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smath 4 hours ago [-]
This has it backwards. The Victorian elite had a high standard of life because they had an empire that funded their decadent lifestyle - at the expense of their colonies! They were cushioned from negative consequences of their be debaucherous lifestyle.
Such macro effects exist today as well, in certain countries, that enjoy exorbitant privileges.
A focus on STEM is how a up and coming nation builds itself — innovation, and making something the world wants, rather than subjugation or rent seeking.
watwut 6 minutes ago [-]
Tech and STEM people are currently fully in the subjugate and get rent phase.
darubedarob 16 minutes ago [-]
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cafebeen 14 hours ago [-]
Seems like an accurate picture of the Victorian elite, but it sounds like they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked. That was success "on their own terms," as the article puts it, but not something to emulate.
graemep 13 hours ago [-]
Depends who you mean by the elite.
The aristocracy, certainly.
The upper middle class (i.e. professional class - I know other countries define these things differently) that provided the administrators were just good at their jobs and worked hard. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is a great insider view. Histories of the period too.
tsunamifury 13 hours ago [-]
The upper middle class were decidedly not elite at that time and very much "working class plus"
graemep 12 hours ago [-]
Still are, arguably. Dependent on earnings rather than wealth.
They did have a lot of privileges, especially when employed in the colonies.
tsunamifury 12 hours ago [-]
I think we are entering a wierd era where a huge population (baby boomers) are returing with incredible passive wealth compared to any other working class era in history.
This is... a mass elite or more of one that may have ever existed before including the small merchant class of the late 1800s
graemep 11 hours ago [-]
Baby boomers are aged between 66 and 80, so most of them have already retired. We are not entering the era, we are in it.
SoftTalker 11 hours ago [-]
And though some are quite wealthy, the average Boomer net worth of about $1.6MM is concentrated in the wealthy top few, like any other demographic. The median Boomer has a net worth of $300-$400K, the largest fraction of which is probably their house (so not income-producing), and that isn't really a lot to live off of in 2026.
ButlerianJihad 2 minutes ago [-]
Moderns who are accustomed to typical homeownership arrangements do not even realize how different this world is from feudal times and manor houses in the UK. If we transplanted a medieval feudal lord or serf to 2026, they would be appalled and shocked at how wasteful our land-use is.
I have contemplated this, especially in terms of universal suffrage, where we've progressed from a male landowner with voting rights, to anyone over 18. And I've also come to find out that there are many, many homeowners today who flout zoning, insurance, and business licensing to run "cottage industries" in SFH-zoned areas, and these are often sources of clash with the HOA.
It's been mentioned on HN before how the "front lawn" and ornamental gardens are implicitly conspicuous consumption. They boast, "I own land and I can waste all this space on non-farmland! I am wealthy enough to feed my family without growing my own!" Because in feudal days, in the manor house, your estate and your land were really expected to produce revenue! The lord of a manor was duty-bound to hire a cadre of servants to care for the home and family, and hire or sublet to farmers and shepherds and others who would exploit the land. The estates, the convents and monasteries, the farmlands, the Southern plantations, these were all implicitly revenue-producing, not merely where someone lived, and then rode a horse to their office somewhere else in a different "zone". That would've been absurdly wasteful...
So today, there are people secretly painting sneakers, or selling firearms, or running a family farm to sell raw milk and mutton, or doing mani-pedis, or selling tee shirts, from their residential-zoned McMansions or even apartments. But typically a SFH, where in 2026, we've decided that if we're investing a cool million in property, it would indeed be wasteful not to exploit that, even if we need to do it on the D.L., and fight endlessly with the HOA and code inspectors, who are gonna say we need to rent office space.
bluGill 7 hours ago [-]
While the house isn't producing, it is expense reducing, and that works out to be the same thing. Assuming that the house is paid for, of course, if your net worth is really only $300K, odds are you don't have the house paid for either: social Security is the bulk of your income, which, it's enough to live on, but it isn't a life of luxury.
jltsiren 2 hours ago [-]
In some countries, imputed rent used to be taxable income. If you owned your home, you basically calculated the market rent for a similar home, subtracted your expenses, and paid taxes for the rest. It was one of those policies economists considered justified (because it made the choice between owning and renting tax neutral) but the general public didn't.
Those times are gone, but the theoretical justification that makes homes income-producting assets remains.
beachy 1 hours ago [-]
Sounds sensible. In my country (and probably many others), if you and your neighbour own identical houses or apartments and have identical mortgages, and instead of living in your own one you rent the neighbours one and live in that and vice versa, then you can both offset your mortgage interest against the rental income and both be better off than if you lived in your own house.
59percentmore 7 hours ago [-]
>so not income-producing
Depends on what you consider a reverse mortgage/equity loan they plan to die before paying.
Danox 7 hours ago [-]
Very true. And the way things are going, just in the English-speaking countries, United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, those between 18 and 40 are having more trouble buying that house or condo.
Those luxury apartments are going up everywhere, at least in the United States.
$2200 a month with amenities for a one bedroom studio.
nradov 1 hours ago [-]
Come on. There are plenty of places in the USA where you can rent a small apartment for less than $2200. Try Cleveland.
mistrial9 6 hours ago [-]
don't forget the 2.5 children in the stats prattle
thaumasiotes 7 hours ago [-]
> The median Boomer has a net worth of $300-$400K, the largest fraction of which is probably their house (so not income-producing)
What? Do you not live in your house?
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
You do, but even if it's paid for, you still have to pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance on it. It's likely better than renting in most cases, but it's not a free place to live.
thaumasiotes 3 hours ago [-]
It's still an income-producing asset. It produces quite a lot of income. You have to pay for maintenance on everything, but that doesn't mean that income-producing assets don't exist.
bigstrat2003 24 minutes ago [-]
Living in a house is not income.
NoMoreNicksLeft 7 hours ago [-]
On other social media platforms, the boomers are aged 28 to 107. And I'm not exaggerating, you can check for yourself. The muddying of definitions is the root of all evil.
awesome_dude 2 hours ago [-]
Ok Boomer
Wild random insults don't change the definition
KerrAvon 6 hours ago [-]
The age range of baby boomers is not seriously in question no matter what some internet random on social may say. At most it's a little fuzzy around the edges, but Wikipedia's range of 1946 and 1964 seems on the mark.
NoMoreNicksLeft 31 minutes ago [-]
>The age range of baby boomers is not seriously in question no matter what some internet random on social may say.
Tell them that, not me. We live in a descriptivist universe.
AndrewKemendo 5 hours ago [-]
You can’t have a bourgeoisie without a mass of petit-bourgeoisie making sure no proletariat ever forgets their class
mike_hearn 13 hours ago [-]
Rent seeking how? As the article says, most government positions were unpaid and to be an MP required paying all your own election expenses out of pocket, which were huge. They did it for the prestige and social rewards, not financial. Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free.
sp1nningaway 13 hours ago [-]
I know! How could these literal landlords be rent-seeking by taking unpaid positions of political influence to increase literal rental income and protect their wealth?
aetch 13 hours ago [-]
Its rent seeking because they’re using the government role to bring in the dough for themselves after they get the role. It just takes a bit of money upfront similar to a landlord buying a house.
That’s also how you restrict government roles to the rich who only use it for personal gain. Similar to people who believe that Trump is generously by “donating” his salary back but not realizing that he and his family are earning far more in bribes and kickbacks using his position.
mike_hearn 13 hours ago [-]
You're asserting a lot of things that aren't in the article. If you want to argue Victorian-era MPs were all motivated by corruption then go ahead but you'll need to cite strong evidence for that, because the general consensus was that MPs of that time were not particularly corrupt. As the article says, they didn't even spend much time on lawmaking at all, so there wasn't a lot of legislation to abuse.
mcmcmc 6 hours ago [-]
Someone’s never heard of regulatory capture
LtWorf 13 hours ago [-]
And to get a promotion in the army you had to buy it.
52-6F-62 13 hours ago [-]
Careful, that's some of that stuff that they teach in humanities and classics courses. You know, what is being labeled as wasteful or impractical in this thread.
vessenes 13 hours ago [-]
I believe Victorian wealth disparity was on par with today's in America -- perhaps America has slightly more "power law" wealth at the very top of the percentage charts -- but for those in charge of new empires, maybe this article will be very useful and remind them it's better to go party in SF than it is to put in too much time in the office.
PowerElectronix 13 hours ago [-]
Not in the least. Today in the US less than 1% of the population works as home service. In victorian England it was around 10%.
The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
GolfPopper 44 minutes ago [-]
As the variably attributed proverb goes, "The sun never sets on the British Empire, because God doesn't trust the English in the dark"
harimau777 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure that demonstrates anything. That just demonstrates that people work different jobs than they did back then; it doesn't tell us anything about wealth distribution.
ponector 10 hours ago [-]
Nowadays service jobs are externalized. Try to compare how big chunk of the population are in service industries now and then.
