Consume Product

The topic of feudalism is complex and it doesn't help that communists / marxists tried to argue that it was part of the natural progression of economies and so put it at a lower state than the so-called "free market" or as they say "capitalism" that we live in today.

Feudalism, as actually practiced, and the practice was not standard by any stretch of the imagination, is probably a better way to ensure the freedoms of the lower classes and keep the upper classes honest than any other system I can come up with. When you boil it down to its essence you see in it the profound respect for human rights and reverence towards God and creation.

To wit, understand first that the Roman Empire merely enforced a sort of what we call "capitalism". Their brand of capitalism allowed regular people to acquire and use armies, and political offices were for sale to the highest bidder, but nonetheless the average Roman citizen could buy and sell and work as he pleased, save for his future and so on and so forth. If anything, it's probably closer to what we have in the US than any other historical system that we have a lot of knowledge of.

When the Roman Empire "collapsed", people didn't know it. They just thought it was another invader taking the emperor's throne for themselves, the same as it has always been done. The significance of the fall wasn't some event but a shift in how people organized. No longer were people deferring to the Roman Empire. It gradually became an honorary title with few if any real powers. Instead, people organized their own little kingdoms and fiefdoms.

If you want to understand what is coming next in US history -- I believe it is the middle ages all over again, so it's important to understand how it developed and especially WHY it developed and was sustained for nearly 1,000 years, and what parts of it are still present today.

To summarize what I understand of it, it is very simply this: People swear loyalty to each other, and they count on each other to be there when they are most needed, and people's worth is determined by how well they execute on their sworn oaths. That's it. Lords could only accumulate as much power as they could reciprocate. If the lord wasn't able to effectively manage his domain, then his tenets would leave and go elsewhere until he got his act together, or he died and someone else replaced him, or worst of all, a higher noble threw him out. We often equate warfare with the middle ages but the truth is that it was a relatively peaceful time in European history. Before and after the Middle Ages wars were very much more common and more severe. The Middle Ages provided a framework for wars, but more importantly, a way to fight wars without destroying the farmland or the peasants who worked it.

At no point during the Middle Ages were lords and kings able to treat their subjects as slaves. It wasn't until AFTER the middle ages that we saw kings begin to imagine that they had absolute power and that subjects were mere pawns on a board to be dispensed with as they pleased. And as we saw under communism, as a society moves more towards "enlightenment" the value of human life drops rapidly.