How to Enter a City Like a King
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The article discusses how historical figures entered cities in grand processions, sparking a discussion on the symbolism and implications of such entrances, as well as the contrast with modern-day leadership and societal values.
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Humbly, on a donkey. As one who comes to serve instead of one who comes to be served.
What a difference from what we can expect from our current leaders, kings or king wannabees alike.
A pretty deviance of his previous pieceful principles.
No, he didn't come to militarily overthrow the priestship.
You had some particularly colorful episodes like the year of the four emperors where Nero's regional governors revolted and he committed suicide. Galba, a general, was declared imperator by his troops, only to be overthrown and killed by the Praetorians 6 months later.
Otho seized power, but died by suicide after he was defeated by Vitellius 3 months later.
Vitellius was declared emperor by his troops after defeating Otho at Bedriacum; held onto power for 7-8 months before being defeated & executed by Vespasian at the 2nd battle of Bedriacum.
Vespasian seized power and had himself proclaimed emperor by his legions, reigning for ~10 years.
Since human history is by definition what has been recorded, a small subset of what has happened, it is roughly possible. Granted, there exist records of monarchs whose deaths were not recorded, but we can still make pretty good estimates I think.
Isn't that just dabbling into semantics? There are numerous societies & cultures we can definitely prove existed, without having further info on specifics such as their monarchs, etc. Your statement on human history sounds like, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
It's still an instance in spacetime and our detailed knowledge of it doesn't delegitimize it.
I never suggested history was reality.
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humor’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/killing-kings
https://www.heritage.org/commentary/the-man-who-would-not-be...
After the [revolutionary] war, there were calls for Washington to claim formal political power. Indeed, seven months after the victory at Yorktown, one of his officers suggested what many thought only reasonable in the context of the 18th century: that America should establish a monarchy and that Washington should become king. A shocked Washington immediately rejected the offer out of hand as both inappropriate and dishonorable, and demanded the topic never be raised again.
Frustrating to have such an authoritative sounding correction be wrong!
We owe a lot to him.
This isn't quite what you are talking about at all. The number of rich people in this example decreased on a country wide scale, but simultaneously the Nobility system was basically founded upon familial-wealth / dynasty wealth, rather than any individual having wealth. So in the old system the haves-families always had wealth and the have-nots always will not have wealth.
Well, except for the bakers dozen who tried to blow him up, but that was a couple years later.
Back in the day, with billions fewer people, you could still bind up some percentage of available labor making beautiful gates for the coronation, or staging mock battles for the king as he passed. Today, I guess people make marketing copy for cat food and run professional sports. And yet a great many of us are still alive, having continued to survive despite our countrymen spending all their available labor on frivolity.
What percentage of that "available labor" is really truly usefully bound up in making sure we don't all starve to death, get violently invaded, or die of exposure?
I wish I could see what kind of society would appear if that pool of "available labor" was turned toward purposes I personally consider worthy--caring for the weak, erecting and protecting great monuments and cities and wild areas, etc. Obviously this has been attempted before in various different regimes--merely having full dominion over all "available labor" and turning it toward "worthy purposes" does not automatically create a great nation, as the USSR and China found out--but it doesn't stop me from wondering, if Man wasn't so busy making gates for the king or increasing user conversion from 17.805% to 17.873%, what would that society look like?
What intrigues me is that all of it is considered "economic activity", and counts toward GDP and is considered beneficial, even flower arranging and witchcraft accessories and cloud-connected sneakers. Somehow that assessment ends up being correct, because nobody knows for sure which parts are bullshit.
I am intrigued by the same thing you are. How does it all count as economic activity? What percentage of the flower-arranging has to be done to ensure that the medicine-manufacturing can be done? It's such an endless chain--"I pay the credit card fee on my purchase of custom stationary to the credit card company and the credit card company rolls it up in its revenue projections and forecasts a more profitable Q3 so their stock price increases so the portfolio-holding lenders are more lenient with their loan terms so Pfizer takes out a larger loan to build a factory in Bangalore to run the manufacturing lines..."
If the custom-stationary buying stops, so does the factory-loan lending... and vice versa.
I note that Pfizer's new factory is a venture, and although it's medical it's debatably not necessary for survival: it's not part of homeostasis.
But these costs are basically taxes in a different form.
There is a slight truth to the conspiracy theory that "doctors keep people sick because it's good for business", in the same way that building appliances that last forever isn't a good business strategy.
I'd reframe that as people don't want to pay for an appliance that lasts forever.
There are exceptions. Things built for professional use are of a much higher quality. For example, restaurant grade kitchen equipment and appliances are far more durable than consumer ones. Of course, they cost quite a bit more, too.
People want to be free. Being infantilized by being fed, sheltered, and protected by others rots the soul.
One of the proudest days of my life was when I told my dad I no longer needed any support from him. Unexpectedly, my relationship with him suddenly changed. He started treating me like a man, rather than a child.
There's a short story about a man who dies and goes to heaven. A person appears, and says the man can have whatever he wants. The man asks for this, and that, and voila! He gets it. Whatever he wants. His slightest wish gets fulfilled immediately.
But after a while, he gets bored. He asks the person, he didn't think heaven would be so boring. The person replies, you aren't in heaven, you're in hell.
Be careful what you wish for.
I'm pretty sure it's all bullshit and the universe is just random chaos, unless you could convince everyone that there's some kind of objective higher purpose that they all should be striving towards. People just figure out which things they believe to be non-bullshit and go in that direction. Perhaps the only guaranteed purpose for life is to continue itself, which seems awkwardly recursive.
Or as Terry Pratchett put in Hogfather:
"Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet," Death waved a hand, "And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged."
People have a ton of different values, but a lot of general agreement, because this is some knowledge about reality, moral knowledge, a work in progress.