Back then they had a private coachman and now you have an independent contractor with the Uber app.
PowerElectronix 9 hours ago [-]
We've always have public coachmen and public bars and restaurants. The fact that there are many more now only means a lot more people can afford them.
anonymous908213 11 hours ago [-]
21% of US jobs are service occupations. All you've really done is establish that cars exist so the wealthy have deemed it no longer necessary to allow filthy peasants to live in their mansions.
7 hours ago [-]
vessenes 13 hours ago [-]
That's an unusual measure -- and I like it. I wonder what those percentages are in very wealthy communities in America, e.g. Greenwich and surroundings, Nantucket, Hamptons plus labor communities west.
alcuin 3 hours ago [-]
>but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
Interesting to see this popular myth still being regurgitated when someone as perceptive as Bertrand Russell who lived through part of it admitted it was self-aggrandizing propaganda. In truth 80% of the British "Empire" were impoverished Indians. While back at home the Blue Books were churning out shocking reports of the misery and physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers. Read the archives from the early 20th century for a real eye-opener. And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
tastyfreeze 2 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't say the UK is now, but was the most powerful empire to have existed. What else would you call a nation that 65 nations have claimed independence from? They can't claim independence if they weren't once part of the empire.
nradov 1 hours ago [-]
Are you claiming that the Battle of Trafalgar didn't matter?
jjtwixman 1 hours ago [-]
In which European countries were wages higher than in Britain? In which countries were the living conditions so much higher than in Britain in that period? That Britain ruled India and India was poor is no secret but that also doesn’t mean they weren’t powerful.
Also regarding Chesapeake, Britain’s century of hegemony came afterwards. Trafalgar came afterwards, and mattered a lot. Losing that battle doesn’t mean the navy wasn’t globally dominant in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What’s the Bertrand Russell quote?
You can list a long series of reasons why they were weak and crap, ackshually. But presumably plenty about them was also not weak and crap otherwise they wouldn’t have ended up the global hegemon for a century. Certainly in terms of global trade dominance, at their peak nobody in history has come close, not China and not the USA.
csours 13 hours ago [-]
The first rule of success is to own your definition of success.
Danox 7 hours ago [-]
What if you fell into it by accident? I fell into it because I like computers. and the design department I worked in at the time. started an investment club.
Muromec 6 hours ago [-]
You will fall out of it just as easily
NoMoreNicksLeft 7 hours ago [-]
Is there a form of (self-)success that manifests when you accomplish what other people and only other people wanted you to accomplish? That'd be their success, not yours.
thelastgallon 6 hours ago [-]
> optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked
I wonder if we could see the American elite the same way? Private schools, then greek houses (fraternities) on campuses. Fraternities seem like they are continuing the victorian elite education, focus on long lasting connections between them.
jan_m_savage 6 hours ago [-]
you put the finger on it. And meanwhile the children were being worked to death in work houses.
rayiner 13 hours ago [-]
I don’t think that’s a helpful explanation. This period was the age of empires. Why were the Victorian elites so much more successful at it than their counterparts?
cafebeen 11 hours ago [-]
One way of thinking about it, the success of the elite (meaning the aristocracy) may be separate from the success of the empire. Most of the work behind the latter was done by the industrial bourgeoisie, engineers, workers, colonized people, etc., so the question is, how big a direct impact did the elite have on the empire? How successful they were individually is a different question.
0xDEAFBEAD 7 hours ago [-]
In most corporations, most of the work is not done by the CEO. Yet a good or bad CEO can still have a big impact.
cafebeen 5 hours ago [-]
True, but not universally, depending on whether they are involved day-to-day management or just acting as a public face to the org. Of course there's always just being in the right place at the right time. So I think it's worth looking at the specific decisions, policies, culture, etc.
frutiger 6 hours ago [-]
This whole article is not about the aristocracy.
cafebeen 5 hours ago [-]
I guess the author doesn't cleanly define "elite", but it does lean heavy on the upper-class, and the depiction of social life seems to suggest that as well. But I guess during that period the makeup of upper-class shifted a bit from entirely aristocrats / nobility to include others too
52-6F-62 13 hours ago [-]
Isn't it exactly how the tech industry largely operates today?
59percentmore 7 hours ago [-]
On the last supposition: they've managed something better for themselves, which is an order where they have substantial control over public policy without being subject to the full brunt of public inquiry or responsibility. You would have to force Sam Altman to run for office; Oprah famously laughs when questioned about pursuing the presidency.
LarsDu88 5 hours ago [-]
The article tries to imply this system 'worked', but Britain alreadt had an intercontinental colonial empire for 150 years prior to the Victorian era. Massive technological and scientific advances like the steam engine and calculus preceded the Victorian era. The hedonistic generation of leadership that came out of this era basically lost it all.
For better picture of what made Britain successful during this era look to folks like Isa Brunel... son of a French Revolutionary immigrant who was poor enough for debtors prison, but skilled enough in engineering and math to build some of the largest ships in the world.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> where they have substantial control over public policy
Substantial influence. The fact that America's rich are constantly mobilizing to promote or defeat ballot measures and candidates shows the limits of their power.
cucumber3732842 4 hours ago [-]
The government is always infighting.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> government is always infighting
By design. That's what separation of powers–and the division of power–is intended to do.
etc-hosts 4 hours ago [-]
Huge pools of money got Trump elected, not sure what youre talking about.
mediaman 4 hours ago [-]
Do those huge pools of money wanted restrictions on immigration and high tariffs?
Why is populism doing so well on the right? Is that what the pools of money want?
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> Why is populism doing so well on the right?
It's doing well on both sides. The Republican Party was just more willing to compromise its values to give them power. The debate over electability in the Democratic Party, on the other hand, is taking longer to manifest, but is probably going to result in far fitter candidates than e.g. Ken Paxton.
lostlogin 4 hours ago [-]
> Why is populism doing so well on the right? Is that what the pools of money want?
I think it is. It’s hard to believe Musk doesn’t want China tariffs and he loves the hard right agenda. Those like Thiel have some deeply dubious views.
But it’s not so much the political views as the opportunity that exists at the moment. Give Trump enough money and you can do what you like.
etc-hosts 4 hours ago [-]
Thiel's main goal is no income tax. One of his other goals is autarchy.
Ridiculously high Chinese tariffs dovetail with this just fine.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
Thiel is almost openly a monarchist.
jimbo456 14 hours ago [-]
Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants who did their laundry, cooked their food, poured their Port and generally did all the work.
usrnm 14 hours ago [-]
Because it was not any different from any other aristocracy in the world at the time. The question the article is trying to answer is "why Britain?" Of all the competing european empires what made that particular one especially successful?
The industries in Britain had access to such huge monopolistic markets, so not really a surprise.
tsunamifury 13 hours ago [-]
I love comments like this... they say "well like just build amazon, easy as that"
13 hours ago [-]
0xDEAFBEAD 7 hours ago [-]
Britain was the largest empire in history and covered 25% of the Earth's surface area. What was it which allowed them to become the largest empire in history?
wredcoll 6 hours ago [-]
Having lots of ships and not needing a standing army to defend against neighboring countries who share a land border.
A navy is, effectively, mulitpurpose when it comes to trading and colonies and such in a way that an army is not. Therefor countries that can invest only in a navy are at an advantage.
Also, while it is true that the british empire was very large and impressive by almost any measure, and I don't want to downplay it too much, it's worth remembering that a very, very large portion of that empire was made up of the indian subcontinent, and while they certainly had political control over the place, the actual reality was a (very) tiny elite who replaced the previous group of rulers.
Also this empire as described lasted barely 100 years.
MisterMunchkin 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah but why did they have the biggest and best empire in history?
glitchc 13 hours ago [-]
The legal framework was a big part of the puzzle. Britain's lawyers and legal system were head and shoulders above their peers. Colonies and companies in charge were controlled by complex legal contracts guaranteeing profits to those in charge, from the Crown down.
In most cases, the indigenous populations signed their rights away first through clever negotiation and the companies subsequently used force to enforce their contractual rights. Over time, the companies themselves could not muster sufficient force to maintain status quo as they relied mainly on mecenaries who could only be sourced from the local populations and were notoriously fickle, so the Crown inevitably took charge.
TheOtherHobbes 8 hours ago [-]
The Industrial Revolution hugely increased production and improved logistics.
The Navy was the best in the world.
There was a capitalist investment culture which linked elements of the aristocracy with inventors and traders, so ventures were relatively easy to fund.
The Royal Society helped spread scientific research and insights.
Private military ventures like the East India Company were closely linked to the state and 'too big to fail' (at least for a while.)
The educational system produced administrators, adventurers, soldiers, and politicians with an unshakeable, almost cult-like, sense of patriotic entitlement.
Britain was isolated physically, which meant the possibility of a distracting land war stopped being a risk after Waterloo, and sea war more or less after Trafalgar.
