Kingship By Consent

No I haven’t gone Monarchist — snort, giggle — I’ve also not been replaced with a pod person.

However work on the second book of Chronicles of Lost Elly — NOT THE SECOND VOLUME, that’s out, the second book Orphans of the Stars — brought up the concept and then I ran into some stuff on Twitter, which made me realize there are instances of that — sort of — in our own world.

Okay, to some extent kingship, like all forms of government, is always “by consent”. Piss off enough people who are strong/rich enough to unseat you and you’re going to have a problem. (Communism, of course, solves that problem by making everyone not the dictator and henchmen poor and powerless. It’s a choice for them. Not the people. In that sense it’s most closely related to feudalism, and I suspect Europe would still be locked down in THAT if it weren’t for the Black Death upending everything.)

However in small enough or in some cases distributed enough (later) systems, the kingship is more by consent than not. This is particularly the case if the king doesn’t really have armies. Or does, but it’s no more than some of his vassals can command.

Which is the situation in Elly, because small, distributed population, primitive armament and some of the clans, say, or even rich tradesmen can command a larger force than the king’s dedicated “personal guard”. In primitive fighting the size of the army is a lot more important than the proficiency, to a point, so that’s that.

And the problem is since they are also more … um…. primitive in communications — which weirdly isn’t any or much different than the situation we’re in, where we have massively unreliable mass media, and a zillion small voices often contradictory or falling for Mass Media’s bs. — it means that any rumor that catches hold of the people, or acquires legs of some sort can mean the kingship will be toppled. If not by killing the king (which might or might not be difficult) by disengaging from him so completely that he might as well not be there.

They have in fact, in their very long history had several situations like that, when it then takes a strong and charismatic king, with an ability to use rumor and story to his advantage to become a king again in anything but name.

So, why was I thinking about that for any other reason than that I’m writing the book. Because it occurred to me that it applies in all sorts of ways in our world to things that aren’t exactly monarchies.

For instance the Papacy. There is a concerted campaign to discredit Pope Leo, against all possible sanity or sense. No, seriously, they are calling him “Obama’s Pope” when the man has more than once possibly stretched his neck out too far to signal “I’m not a leftist.” I covered some of it here on the blog, but yesterday I sort of lost it at instapundit and blasted one of my favorite blogs for a serious case of head in ass. Here.

Note I’m not defending Leo because I’m Catholic. I was one of the first/most prominent Catholic bloggers to make bear and Pope jokes about Francis the excessively woke. I like to think that even if I weren’t Catholic I’d be defending Leo. A) because it burns me when someone is accused of exactly the opposite of what they’re doing, thereby catching the same flak from the right he gets from the left. b) if the left really wants you to hate him that badly, then you probably shouldn’t. Particularly since he seems not to like commies.

And every time I do this someone is like “Well, then why doesn’t he come right out and say it?” Well, because he is a king by consent. Yes, once upon a time the pope had armies and could send them out on various punitive expeditions. But right now, um…. no. And frankly the lower offices can and often do ignore him. So he has to be agreeable enough that people don’t simply tune him out and strong enough that he can do something other than wear the crown. Or in the Pope’s case the funny hat thing.

(Oh, I suspect the reason for the campaign to discredit him is that Leo has already once come out against mass migration from the third world. And if he can carry or make that point bear fruit and convince third worlders they shouldn’t be doing this, a lot of grifters within the church structure lose their rice bowls. Not to mention a lot of other grifters not in the church, and oh, yeah, the people who hope to wholesale replace their electorate.)

Anyway, so that’s why he doesn’t come right out and say stuff.

However, while on that, I’ve been reading Roger L. Simon’s American Refugees book. Thank you to whoever linked it. I’m reading it for obvious reasons: I are one. And it’s a fascinating mix of matching my experience and places I giggle, because — I like Roger. He was my remote boss when I worked for PJM and though we never had much contact, I find him eminently readable and interesting but — liberals who got red pilled have some interesting illusions, like his idea that the left ever actually was for free speech, and it wasn’t a from-the-lips-out and no such things behind the scenes (like how they controlled mass media and kept conservatives away) thing.

Anyway, one of the things he ran into which we did also is the existence structures of power in the red states we moved to, some of which bear a striking resemblance to kingship by consent, because there’s really no reason for locals to put up with corrupt or incompetent petty pseudo-GOP people, except personal loyalty and “I remember when his daddy…”

I’m not in politics. Well, other than this blog, and the fictional politics in my books. But if I were, that would be a b*tch to deal with, particularly since we would be dealing with it as refugees/new comers, ie. handicapped by “y’all not from around here” and “You can’t just that because you just arrived.”

So, definitely to topple the petty small local kings, you need some kind of power: either local ties that allow you to say “yeah, and I wasn’t that impressed by his daddy, either” OR a rumor mill worthy of a dystopian novel. (Which to an extent is what the left employed to flip those petty kings on the right.)

Anyway, I really don’t have any other point except that I find people don’t understand this. We are so entrenched in an elective system that we assume everyone is able to behave like an elected leader.

While in fact, for those whose power is more granted by prestige and tradition, they have to be almost Machiavellic to manage to do anything they actually want to do.

And many are. But they baffle those watching them. Having figured it out, I wanted to share the insight.