As someone who deeply loves LOTR - if you try to apply the rules of LOTR to this world, you will make this world worse. This is true. Inheritance and monarchy does not make for a good government, and we know this.
But LOTR is about vibes not facts. Friendship, loyalty, hope, doing the right thing with what power you have, appreciating what is good and green and gentle in the world, etc.
> the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld
The more seriously you take the rules of LOTR, yes. But you can take LOTR seriously without taking the rules seriously - by taking the vibes seriously.
> Inheritance and monarchy does not make for a good government, and we know this.
Monarchy makes for some of both the best and worst governments on record. The problem isn't that you can't get good results, but rather the extreme variance.
lol. I lived under the same monarch, QEII, who has ruled for seventy years, and I assure you that I and my compatriots feel far, far, freer in practice and guided more well than any single American ought to feel currently.
They don't have power, but they do have influence. Every Prime Minister has a weekly meeting with the... King (still hard to type that, isn't it?), an off-the-record discussion of what they're doing and thinking, with someone who (theoretically, at least) has the long view interests of the nation in mind. Most have said it's immensely valuable.
That apart, the "show" function is important, too. It separates the Head of State and Head of Government functions, which makes it easier to dismiss the Head of Government, without disturbing the stability of the State. The US system fuses the two, which (in my view) is part of what makes the Congress reluctant to follow through on impeachment. (To avoid recent examples: had Bill Clinton been (treated like) a British Prime Minister in 1998 he'd have lost a no-confidence vote among his own party, and Al Gore would have served out his term. I think that would have been a better outcome than what actually happened, and followed.)
Which can be mitigated by making the monarch powerless.
I’m in Australia and the Trump presidency will be the thing for the next century that we can point to and say that this is why we are not going to ever, ever, ever get rid of the king or queen, in favour of a local president. I suspect that Canada and other countries feel much the same.
I agree that Monarchs are great if they realise their long term legacy is best served by doing very little-to-nothing but still bringing the Prime Minister to account once a week (the A/UK/CA/NZ evolutionary model). However, even the ceremonial power is proving problematic in a world where the government of UK wants King of UK to have Trump for tea and the government of CA wants King of CA to spit in it.
Monarchy does not prevent enslavement. In fact, serfdom is a relatively common feature of monarchy. That’s what those two things have to do with each other.
The UK, under a monarch, abolished slavery and set the Royal Navy to blockade slave ships.
Meanwhile, the USofA pre civil war under a President with no offical monarch (other than the Little King for a term arrangement) had extensive slave plantations.
Good that you agree slavery was abolished by a country with a monarch ... you skipped over the second point; the country most associated with industrial scale slavery in the world had no monarch.
It's a loose correlation you're making here, very much a "let's build this skyscraper with wet noodles instead of steel" approach.
Slavery was “abolished” in the UK while that same nation continued to traffic and profit from enslavement for quite a long time it’s “abolition”. Is your point that monarchy is good, or that slavery is associated with all forms of government?
"guest workers" as a term completely excludes serfs. Serfs are attached to the land, guest workers on the other hand come from a completely different place. North Korea is not a monarchy, and what's happening there is forced labour, or slavery.
The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy". People are so completely unable to provide evidence for that claim of it being common these days (500 years in the past being quite irrelevant here given numerous monarchies exist these days) that the closest you can get is by pointing to one single case, on the other side of the world from the monarchies we're talking about, that isn't serfdom and isn't a monarchy. Hardly a "relatively common feature".
Serfs were forced to work for little to no wages, and often can't leave the country because their employers confiscate their passports. That's about as close to modern serfdom as you can get.
> The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy".
It is. Some kind of serfdom was common throughout Europe until around 19-th century. Russia abolished it in 1861, in Austria in 1848, hardly "500 years". As usual, Wikipedia has a nice overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
Perhaps absolute would be a better wording. After all there are also very few absolute democracies, absolute free markets, etc, etc.
Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned it just isn't prevented in practice either. At which point I wonder about other localized abusive working and living conditions in many supposedly more developed and civilized countries.
> with hereditary power transfer
Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy? It seems to me that the defining characteristic is a single authority figure. Hereditary power transfer is just a natural consequence of basic self interest under those circumstances.
> Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned
Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
> Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy?