Basically England was a mature nation state with stable borders and a workable (if brutal and very imperfect) investment-oriented economy, while the other European powers were still fighting each other and - in many cases - trying to self-organise a national identity.
graemep 7 hours ago [-]
The UK, not England!
The article says.the education they received was less rigorous than schools in France, Germany or Italy. Despite this and the educational focus on the classics Britain made huge contributions to science and technology. Maybe schools did not matter that much educationally, but did, as you say, create loyalty and character.
Huarache1 3 hours ago [-]
The Brits weaponized their most intelligent, and made them work for the crown.
That being said, mercantile navy based nations never really last beyond a few hundred years compared to the nations near the Steppe.
sssilver 13 hours ago [-]
How's this different from modern-day "aristocracy"? Don't they get servants who do their laundry, cook their food, pour their Port, and generally do all the work?
nik282000 4 hours ago [-]
You mean exactly like rich cunts today? You never hear a politician or a CEO say "boy am I glad all those interns do the bitch work so I can look good on TV".
lostlogin 4 hours ago [-]
Anthony Scaramucci says pretty much that on the podcast ‘The Rest Is Politics, US’.
He didn’t do very well in his 7 minutes in politics, so maybe that’s part of it.
TacticalCoder 13 hours ago [-]
> Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants ...
OK but we're talking about a period where the UK was the world's first superpower.
I understand you want to portray the despicable conditions of servants living in rich people's houses in Victorian britain but...
Wanna have a talk about the living conditions of people in, say, Eritrea at the same time? (Eritrea has never really been colonized btw so the whole "it's because of colonialism" angle doesn't really work).
Or even just the living conditions of poor people in Britain who happened to not have jobs as servants for the rich?
My great-uncle (a radiologist) and my great-aunt (she had a pharmacy) had a servant during a bit part of their lives, Tess: and she was basically part of the family. Sure she did the laundry and cooking and cleaning but she never struck me as some oppressed human being living in misery. What I remember from visiting them was my uncle in his office, always working (analyzing radio from patients, writing (snail) mails to other doctors, etc.) and Tess always working too: just a different kind of work.
People getting paid to work for other people doesn't imply slavery. We could of course also have a talk about actual slavery, what were the last countries to officially abolish it, who were the biggest slavers in the world, which countries still have actual slaves (and sex slaves) today, etc.
I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
Huarache1 3 hours ago [-]
Countries in their industrial era are quite literally not unlike third world countries.
England at its Victorian era looks like an overpowered Brazil than anything even close resembling the US now.
scrumper 4 hours ago [-]
> I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
Indeed not. Being in service provided one of the most desirable careers you could hope for as a working class Victorian. When your options look like pit, mill, or factory, cleaning floors in a nice warm house is a good alternative. And that was just the foot in the door: there was progression available. Those jobs were hard to get, prestigious, came with their own status hierarchy, and could keep you set for life.
xinuc 14 hours ago [-]
And also millions of poor and suffering people from the colonized countries. Millions of them died of famine. I'm not sure how much we can learn from those elites.
bee_rider 13 hours ago [-]
It did mention the colonial empire up near the beginning.
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.
The essay is intentionally exploring an alternative to the obvious one. I think the essay does brush off the cruelty of the empire too quickly, but cruelty isn’t inherently profitable, so there’s still some explaining to do.
tsunamifury 13 hours ago [-]
World War I killed so many victorian elites off and destroyed their culture because it proved honor culture inferior to industrialized killing
Huarache1 3 hours ago [-]
*inferior to industrialized versions of ancient cultures. The Victorians essentially gave up all sense of their medieval culture (Longbowmen and archer traditions, Yeoman farmers) for immense wealth and new luxuries (Tea, tea houses, Opium, and lots of parties).
This led to their decline within 200 years, compared to China or the Roman Empire. The Chinese had to deal with the incompetent Qing, but luckily they survived as a culture, and learned a lot from Deng Xiaoping.
xinuc 12 hours ago [-]
> cruelty isn’t inherently profitable
agreed. But it takes tremendous amounts of stupidity to not be profitable while cruelly exploiting millions of people and their resources.
xinuc 14 hours ago [-]
other than the fact that success is mostly just luck (and lack of morality), not hard work.
HPsquared 14 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't say there was a relative lack of morality compared to other elites. Quite the opposite actually.
xinuc 13 hours ago [-]
I don't know man.
The great famine of Ireland, The great famine of India, and even The late Victorian Holocaust is a thing.
It is also well documented where other empire wanted to help the starving people, but denied because it would make them looked bad.
I really can not see that they are not lack of morality.
dash2 13 hours ago [-]
Countries that were not under an empire also had famines and other disasters (China had a civil war with 50 million killed, IIRC) as well as endemic practices like slavery.
xinuc 12 hours ago [-]
Sure. But we're discussing Victorians here.
13 hours ago [-]
mike_hearn 13 hours ago [-]
This always comes up.
Those famines were not created by the Victorians. They were all originating in natural disasters that the locals were unable to handle for themselves. The claim that the Victorians did something immoral is an ideological one, as it's effectively a claim that even though they did try to help they could have tried even more - and not rising to that level of assistance (determined arbitrarily by moderns who were not there) was somehow evil.
This view is usually also implying without stating that it is uncharitable or morally wrong for governments to not suspend free markets and impose a communist planned economy the moment there's a natural disaster. That's a highly controversial view (and a wrong one if you want something that works), but it gets slipped into criticisms of the Victorians all the time.
This is the same logic that says shutting down USAID killed people. It's an attempt to convert the possibility of charity into a hard moral obligation - but if accepted, that would make it no longer charity.
Specifically:
• The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.
• In India they did also provide aid, organized relief camps, suspended tax collection, and spent large sums of taxes and Victorian Brits made large numbers of charitable donations. It didn't look so different to the various aid campaigns for Africa in the 20th century.
• There is no such thing as the "late Victorian Holocaust". That's a concept from a book written by a Marxist in 2000 that argues that capitalism is the same thing as genocide, and frankly seems incredibly offensive to survivors of the actual holocaust.
neffy 13 hours ago [-]
It´s true that some Victorians organised aid for Ireland during the famine, it is also true that other Vicorians, English origin who were landowners in Ireland courtesy of the Cromwell invasion in the 1650's, exported large amounts of food from Ireland during the famine, to pay some of the bills mentioned in the article. Many land owners in Ireland were heavily in debt, with mortgages on their property. Potatoes were peasant food, and the failure of the crop, combined with lack of control over the food suppliers, led to the death and forced immigrations of millions. The population of Ireland is still lower in the 21st century than it was in the 19th.
So we can take a look at it with 21st century eyes, and consider that actual control is a nebulous thing, and that the absentee landowners were protecting their interests, while some at least of the local ones, including anglo-irish intervened to try and help the people on their estates. but then we also have to dig into the fiasco that is the 1847 Poor Law extension relief act, which sets up systems for relief that effectively dispossess people of their land, and makes the entire thing much worse.
Did the people creating the act understand systemic behaviour well enough to predict the consequences? Do we even understand these things well enough now? The interaction between debt and market pricing, and its inevitable consequences are playing out in real time now with AI.
Hikikomori 7 hours ago [-]
Man this is dumb.
Ireland produced more food than it needed, even if we don't count potatoes. It was exported, mainly to England, as other markets could pay more. Plenty of other things the victorian's did to make the situation worse. Mainly thanks to free market idealists.
Pre colonial India had famines and many ways to handle them, the British did away with them. The system they set up and replaced made it a lot worse and whatever small trickle of help they provided clearly wasn't enough.
I don't know why you're trying to whitewash colonialism. That it's immoral is pretty simple, they let millions of people die for profit.
HPsquared 13 hours ago [-]
Elites are generally immoral, even today. I mean only in relative terms, they were no worse than others. On the positive side, they did quite a few pro-social things as well (abolition of slavery, for example).
IncreasePosts 14 hours ago [-]
This is addressed near the beginning as the Orthodox view:
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true.
lukan 14 hours ago [-]
Also:
"Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically."
jan_m_savage 6 hours ago [-]
"Oxbridge tutors believed overwhelmingly that the purpose of an undergraduate degree was not training for work nor even preparation for academic research, but rather a general moral and intellectual formation that would fit students for any professional role they might later pursue."
This is what the Japanese are still doing; the top companies seek out top achievers regardless of the major, and then employ them, and teach them the things the employee lacks inside the company.
genodethrowaway 45 minutes ago [-]
this is in part due to the structure of the japanese economy and it's businesses. Businesses hire for life, encourage their employees to experiment, and dip their hands into as many parts of the economy as possible. Compare to America where companies hire and fire at will and build their entire value proposition around specialized products. Only the biggest companies generalize, and even then, within their niche.
