies.

    - "Aradia, or the Gospel of Witches" may or may not be a reliable source, but it does present an idea of witchraft and its purpose that makes the most sense to me: a remnant of a role that then evolved as a way to fight against patriarchial tyranny and oppression.

    "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"

    I don't think it is that simple.

    I couldn't find your contact info on your profile, and there's a lot more to engage. Feel free to email me sometime.