Yes. It's _the_ main characteristic of monarchy. Without it, you have run-of-the-mill autocracy (e.g. Putin in Russia or Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Hereditary power transfer means that the monarchy is an institution, with its own support structures (feudals, court, etc.).
The saying: "The king is dead, long live the king!" is not hypocrisy. It's a sign that the monarchy is an institution and can survive an individual monarch's death.
For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know. There's going to be a power struggle with unpredictable results. There is no line of succession for the true power.
Sure but, in theory at least, who says you need the official mechanism to be hereditary? An institution could define that however it wanted, and if it works then it works.
Admittedly it's possible that might run afoul of a dictionary definition or three. I'm not sure. I suppose it's all largely pointless speculation anyway since someone with a long enough term is going to be incentivized to modify the system to officially become hereditary if it isn't already.
> Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
Officially though?
Contrast with your other example, North Korea, where many of the abuses are indeed officially recognized.
There's plenty that the laws (or at least enforcement) in the western world fail to stop. In many cases you can argue that it's intentional (and I might even agree with you). But that doesn't make it official in that it isn't what's written down or what the electorate explicitly agreed to.
> Sure but, in theory at least, who says you need the official mechanism to be hereditary? An institution could define that however it wanted, and if it works then it works.
The thing is, regular autocracy has to destroy the institutions of power transfer. If there's a presumptive successor, then the autocrat can never feel secure in their power. So hereditary transfer is the only model that is at least tolerable for autocrats.
But building the institutions of power transfer requires people who are invested in them. So you need feudal lords who derive their power and wealth from their relation with the monarch. These feudal lords _themselves_ are interested in power transfer to make sure their heirs can be secure.
That's why, historically, elected kings turned into hereditary kings with only one exception, Vatican (for obvious reasons).
> For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know.
Mikhail Mishustin. The Prime Minister of Russia takes over in the event of the President being indisposed and acts as temporary President until the President recovers or a new one is elected.
Putin is holding his power because he set himself up as the final arbiter in conflicts between powerful "clans". This is largely unofficial power, that he holds personally (not due to institutions).
He is preventing anyone else from gaining similar levels of influence. For example, Mishustin's power was cut down by the changes Putin pushed into the Constitution in 2020.
Side note, this situation is 100% typical for autocracies. And once the autocrat dies, the country very often descends into chaos, simply because there are no institutions that are capable of resolving conflicts between groups without violence. Example: Libya.
It's almost as though the global political landscape has varied significantly over these thousands of years and various societal features (including monarchy, serfdom, slavery, etc) aren't inherently linked to one another.
My original point was that a monarchy permits both the best and worst possible outcomes because a single individual has maximal power to enact a unified vision. The observation could obviously apply in degrees to any dictatorship though, regardless of the official classification.
Yeah, that’s the ol’ philosopher-king argument. I get it, but I don’t really buy into it. I.e. if the next monarch is a despot, their rule is a part of the previous monarch’s actions… so even a truly good king will inevitably harm the people under them.
You don't actually seem like you're disagreeing with me though? I spoke only to the form of government as it pertains to end results, not to how we should attribute "points" to a given ruler or politician. Credit assignment is similarly difficult when it comes to voters and elected leaders.
The end result is higher variance over a long period of time as a dictatorship switches between good and bad leadership. Meanwhile democracies consistently fail to execute on large scale visions. There's a reason corporate structure generally resembles a dictatorship, and that same reason is what eventually leads many of them to fail.
It's also notably light on the "prosaic" aspects. It just says that elves "dwelt" here and made a kingdom there. But as GRRM said: what was Aragorn's tax policy?
At least in the Once and Future King, the only real King Arthur story that I've read, I got the impression that Arthur pulling the sword from the stone was more of a metaphor of him "being ready" to be king more than just genealogy or anything like that.
When Arthur pulled the sword out of the stone, he was remembering all the stuff that Merlyn taught him about the different ways that animals run their societies and how it informed how he would lead if he were in charge.
But LOTR is about vibes not facts. Friendship, loyalty, hope, doing the right thing with what power you have, appreciating what is good and green and gentle in the world, etc.
> the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld
The more seriously you take the rules of LOTR, yes. But you can take LOTR seriously without taking the rules seriously - by taking the vibes seriously.