CGMthrowaway 6 hours ago [-]
Many private K-12 schools in the US are also doing this. It's the type of education my parents wanted for me, and for college they thought likewise about the importance of liberal arts, in the classical sense of that term (intellectual pursuits as distinct from practical trades).
This type of education is not for everyone, though.
bluGill 6 hours ago [-]
A lot of parents are choosing a public school because it's doing the equivalent of that as well. Private schools can select out the undesirable students, but so long as there's only a few of those your life is better for meeting the undesirable people in the world.
Undesirable is of course is to find different by different people. The larger point is so long as the undesirable people are not overwhelming the school and bringing you down, it's actually good to meet them. Maybe you'll bring them up, but even if you don't, it helps to broaden your viewpoint of the world and helps you to not become a bigot.
halJordan 6 hours ago [-]
Absolutely disagree that it's not for everyone. It's exactly what makes a robust and educated populace. Relegating someone to aircon technician and telling them that makes them just as smart as a liberal arts major is disrespectful to them, if they could but be educated enough to understand it.
simonw 14 hours ago [-]
> Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. The exact share varied, but the classical languages took up generally at least half of teaching hours, and sometimes as much as 80 percent, especially earlier in the century.
That's so weird to me. How did that tradition hold on for so long? Where did it come from? Who thought that was a good idea?
vessenes 13 hours ago [-]
This theory continues in modern elite American Universities -- they exist not to provide job skills but to deliver a "liberal education" -- one that teaches students to think, be moral, etc. (I read from the brochure here).
Those Ivies that have more job-oriented programs tend to have (at the least) those schools looked down upon in comparison to the more 'pure' academic pursuits, e.g. Cornell's Hospitality school.
While Ivies are not tied strictly to America's true upper class, serving more as a means of entry into the upper-middle and lower-upper, this sort of signaling is an important part of some of the soft benefits they provide students -- it would be gauche to be worried about a job, ne c'est pas?
boelboel 13 hours ago [-]
It's a thing in other countries as well. Schools which teach the classical languages in Belgium are called humaniora (literally 'more human'). About 30% of my classes were Latin and ancient Greek but we would also have more in depth art history classes.
They would lack in other education (like math and sciences) in theory but as it's also the place the best students get their education they tend to just force you to learn both (which is against some protocols afaik).
f646993e074382f 13 hours ago [-]
n'est-ce pas ?
Sincerely,the French grammar police
triceratops 3 hours ago [-]
Surely you mean the police grammar French
vessenes 3 hours ago [-]
Alours. merci monsieur
cjbgkagh 14 hours ago [-]
Signals must to be costly in order to be effective
neaden 14 hours ago [-]
Also also hard to fake and easy to slip in. You throw in a Latin quote in your conversation and either the other person gets it and you both know you're the proper class, or they don't and you both know you're higher up the ladder than they are.
vulcan01 4 hours ago [-]
This is repeatedly used in Yes, Minister to demonstrate the large class gap between Sir Humphrey (and Bernard) and Jim Hacker.
sadboi_fandango 4 hours ago [-]
si tacuisses philosophus mansisses ;)
nitwit005 8 hours ago [-]
Remember that religious study was the driving force behind much of the education that went on for a long time. If you view some version of the bible as literal divine word, learning the language it's written in makes sense.
The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s. If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.
walthamstow 14 hours ago [-]
This is why grammar schools are so called, they're talking about Latin grammar
SoftTalker 13 hours ago [-]
The term comes from the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Yes grammar is literally part of it but more generally it's the learning of facts and definitions.
aitchnyu 13 hours ago [-]
To know another language is to possess a second soul - Big Chuck aka Charlemagne.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote an entire journal in Greek in the middle of enemy territory. "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.". Historians criticize his Greek fluency.
dcminter 13 hours ago [-]
Academia in Britain was intimately connected to membership of the church and, thus, to the ability to speak Latin to hold services. It held on beyond that tenure out of both momentum and prestige.
graemep 13 hours ago [-]
That was true in medieval times. From the start of the early modern (e.g. Henry VIII) the Church of England used English for services.
The prestige also accrued because it was the language of the educated in Europe for a long time.
neaden 6 hours ago [-]
Henry the Eighth never allowed vernacular service, that was his son Edward the VI.
dcminter 13 hours ago [-]
I agree, but latin was the language of the educated in Europe because of the (Catholic) church, and the universities pre-date the C of E by several hundred years.
I was going to answer with just "the church" but the OP specifically asked about academia.
constantius 12 hours ago [-]
It was the language of the educated because of the Roman Empire. The elites used to study how to be Roman elites before the 5th century, and when Rome fell they just continued, as it was the established sign of higher class. The elite has been educated by Cicero for the last 2 millennia, and continues to be so.
A good analogy is French being the language of the elite in Britain, well after the Normans got merged into the general population.
LtWorf 13 hours ago [-]
All academia used latin until quite recently. Because all books were written in latin.
Why do you think all animal species have a latin name? You think the ancient romans classified them?
dcminter 13 hours ago [-]
Genuinely bizarre comment. Why do you think the books were written in latin?
graemep 7 hours ago [-]
They were written in Latin until well into the modern era. Newton wrote his major work in Latin, for example.
dcminter 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, I know. Why the confidence that this contradicts anything I said?
Edit: Re-reading I realise you were reading that as me thinking the books weren't written in Latin, whereas I was trying to get the parent poster to think a bit beyond "the books were written in Latin" to wonder why they might be written in Latin long, long after the fall of the Roman Empire.
graemep 6 hours ago [-]
Yes. that was how I read it. Sorry for that but think the poster you were replying to got it either.
dcminter 6 hours ago [-]
The other poster seems to have got on the wrong end of the stick about something, but I don't think it's that.
triceratops 3 hours ago [-]
The only language that literate people in Europe had in common. Mostly because of the church.
11 hours ago [-]
LtWorf 7 hours ago [-]
Because other languages didn't have a writing system, which is why every western language is using latin alphabet now.
dcminter 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
LtWorf 7 hours ago [-]
Is there a question here or just sneering?
I don't really care to waste my time since you don't really seem interested in learning anything new. Have a nice day.
dcminter 6 hours ago [-]
Mostly sneering, if I'm honest. I love learning new stuff, but I'm not optimistic you can help there.
LtWorf 6 hours ago [-]
Go waste someone else's time then :)
engineer_22 2 hours ago [-]
the clergy.
52-6F-62 13 hours ago [-]
Who thought understanding, in depth, the fundamental bases of their legal system was a good idea?
14 hours ago [-]
pipes 8 hours ago [-]
What a fantastic read. An interesting perspective on schooling. I've been thinking a lot lately if booze is actually a useful thing, it seems the Victorians saw that it is.
rambambram 6 hours ago [-]
Alcohol is social cement in a sense. Pretty good means to achieve Gemeinschaft, I guess.
yubblegum 13 hours ago [-]
(Modulo d'oh because of the industrial revolution and the relatively easy wealth extraction that that enabled;) because the British public had internalized (I would venture to this day) the distinction between upstairs and downstairs and did not present a revolutionary risk to the elite. This then allowed the wise decision of the elite to permit social mobility to those who would work to further the broader cause of the Empire, in all domains including sciences. This is likely a very goldilock moment for any civilization: higher valuation of reason over dogma; a techological and economic production jump that enabled a categorical raising of one nation over many others; a mass population that did not think less of its 'betters' because they were slothful extravagents (as long as they 'acted' superior); and finally the creation of a productive and resourceful middle class that was satisfied to help in the administration and operation of an enterprise that was deemed a national cause: the empire.
robotresearcher 5 hours ago [-]
I think part of the story is the competent Civil Service that deployed the newly created educated middle class. This competent machinery, and very firm social norms in place, the toffs (aristocracy) could delegate a lot of managerial work in addition to the labor they’d delegated for centuries.
anonymous908213 14 hours ago [-]
Completely faulty premise. The British Empire was already globally dominant before the Victorian era. You cannot attribute success nor failure to something that came after the fact; I suppose the Victorian elites were not time travelers. That the Empire has since collapsed does not give an especially strong vote of confidence in their stewardship, however.
Moreover, the article presupposes the notion that STEM is associated with "success", but it has never been associated with the elite in any capacity. Generously, STEM might be considered elite for a peasant. Let us not forget who the current US president is, or the general makeup of both the American and British political systems. Hint: it's not composed of scientists and engineers.
pu_pe 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, exactly. British power came from technological advancements that occurred before the Victorian era: steam engine, spinning jenny, railways, electricity, etc. By the time the elite depicted in this article was running the country, they were largely inheriting that technological lead, and arguably had already lost it by the turn of the 20th century.
fragmede 7 hours ago [-]
Deepmind, one of the top three western frontier AI labs, is headquartered in London. The other two are headquartered in San Francisco.
LarsDu88 6 hours ago [-]
This really is the takeaway for me. The elites of the Empire come off as lazy and ignorant even when Britain has a massive massive technological lead from the work of organizations like the Royal Society.
