Are You Governed or Ruled?

It is always a mix of both - but the current trend is not your friend.

If you are reading this, chances are that you live in the “developed” world. You likely live in a rich country and a democracy at that. You learned in school that feudal governance systems dominated the civilization of most humans for hundreds of years until markets slowly began to develop, and over time, capitalism became the dominant economic system around the world.

Those in the Global South may want to have a word with me about the colonialism and exploitation that fueled capitalism and helped build the world today. They are not wrong. But I’m not going to talk about that today. I’ve touched on that before and will talk about it again. That deserves its own essay.

But today I want to talk about feudalism. Not the feudalism from the Middle Ages, but the feudalism or neo-feudalism of today.

Feudalism means unequal legal rights for different citizens, with commoners enjoying fewer rights and legal protections than the nobility. Feudalism is also characterized by vast income inequality and the dominance of a small group of elites over society. Those elites write the laws, hold the power, and protect that power. The peasants lack social and economic mobility.

That paragraph describes the life of the average citizen today as well as it does a serf from the 12^th century.

We just have nicer breads and circuses than the serfs of yore.

Democracy on the march … Into a ditch.

The ancient Greeks may have invented democracy, but it has grown far beyond those humble city-state origins, and we are now looking increasingly like we can’t be bothered with the upkeep required. This “price of freedom is eternal vigilance” bullshit is a hassle.

If you want to take a deep dive into how corporations have become our new feudal Lords, I recommend; The Rise of Neo-Feudalism - The American Prospect by Katherine V.W. Stone, Robert Kuttner from April 2020.

The article walks through how corporate America has gamed regulation and law through lobbying and tenacious efforts over the decades to erode the legal protections and regulatory oversight that used to protect us. The story is similar in other “developed” countries. Corporations have worked to develop self-regulating organizations (SROs) that offer a lighter touch than regulation and carve out exemptions to the law and private law such as arbitration to ensure they always have the upper hand. From finance to pharmaceuticals, over the years, governments have handed over some policing and enforcement duties to industries themselves.

I don’t know about where you live, but where I live (America), in the words of Leonard Cohen, “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.” Our political system is well understood to be a racket for special interests to keep the powerful, powerful and the rich, rich. Upward mobility has largely left the scene, and the American dream keeps getting negotiated downward, from a house in the suburbs to Netflix and chill. The younger generations don’t think that economic upward mobility is gone. They know it (See chart below).

Source: The Visual Capitalist: 2020

The story is much the same around the world. This next chart, also from the visual capitalist (check them out please), shows that about 1% of people in the world control about 45% of the wealth (this has probably increased since 2021). Those at the bottom of the distribution, 55% of the world’s population, control only 1.3% of the world’s wealth.

Source: The Visual Capitalist: 2021

That math looks quite feudal to me.

The move away from democracies is slow but steady. It remains to be seen if we can reverse it. The world has become less democratic in recent years. The number of democracies in the world reached an all-time high in 2016, with 95 electoral democracies. In 2023, their number has fallen to 91 countries.

The real story is somewhere in between.

Of course, no one lives in a perfect egalitarian democracy where 100% of the people vote on every decision and all wealth is distributed equally. That is not a goal and should not be. But power and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few isn’t good for society either. The more feudal our systems get, the fewer rights we have and the less true “pursuit of happiness” is possible.

A society where upward mobility is declining, and the concentration of wealth is accelerating isn’t healthy. It also always ends badly. At some point, the peasants are pushed too far and things like the guillotine get invented. Check your history. We have been here before. People flirting with authoritarianism around the world seem to forget that throughout history, it is the exception, not the rule for power to be transferred peacefully. Once your orderly system of governance is gone, it is gone, for a very long time.

Yesterday, I polled my readers to see where they thought they fit on the free/feudal scale. The sample size is small at 40 people. The poll is also not scientific, consisting only of people with nothing better to do than read this blog. I asked, “Do you feel more governed or ruled”. The result showed that 60% of people feel more ruled, while 40% feel more governed.

I was expecting something closer to 50/50, so maybe I was too optimistic. I encourage professional polling services to use this question in the future. I’d love to see the folks at Gallup run a poll with this question and see the reaction if they get similar results.

Stop complaining about your wonderful life.

I sometimes use the phrase, “Stop complaining about your wonderful life,” when one of my children or a friend is complaining about a very first-world problem. I can see someone saying the same to me upon reading this essay.

I do have a pretty wonderful life. I do have quite a bit of privilege, and I will likely be able to ride out the coming catastrophes – with high cost and discomfort - but ride them out all the same.

But that misses the point. “Stop complaining about your wonderful life,” is reserved for complaints about things that won’t matter tomorrow, or even five minutes from now. I reserve the right to complain about existential threats to humanity that are on track to destroy our civilization.

I think that’s fair.

Feudalism may be good for business – but it is bad for the peasants.

A more feudal society is good for the business of business, but it is bad for the business of living. As more power and wealth are concentrated in fewer hands, the hands that control those businesses will thrive. Yes, climate change and the destruction of the natural world will have negative consequences for all people, including those with wealth and power. But those with wealth and power figure – probably correctly – that they can still have access to food, water, shelter as well as their wealth and power, in whatever world emerges in the coming decades.

The lives of everyone else – and that is most of us – will slowly get worse and worse. To get an idea of what this future will look like, read the excellent essay (1) This is how a bubble ends: not with a bang, but a discount. (substack.com) from Alex Steffan. Alex talks about the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl in Houston, Texas. Beryl was a rather modest Hurricane, but as of this writing, five days after the storm, nearly 1 million people in Houston are still without power in temperatures that reach the mid-90s F in the hottest part of the day. Beryl is the second big storm in as many months that has knocked out power in Houston for a considerable time – in the heat of the Summer.

We will see the scene currently playing out in Houston many times in the future and with more frequency as the years go by and the environmental damage mounts. Flooding, fire, drought, famine, water scarcity, food scarcity, inflation, mass immigration, and other miseries will become increasingly common for the peasants in the coming years.

Not for the Kings and Lords. They will be fine.