The scientific advantage was enormous, and it seems like virtually none of these elites bothered to study the sciences. During that era, the elites of other countries were far, far more ignorant. Compare the socializing and partying of the Victorians with the opium addicted and superstitious Manchurian Emperors of China or the hereditary inbred nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they come off as absolutely industrious.
While Victorian elites were partying it took about 50 years for the Japanese to go from a fully Feudal Society to reaching parity with the Royal Navy (1868-1922).
awbvious 13 hours ago [-]
Disclosure: I did not read the whole thing. I, too, felt the premise was faulty and not worth reading beyond.
First paragraph: "Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours. This last point generates particular excitement, and descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors."
Why are we taking the CEOs words at face value? They are notoriously known for doing and saying whatever will most help them succeed. Do they say they do these things? Sure. Do we know if they do? If they look like they workout, they probably do, but otherwise how do we know what they do with their day? Anyone who probably actually does know probably has to sign some crazy NDA. Will lying about their routine help them succeed? Quite possibly. CEOs rarely work their way up in the same company over decades, starting on the factory floor. They are MBAs that hop from one company to the next. So they are incentivized to promote some kind of mystique about themselves to make them seem more deserving over the next hopper. Knowing the lack of ethics associated with CEOs, it is not a stretch to assume there is a lot of fluffery in their self-proclaimed routine.
mike_hearn 13 hours ago [-]
The Empire ended far after the end of the Victorian age.
mandevil 13 hours ago [-]
The decline and fall was within a lifetime. Not just a random person's lifetime, but that of a single famous individual. By any of the usual endpoints (Indian Independence, Suez Crisis, Winds of Change/South Africa's withdrawal from the Commonwealth) the Empire ended while Winston Churchill was alive- he was born in the 1874, at the height of the Empire, graduated Sandhurst and joined the British Army in 1895, took Queen Victoria's shilling in several colonial wars, then was Secretary of State for the Colonies in the 1920s, and died after Britain had withdrawn from most of her African holdings.
anonymous908213 13 hours ago [-]
Within a lifetime or so, which is certainly within a range you would expect for a global empire to collapse; that rarely happens overnight. That said, it is an unfalsifiable supposition, as much as the article's supposition is, although I framed mine in less certain terms than the article claiming it as factual that said elites were effective.
red-iron-pine 10 hours ago [-]
you're missing the point: this is a submarine propaganda piece to get the STEM nerds to low-key accept aristocracy
been seein a lot of it lately, yarvin eat your fuckin heart out
Erem 13 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, both trained engineers albeit ideologues, just received leadership roles at the pentagon
Danox 7 hours ago [-]
Mentioning those two dumb dumbs in connection with Winston Churchill, Bismarck, Cromwell, come on, they are not in the same league as Truman, Eisenhower, Grant Lincoln, Tecumseh Sherman, Theodore Roosevelt, the list is very long… Where you can dump them however is in a position right next to Pete Hegseth, or Joseph McCarthy.
jaco6 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
52-6F-62 13 hours ago [-]
Who is it sitting with Donald Trump at regular meetings? Who is it who was just put in charge of the American Military?
Are you really sure of what you are saying?
noelwelsh 13 hours ago [-]
You have several comments in this thread. They would all be more useful if you would just plainly state your point and drop the condescending tone.
52-6F-62 13 hours ago [-]
My point is asking people to sharpen theirs. When they fail to do so, the faults in their statements are exposed, and we all learn something.
As for condescension, I'll kindly note that it was you who was instructing me how to engage people and how I should be writing. When someone is writing a statement that directly contradicts even the news of the past few days, I have to ask if they are sure. I'm not sure if I can be much more deferential than that.
8 hours ago [-]
InexSquirrel 6 hours ago [-]
Personal gripe - but I absolutely despise the term 'elites'. The emotive implication is always that there is a group of people that are just categorically better than everyone else, but on closer examination you find an equally (if not more so) flawed group of people which exhibit some of the worst traits and characteristics towards their fellow humans.
Beyond their ability to extract money from anyone around them, I fail to see what is 'elite' about the group of people we currently assign the same classification to.
I'm probably just salty that I'm not rich, is all...
CPLX 6 hours ago [-]
The problem is that you are quarreling with the connotation, but the way it’s being used that you object to is a clear direct definition, specifically:
“a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence”
6 hours ago [-]
GuB-42 5 hours ago [-]
Honestly, the elites are categorically better, on average. Not flawless by any mean but in many ways superior.
The Victorian elites had better education, better diet, better lifestyles, better care, etc... So yes, it makes for smarter and healthier people.
If you mean in term of human qualities like morals, kindness, ethics, etc... This is complicated. Many of the elites also tend to be better in that regard too, with a very big caveat. The reason why they are better is simple: it is easier to be generous when you are not in the need, education can play a part too but it can go both ways.
The thing that make elites worse is mostly the consequence of their actions, the "with great power comes great responsibilities" thing. What is an inconsequential for the poor can have huge implication when the rich do it. If you decide to stop buying bread from one bakery will not impact that bakery too much, they loose and gain customers all the time. If you have a restaurant chain and decide to stop working with a baker, you may have ruined him.
That's when things become more complicated, sometimes the elites really are terrible to the people under them, sometimes, they are as good as humans can reasonably be, noblesse oblige. In history, it is not uncommon, when there is a revolution and power is given back to the people to end up very badly.
I don't know how Victorian elites sit on this scale, certainly not all bad, certainly not all good (especially to the colonies), but where exactly is hard to say.
toofy 4 hours ago [-]
> the elites are categorically better, on average
this is quite the statement. i can think of many, many ways they are not categorically “better” … many ways.
i can think of a number of “peasants” who are categorically “better” than “elites” in many, many areas.
i mean, i think most of us here have personally met at least one or two absolute failsons who are absolute dipshits yet will always fall upwards due to who their families are.
ford 13 hours ago [-]
I think that extreme prosperity like this (another example - Baby Boomers in the US) is a lagging indicator of geopolitical/industrial power.
Britain was prosperous in the 1800s because of colonialism and the industrial revolution. The US was prosperous in the second half of the 1900's because they capitalized on not being decimated by WW2.
IMO Britain's success in this era was actually sustained prosperity driven by the working class, and the failure to maintain global leadership followed from the victorian attitude of the elite.
graemep 13 hours ago [-]
I would say that being sexually abused by older boys (which what the male relationships at schools largely were) was in any way healthy of helpful to anyone.
I think its possible that humanities based education made for efficient administrators.
dash2 13 hours ago [-]
Why do you believe that most male relationships at school involved sexual abuse?
graemep 8 hours ago [-]
I mean the male romantic relationships the article mentions. I did not think this was even contentious with regard to these - its generally known. The "self-government" the article talks about was largely by giving older boys enormous power over younger ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging
Its mentioned in many memoirs and biographies. Even when apparently consensual the younger boys were far too young to meaningfully consent, especially given disparities in age and power
jaco6 2 hours ago [-]
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NordStreamYacht 5 hours ago [-]
Old boys club.
janpeuker 3 hours ago [-]
WIP drifts more and more towards 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible'.
Apart from 1 word in the intro 'parasitically' and not a single mention of slavery, child labour (but boarding schools), women (but very consistent use of 'men') or colonialism (apart from it being used as a _credential_) the entire article literally argues that 'Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg' should run a techno-oligarchy of the absolute worst people?
On the other hand the article seems to be unaware the Victorian empire went down and bankrupt because of its decadency, not being able to foresee let alone counter events such as the Indian independence, Japanese offensive and end of slavery alongside its change in economic primitives (see e.g. 'Capitalism and Slavery'). In that sense the article is maybe spot on, showing how completely disconnected the elites are?
iberator 7 hours ago [-]
Slavery and Imperialism money.
martythemaniak 14 hours ago [-]
They got nothing on American Elites - the current regime is packed to the gills with TV personalities who are incapable of actually doing their nominal jobs, yet they've all done extremely well for themselves.
This article really should not be surprising - the elite go to school to learn to rule - to socialize and develop networks of trust. Doing stuff is for the class below (PMC in today's terms).
Onavo 5 hours ago [-]
The modern elite education doesn't seem that different. If you ignore the weird Bay Area tech bro invented prep schools, your tech elites are mostly from the same few institutions. Forget about Eton, the Phillips Exeter to Ivy pipeline is pretty strong. If you look at the high school backgrounds of the Silicon Valley top founders, they are all mostly cut from the same cloth regardless of how "middle class" they all try to pretend to be.
jrflowers 4 hours ago [-]
Ctrl+f “slaves” 0 matches
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
tsunamifury 13 hours ago [-]
Those who automatically gain leverage of information network, rent seeking, and labor superiority are able to use immense leasure time to better process directional changes. This isnt' automatically true, many Victorian elites went bankrupt, but it is true for some.
What the protestant work ethic is either wrong or intentionally dishonest about, is hard work may inform you of the technicalities of labor, but it rarely gives you the time, enenrgy or education to understand its organizational effeciencies or opportunties.
This is incredibly timely as we have stories and visual evidence of our current oligarchs clearly high on drugs, drunk, or generally indifferent in a leaisure way to the serious science of running our society and business, yet seem to continually get the upper hand in doing it.
Ask yourself ... why?
Razengan 13 hours ago [-]
Something I've always wondered: What keeps the guards and thugs of the ""elite"" from just killing the elite and taking their money and position?
The boss usually doesn't have any actual physical strength (unless maybe you're Genghis Khan or something)
Imagine 2000 years ago: A merchant prepares a caravan of goods to trek across the wilderness to a far-off settlement. He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.
What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
Or a landlord hires some goons to go beat up a tenant for not paying rent on time. Why don't the goons beat up the landlord and take the income from ALL his properties?
Or, after a miserly old oligarch pays off his bodyguards a few times, they'll eventually learn where he keeps all his money. What keeps them from torturing him to give it all to them?
Why didn't Bronn just stomp Tyrion Lannister? He could literally SEE the chest where Tyrion kept all the gold! Why walk around with him and risk getting injured or slain?
toast0 13 hours ago [-]
> He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.
> What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
You shouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Let the merchant do the merchanting and make the profits and you hang out and get your paid vacation.
If you take all the profits, the merchant won't stay in the business and then you don't have a client.
AngryData 7 hours ago [-]
You need the backing of social organization. Who gets to replace the elite positions or obtains or distributes their wealth? It takes a lot of work to build real consensus for people to just be like "okay, sure!"
And nobody in power is going to allow you to organize to any real extent before interseding. They force you to play with their rules to get in the game. The only away around it is to already be a well known and publically liked figure that people will rally behind.
graemep 13 hours ago [-]
That is why societies with effective legal systems are more successful than those without.
There were legal system and courts well before 1000 years ago.
Razengan 13 hours ago [-]
I mean, Ceasar's assassination 2,069 years ago showed that no matter how much "power" the "system" agrees you have, you could be removed at any time by the person standing next to you with a dagger.
graemep 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the stronger the rule of law the greater the deterrent.
It does not really stop assassinations, but it lets the rest of us get on with life without worrying when a thug will take our stuff.
OkayPhysicist 13 hours ago [-]
All hierarchies work like that. In order for the top to gain benefit from wielding the power of the entire hierarchy of lessers, it necessarily means that the coordinated power of each level is greater than that above them (at least on average).
Take a simplified model of a king, a bunch of nobles, beneath whom are a bunch of knights, beneath whom are a bunch of serfs. Collectively, the nobles control more power than than the king. But if an individual noble defects while the others remain loyal, then the King maintains enough power to crush the uprising. So as the King, you have to proactively maintain a status quo where the nobles can't easily collectively plot against you. Classic strategies include maintaining some kind of nebulous ranking, where nobles are constantly competing with each other to garner favor, and thus likely have more to gain outing a rival noble's conspiracy than joining it, keeping the nobles sufficiently comfortable such that the risk of losing that comfort acts as friction against plotting against you, and in times of extreme distrust, keeping the nobles close at hand such that you can take decisive action against the individual noble before the forces they control can show up.
At each level of the hierarchy, recursively apply similar strategies. Nobels need to keep control of their knights, knights need to keep control of their peasants.
anigbrowl 6 hours ago [-]
Hire relatively stupid people, pay them well, have several security organs and nurture a sense of competition between them.
scared_together 13 hours ago [-]
That kind of event happens sometimes.
The first reason it’s not more common is that wealth isn’t so static. Landlords have to collect rents, oligarchs have to skim off the top of their corrupt enterprises etc. A guard who kills the landlord, then manages to organize rent collection for the benefit of other guards, has essentially become the new landlord.
The second reason is that a guard doesn’t just have to kill the landlord, a guard potentially has to kill all the other guards who want all the landlord’s wealth for themselves.
Since rent has to be collected anyway, and an individual guard has a low chance of surviving against all other guards, remaining a guard is a lower risk option.
s_dev 13 hours ago [-]
>What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
This does happen but yes obviously attempts are made to prevent it, the guards my not be familiar with the journey, other guards may be family members or trusted friends. Often then the guards become the Merchant then.
You see this with the billionaires building luxury apocalypse bunkers in New Zealand and other exotic locales that are like mini theme parks. It slowly dawns on them that when society breaks down that's exactly what it means. You can't depend on normal social norms or laws anymore, how do you stop your security team from kicking you out of your own bunker, how you do you charter a flight to your bunker? It's a problem with no guaranteed solution.
Prepping is different as it doesn't involve depending on others. Just yourself and your preparations.
Razengan 13 hours ago [-]
> It's a problem with no guaranteed solution.
You can bet they're considering AI killbots as a possible "solution" to the "hostile bodyguard" problem...
AngryData 7 hours ago [-]
Fortunately AI still can't compare to human intellegence. So they are just putting a target on their back, advertising that there is a prize inside.
asdff 8 hours ago [-]
The answer is really what power is: people willing to do something for you. This very much did happen multiple times in history what you describe. A legion of roman soldiers uplifting their general to the status of emperor and marching on rome is a common theme in history. Mob bosses realizing they have enough support from other capos to take out the don and run the operation. Maybe that holds up, maybe that doesn't. Power is sometimes quite loosely held in history. There are people who claimed title of Emperor of Rome for less than a month. It can very much be like a game of Juggernaught in Halo.
okeuro49 13 hours ago [-]
It has happened a few times in history, e.g. the French revolution and the Bolshevik revolution.
However once they killed the "elite" or "oppressor" they couldn't stop the killing, and kept redefining who the "oppressor" was, until it was anyone who had one more cow than the rest.
anigbrowl 6 hours ago [-]
Those are not good examples. OP is asking about things like military coups, where the seizure of power comes from within the existing establishment.
13 hours ago [-]
lifestyleguru 13 hours ago [-]
Why beat someone where some negative consequences are likely to follow, if the same person can give you immunity to infinitely beat and extort large group of people only for your pleasure and at your whim? This is called society.
ramesh31 13 hours ago [-]
>"Something I've always wondered: What keeps the guards and thugs of the ""elite"" from just killing the elite and taking their money?"
The answer is easy: The others did the work. Until the party was over and the money spent. The more interesting question is: why has so much from the Victorian era survived in Britain to this day, whilst it disappeared in most other countries?
Such macro effects exist today as well, in certain countries, that enjoy exorbitant privileges.
A focus on STEM is how a up and coming nation builds itself — innovation, and making something the world wants, rather than subjugation or rent seeking.
The aristocracy, certainly.
The upper middle class (i.e. professional class - I know other countries define these things differently) that provided the administrators were just good at their jobs and worked hard. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is a great insider view. Histories of the period too.
They did have a lot of privileges, especially when employed in the colonies.
This is... a mass elite or more of one that may have ever existed before including the small merchant class of the late 1800s
I have contemplated this, especially in terms of universal suffrage, where we've progressed from a male landowner with voting rights, to anyone over 18. And I've also come to find out that there are many, many homeowners today who flout zoning, insurance, and business licensing to run "cottage industries" in SFH-zoned areas, and these are often sources of clash with the HOA.
It's been mentioned on HN before how the "front lawn" and ornamental gardens are implicitly conspicuous consumption. They boast, "I own land and I can waste all this space on non-farmland! I am wealthy enough to feed my family without growing my own!" Because in feudal days, in the manor house, your estate and your land were really expected to produce revenue! The lord of a manor was duty-bound to hire a cadre of servants to care for the home and family, and hire or sublet to farmers and shepherds and others who would exploit the land. The estates, the convents and monasteries, the farmlands, the Southern plantations, these were all implicitly revenue-producing, not merely where someone lived, and then rode a horse to their office somewhere else in a different "zone". That would've been absurdly wasteful...
So today, there are people secretly painting sneakers, or selling firearms, or running a family farm to sell raw milk and mutton, or doing mani-pedis, or selling tee shirts, from their residential-zoned McMansions or even apartments. But typically a SFH, where in 2026, we've decided that if we're investing a cool million in property, it would indeed be wasteful not to exploit that, even if we need to do it on the D.L., and fight endlessly with the HOA and code inspectors, who are gonna say we need to rent office space.
Those times are gone, but the theoretical justification that makes homes income-producting assets remains.
Depends on what you consider a reverse mortgage/equity loan they plan to die before paying.
Those luxury apartments are going up everywhere, at least in the United States. $2200 a month with amenities for a one bedroom studio.
What? Do you not live in your house?
Wild random insults don't change the definition
Tell them that, not me. We live in a descriptivist universe.
The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
Back then they had a private coachman and now you have an independent contractor with the Uber app.
Interesting to see this popular myth still being regurgitated when someone as perceptive as Bertrand Russell who lived through part of it admitted it was self-aggrandizing propaganda. In truth 80% of the British "Empire" were impoverished Indians. While back at home the Blue Books were churning out shocking reports of the misery and physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers. Read the archives from the early 20th century for a real eye-opener. And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
Also regarding Chesapeake, Britain’s century of hegemony came afterwards. Trafalgar came afterwards, and mattered a lot. Losing that battle doesn’t mean the navy wasn’t globally dominant in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What’s the Bertrand Russell quote?
You can list a long series of reasons why they were weak and crap, ackshually. But presumably plenty about them was also not weak and crap otherwise they wouldn’t have ended up the global hegemon for a century. Certainly in terms of global trade dominance, at their peak nobody in history has come close, not China and not the USA.
I wonder if we could see the American elite the same way? Private schools, then greek houses (fraternities) on campuses. Fraternities seem like they are continuing the victorian elite education, focus on long lasting connections between them.
For better picture of what made Britain successful during this era look to folks like Isa Brunel... son of a French Revolutionary immigrant who was poor enough for debtors prison, but skilled enough in engineering and math to build some of the largest ships in the world.
Substantial influence. The fact that America's rich are constantly mobilizing to promote or defeat ballot measures and candidates shows the limits of their power.
By design. That's what separation of powers–and the division of power–is intended to do.
Why is populism doing so well on the right? Is that what the pools of money want?
It's doing well on both sides. The Republican Party was just more willing to compromise its values to give them power. The debate over electability in the Democratic Party, on the other hand, is taking longer to manifest, but is probably going to result in far fitter candidates than e.g. Ken Paxton.
I think it is. It’s hard to believe Musk doesn’t want China tariffs and he loves the hard right agenda. Those like Thiel have some deeply dubious views.
But it’s not so much the political views as the opportunity that exists at the moment. Give Trump enough money and you can do what you like.
The industries in Britain had access to such huge monopolistic markets, so not really a surprise.
A navy is, effectively, mulitpurpose when it comes to trading and colonies and such in a way that an army is not. Therefor countries that can invest only in a navy are at an advantage.
Also, while it is true that the british empire was very large and impressive by almost any measure, and I don't want to downplay it too much, it's worth remembering that a very, very large portion of that empire was made up of the indian subcontinent, and while they certainly had political control over the place, the actual reality was a (very) tiny elite who replaced the previous group of rulers.
Also this empire as described lasted barely 100 years.
In most cases, the indigenous populations signed their rights away first through clever negotiation and the companies subsequently used force to enforce their contractual rights. Over time, the companies themselves could not muster sufficient force to maintain status quo as they relied mainly on mecenaries who could only be sourced from the local populations and were notoriously fickle, so the Crown inevitably took charge.
The Navy was the best in the world.
There was a capitalist investment culture which linked elements of the aristocracy with inventors and traders, so ventures were relatively easy to fund.
The Royal Society helped spread scientific research and insights.
Private military ventures like the East India Company were closely linked to the state and 'too big to fail' (at least for a while.)
The educational system produced administrators, adventurers, soldiers, and politicians with an unshakeable, almost cult-like, sense of patriotic entitlement.
Britain was isolated physically, which meant the possibility of a distracting land war stopped being a risk after Waterloo, and sea war more or less after Trafalgar.
Basically England was a mature nation state with stable borders and a workable (if brutal and very imperfect) investment-oriented economy, while the other European powers were still fighting each other and - in many cases - trying to self-organise a national identity.
The article says.the education they received was less rigorous than schools in France, Germany or Italy. Despite this and the educational focus on the classics Britain made huge contributions to science and technology. Maybe schools did not matter that much educationally, but did, as you say, create loyalty and character.
That being said, mercantile navy based nations never really last beyond a few hundred years compared to the nations near the Steppe.
He didn’t do very well in his 7 minutes in politics, so maybe that’s part of it.
OK but we're talking about a period where the UK was the world's first superpower.
I understand you want to portray the despicable conditions of servants living in rich people's houses in Victorian britain but...
Wanna have a talk about the living conditions of people in, say, Eritrea at the same time? (Eritrea has never really been colonized btw so the whole "it's because of colonialism" angle doesn't really work).
Or even just the living conditions of poor people in Britain who happened to not have jobs as servants for the rich?
My great-uncle (a radiologist) and my great-aunt (she had a pharmacy) had a servant during a bit part of their lives, Tess: and she was basically part of the family. Sure she did the laundry and cooking and cleaning but she never struck me as some oppressed human being living in misery. What I remember from visiting them was my uncle in his office, always working (analyzing radio from patients, writing (snail) mails to other doctors, etc.) and Tess always working too: just a different kind of work.
People getting paid to work for other people doesn't imply slavery. We could of course also have a talk about actual slavery, what were the last countries to officially abolish it, who were the biggest slavers in the world, which countries still have actual slaves (and sex slaves) today, etc.
I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
England at its Victorian era looks like an overpowered Brazil than anything even close resembling the US now.
Indeed not. Being in service provided one of the most desirable careers you could hope for as a working class Victorian. When your options look like pit, mill, or factory, cleaning floors in a nice warm house is a good alternative. And that was just the foot in the door: there was progression available. Those jobs were hard to get, prestigious, came with their own status hierarchy, and could keep you set for life.
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.
The essay is intentionally exploring an alternative to the obvious one. I think the essay does brush off the cruelty of the empire too quickly, but cruelty isn’t inherently profitable, so there’s still some explaining to do.
This led to their decline within 200 years, compared to China or the Roman Empire. The Chinese had to deal with the incompetent Qing, but luckily they survived as a culture, and learned a lot from Deng Xiaoping.
agreed. But it takes tremendous amounts of stupidity to not be profitable while cruelly exploiting millions of people and their resources.
The great famine of Ireland, The great famine of India, and even The late Victorian Holocaust is a thing.
It is also well documented where other empire wanted to help the starving people, but denied because it would make them looked bad.
I really can not see that they are not lack of morality.
Those famines were not created by the Victorians. They were all originating in natural disasters that the locals were unable to handle for themselves. The claim that the Victorians did something immoral is an ideological one, as it's effectively a claim that even though they did try to help they could have tried even more - and not rising to that level of assistance (determined arbitrarily by moderns who were not there) was somehow evil.
This view is usually also implying without stating that it is uncharitable or morally wrong for governments to not suspend free markets and impose a communist planned economy the moment there's a natural disaster. That's a highly controversial view (and a wrong one if you want something that works), but it gets slipped into criticisms of the Victorians all the time.
This is the same logic that says shutting down USAID killed people. It's an attempt to convert the possibility of charity into a hard moral obligation - but if accepted, that would make it no longer charity.
Specifically:
• The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.
• In India they did also provide aid, organized relief camps, suspended tax collection, and spent large sums of taxes and Victorian Brits made large numbers of charitable donations. It didn't look so different to the various aid campaigns for Africa in the 20th century.
• There is no such thing as the "late Victorian Holocaust". That's a concept from a book written by a Marxist in 2000 that argues that capitalism is the same thing as genocide, and frankly seems incredibly offensive to survivors of the actual holocaust.
So we can take a look at it with 21st century eyes, and consider that actual control is a nebulous thing, and that the absentee landowners were protecting their interests, while some at least of the local ones, including anglo-irish intervened to try and help the people on their estates. but then we also have to dig into the fiasco that is the 1847 Poor Law extension relief act, which sets up systems for relief that effectively dispossess people of their land, and makes the entire thing much worse.
Did the people creating the act understand systemic behaviour well enough to predict the consequences? Do we even understand these things well enough now? The interaction between debt and market pricing, and its inevitable consequences are playing out in real time now with AI.
Ireland produced more food than it needed, even if we don't count potatoes. It was exported, mainly to England, as other markets could pay more. Plenty of other things the victorian's did to make the situation worse. Mainly thanks to free market idealists.
Pre colonial India had famines and many ways to handle them, the British did away with them. The system they set up and replaced made it a lot worse and whatever small trickle of help they provided clearly wasn't enough.
I don't know why you're trying to whitewash colonialism. That it's immoral is pretty simple, they let millions of people die for profit.
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true.
"Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically."
This is what the Japanese are still doing; the top companies seek out top achievers regardless of the major, and then employ them, and teach them the things the employee lacks inside the company.
This type of education is not for everyone, though.
Undesirable is of course is to find different by different people. The larger point is so long as the undesirable people are not overwhelming the school and bringing you down, it's actually good to meet them. Maybe you'll bring them up, but even if you don't, it helps to broaden your viewpoint of the world and helps you to not become a bigot.
That's so weird to me. How did that tradition hold on for so long? Where did it come from? Who thought that was a good idea?
Those Ivies that have more job-oriented programs tend to have (at the least) those schools looked down upon in comparison to the more 'pure' academic pursuits, e.g. Cornell's Hospitality school.
While Ivies are not tied strictly to America's true upper class, serving more as a means of entry into the upper-middle and lower-upper, this sort of signaling is an important part of some of the soft benefits they provide students -- it would be gauche to be worried about a job, ne c'est pas?
They would lack in other education (like math and sciences) in theory but as it's also the place the best students get their education they tend to just force you to learn both (which is against some protocols afaik).
The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s. If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote an entire journal in Greek in the middle of enemy territory. "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.". Historians criticize his Greek fluency.
The prestige also accrued because it was the language of the educated in Europe for a long time.
I was going to answer with just "the church" but the OP specifically asked about academia.
A good analogy is French being the language of the elite in Britain, well after the Normans got merged into the general population.
Why do you think all animal species have a latin name? You think the ancient romans classified them?
Edit: Re-reading I realise you were reading that as me thinking the books weren't written in Latin, whereas I was trying to get the parent poster to think a bit beyond "the books were written in Latin" to wonder why they might be written in Latin long, long after the fall of the Roman Empire.
I don't really care to waste my time since you don't really seem interested in learning anything new. Have a nice day.
Moreover, the article presupposes the notion that STEM is associated with "success", but it has never been associated with the elite in any capacity. Generously, STEM might be considered elite for a peasant. Let us not forget who the current US president is, or the general makeup of both the American and British political systems. Hint: it's not composed of scientists and engineers.
The scientific advantage was enormous, and it seems like virtually none of these elites bothered to study the sciences. During that era, the elites of other countries were far, far more ignorant. Compare the socializing and partying of the Victorians with the opium addicted and superstitious Manchurian Emperors of China or the hereditary inbred nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they come off as absolutely industrious.
While Victorian elites were partying it took about 50 years for the Japanese to go from a fully Feudal Society to reaching parity with the Royal Navy (1868-1922).
First paragraph: "Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours. This last point generates particular excitement, and descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors."
Why are we taking the CEOs words at face value? They are notoriously known for doing and saying whatever will most help them succeed. Do they say they do these things? Sure. Do we know if they do? If they look like they workout, they probably do, but otherwise how do we know what they do with their day? Anyone who probably actually does know probably has to sign some crazy NDA. Will lying about their routine help them succeed? Quite possibly. CEOs rarely work their way up in the same company over decades, starting on the factory floor. They are MBAs that hop from one company to the next. So they are incentivized to promote some kind of mystique about themselves to make them seem more deserving over the next hopper. Knowing the lack of ethics associated with CEOs, it is not a stretch to assume there is a lot of fluffery in their self-proclaimed routine.
been seein a lot of it lately, yarvin eat your fuckin heart out
Are you really sure of what you are saying?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
As for condescension, I'll kindly note that it was you who was instructing me how to engage people and how I should be writing. When someone is writing a statement that directly contradicts even the news of the past few days, I have to ask if they are sure. I'm not sure if I can be much more deferential than that.
Beyond their ability to extract money from anyone around them, I fail to see what is 'elite' about the group of people we currently assign the same classification to.
I'm probably just salty that I'm not rich, is all...
“a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence”
The Victorian elites had better education, better diet, better lifestyles, better care, etc... So yes, it makes for smarter and healthier people.
If you mean in term of human qualities like morals, kindness, ethics, etc... This is complicated. Many of the elites also tend to be better in that regard too, with a very big caveat. The reason why they are better is simple: it is easier to be generous when you are not in the need, education can play a part too but it can go both ways.
The thing that make elites worse is mostly the consequence of their actions, the "with great power comes great responsibilities" thing. What is an inconsequential for the poor can have huge implication when the rich do it. If you decide to stop buying bread from one bakery will not impact that bakery too much, they loose and gain customers all the time. If you have a restaurant chain and decide to stop working with a baker, you may have ruined him.
That's when things become more complicated, sometimes the elites really are terrible to the people under them, sometimes, they are as good as humans can reasonably be, noblesse oblige. In history, it is not uncommon, when there is a revolution and power is given back to the people to end up very badly.
I don't know how Victorian elites sit on this scale, certainly not all bad, certainly not all good (especially to the colonies), but where exactly is hard to say.
this is quite the statement. i can think of many, many ways they are not categorically “better” … many ways.
i can think of a number of “peasants” who are categorically “better” than “elites” in many, many areas.
i mean, i think most of us here have personally met at least one or two absolute failsons who are absolute dipshits yet will always fall upwards due to who their families are.
Britain was prosperous in the 1800s because of colonialism and the industrial revolution. The US was prosperous in the second half of the 1900's because they capitalized on not being decimated by WW2.
IMO Britain's success in this era was actually sustained prosperity driven by the working class, and the failure to maintain global leadership followed from the victorian attitude of the elite.
I think its possible that humanities based education made for efficient administrators.
Its mentioned in many memoirs and biographies. Even when apparently consensual the younger boys were far too young to meaningfully consent, especially given disparities in age and power
This article really should not be surprising - the elite go to school to learn to rule - to socialize and develop networks of trust. Doing stuff is for the class below (PMC in today's terms).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What the protestant work ethic is either wrong or intentionally dishonest about, is hard work may inform you of the technicalities of labor, but it rarely gives you the time, enenrgy or education to understand its organizational effeciencies or opportunties.
This is incredibly timely as we have stories and visual evidence of our current oligarchs clearly high on drugs, drunk, or generally indifferent in a leaisure way to the serious science of running our society and business, yet seem to continually get the upper hand in doing it.
Ask yourself ... why?
The boss usually doesn't have any actual physical strength (unless maybe you're Genghis Khan or something)
Imagine 2000 years ago: A merchant prepares a caravan of goods to trek across the wilderness to a far-off settlement. He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.
What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
Or a landlord hires some goons to go beat up a tenant for not paying rent on time. Why don't the goons beat up the landlord and take the income from ALL his properties?
Or, after a miserly old oligarch pays off his bodyguards a few times, they'll eventually learn where he keeps all his money. What keeps them from torturing him to give it all to them?
Why didn't Bronn just stomp Tyrion Lannister? He could literally SEE the chest where Tyrion kept all the gold! Why walk around with him and risk getting injured or slain?
> What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
You shouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Let the merchant do the merchanting and make the profits and you hang out and get your paid vacation.
If you take all the profits, the merchant won't stay in the business and then you don't have a client.
And nobody in power is going to allow you to organize to any real extent before interseding. They force you to play with their rules to get in the game. The only away around it is to already be a well known and publically liked figure that people will rally behind.
There were legal system and courts well before 1000 years ago.
It does not really stop assassinations, but it lets the rest of us get on with life without worrying when a thug will take our stuff.
Take a simplified model of a king, a bunch of nobles, beneath whom are a bunch of knights, beneath whom are a bunch of serfs. Collectively, the nobles control more power than than the king. But if an individual noble defects while the others remain loyal, then the King maintains enough power to crush the uprising. So as the King, you have to proactively maintain a status quo where the nobles can't easily collectively plot against you. Classic strategies include maintaining some kind of nebulous ranking, where nobles are constantly competing with each other to garner favor, and thus likely have more to gain outing a rival noble's conspiracy than joining it, keeping the nobles sufficiently comfortable such that the risk of losing that comfort acts as friction against plotting against you, and in times of extreme distrust, keeping the nobles close at hand such that you can take decisive action against the individual noble before the forces they control can show up.
At each level of the hierarchy, recursively apply similar strategies. Nobels need to keep control of their knights, knights need to keep control of their peasants.
The first reason it’s not more common is that wealth isn’t so static. Landlords have to collect rents, oligarchs have to skim off the top of their corrupt enterprises etc. A guard who kills the landlord, then manages to organize rent collection for the benefit of other guards, has essentially become the new landlord.
The second reason is that a guard doesn’t just have to kill the landlord, a guard potentially has to kill all the other guards who want all the landlord’s wealth for themselves.
Since rent has to be collected anyway, and an individual guard has a low chance of surviving against all other guards, remaining a guard is a lower risk option.
This does happen but yes obviously attempts are made to prevent it, the guards my not be familiar with the journey, other guards may be family members or trusted friends. Often then the guards become the Merchant then.
You see this with the billionaires building luxury apocalypse bunkers in New Zealand and other exotic locales that are like mini theme parks. It slowly dawns on them that when society breaks down that's exactly what it means. You can't depend on normal social norms or laws anymore, how do you stop your security team from kicking you out of your own bunker, how you do you charter a flight to your bunker? It's a problem with no guaranteed solution.
Prepping is different as it doesn't involve depending on others. Just yourself and your preparations.
You can bet they're considering AI killbots as a possible "solution" to the "hostile bodyguard" problem...
However once they killed the "elite" or "oppressor" they couldn't stop the killing, and kept redefining who the "oppressor" was, until it was anyone who had one more cow than the rest.
Read Leviathan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)