I really like this angle and do find my own solace in this approach, but I've never quite been able to convince myself that it's not essentially just an artificial or manufactured purpose. Which is fine. It's useful for my own goals and personal growth. But it still feels like a very localised view. If there is some kind of global maxima, I certainly haven't heard about it yet.
We can do targeted resource allocation for what we deem promising threads.
We can identify simple failure states to avoid for known recurring issues (plant food now or starve next year.)
But for the vast majority of areas a new venture is required by new people creating new things.
Humans don't simply find, but generate meaning (some that coheres only in imagination, some that coheres to facts in the larger world, some that do both over time.) human meaning generation is a kind of random walk where each human is the write head for a path, the causal chain is too complex for any given discovery or "economically" useful thing to be easily predicted.
Destroy art and maybe people will become too depressed to do anything, or will lack enough noise/inspiration in their thinking to have an insight.
Many of these things are impossible to unwind.
Without a tractor, there'd be a major percentage of the population working on farms.
Which is to say, a well run society should have room for BOTH frivolity AND supporting the general welfare of its people. Perhaps our current troubles are the result of many people thinking that supporting the general welfare IS frivolous.
- form a more perfect Union,
- establish Justice,
- insure domestic Tranquility,
- provide for the common defence,
- promote the general Welfare, and
- secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Yeah, seems like a good idea to me
Sports are part of what makes life worth living though :)
It peaked at under 2.5% of GDP in the late 1990s, and is significantly less now.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/oct/rise-digi...
As of 2025, advertising is responsible for approximately 21.9% of the total U.S. economic output, according to a study by S&P Global Market Intelligence commissioned by The Advertising Coalition. [prnewswire.com]
Here are some key figures from the study:
Total U.S. GDP (2024): $47.5 trillion
Advertising-driven economic activity: $10.4 trillion
Direct advertising spend: $491 billion
Jobs supported by advertising: 29 million (about 18.3% of the U.S. workforce)
So while direct advertising expenditures account for about 1–2% of GDP, the broader economic impact—including downstream sales and employee spending—brings the total contribution to nearly 22% of GDP.
That’s not advertising, that's almost entirely sales “stimulated by” advertising, which are, even in theory, sales the particular seller would not have made without advertising, but not, even in principal, necessarily additional economic activity from advertising.
So even in expanding “advertising” to “due to advertising”, its at best a vast overestimate (and the “jobs supported by advertising” statistic is downstream of that statistic and suffers the same problem when treated as if it were additional rather than largely reallocation.)
I know about jarritos too and don’t recall having seen any ads for them.
If ads were useful and benefited my life, I’d watch them on purpose instead of them being forced on me.
You remember Liberty Mutual.
> them being forced on me
That's the price you pay for "free" streaming.
your original pitch was that without ads I’d never know about new products that I might legitimately be interested in. The vast majority of ads are not that
i also see ads in digital billboards and there’s nothing I can do about that
And I stand by that.
For example, in the 80's I subscribed to computer magazines for the ads. The same for hot rod magazines.
World power consumption is around 20 TW (of which around 3 TW electricity), that's very roughly 2 kW per person (obviously not equally distributed).
A human consumes around 8600 kJ of energy in their food per day, or roughly 100 W (search for "basal metabolic rate"). Most of that is needed just to keep the body running, but around a quarter or so can be converted to physical work: an average human can perform some 75 W of physical work over an 8h shift (75 W for 1/3 the time, so 25 W on average).
That means that everyone has (on average) around 80 "people" worth of energy working for them (2000 W of energy consumption per person / 25 W of average usable energy output per person).
If 745 is one horsepower, is 25 W one personpower?
And the point is that we use some 2000 W, so have the equivalent of 26.6 people working for us nonstop (requiring 80 people total on 7 day a week shift work).
But they were unable to generalize this.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, various companies sprang up to sell Soviet goods. I bought a marvelous small telescope, an old-fashioned electro-mechanical telephone, and a mechanical submarine clock. (Note that these were all obsolete technology.) They were all made by former military suppliers.
How many very smart, motivated folks do we have working on essentially ads and related indirect monetization strategies for the very small amount of the internet is the "good stuff"
"Productivity" for the sake of what?
Work for the sake of work is worthless.
Peoples' wants are unbounded.
which is to say a lot of needless things are still highly desired.
The first is that where labor is allocated is a function of culture. We currently live in a consumerist culture. Consumerist culture wants cheap stuff and lots of it and it wants it now. Convenience is god. And we want money so we can keep buying more things and newer things, so we work and work to make that money. Old things are frozen into museum pieces alien to everyday life instead of undergoing use and development and enrichment, because they make no sense to us and we can't develop things as we don't have a direction. So whereas a gothic church may have previously received baroque spires if the gothic was meager, today, most modifications are bound to look like a downgrade. Think of the really awful proposals for the rebuilding of Notre Dame. Save for a few brain damaged architects, nobody liked them.
The second is that leisure is the source of all culture. I'm not talking about recreation or relaxing by the pool with a piña colada (nothing wrong with that per se, but this is not what leisure means). Leisure is activity that isn't oriented toward practical ends, at least not in the intention. They are the activity of a free man, at least at that moment. This spirit of leisure was at times festive, at times contemplative and worshipful (the highest form of leisure), at times something artistic and musical. Today, we live in a world of total work. Work defines us. Whereas the cultures that produced the beautiful architecture we all admire today worked for the sake of leisure, today we work for the sake of work. We are engines running in a parking lot. We can rev them at high horsepower, perhaps even move aimlessly around the parking lot, but we aren't going anywhere. We don't have an address to go to.
The word "culture" is related to the word "cult" and "cultivation". Whereas in previous ages people believed in the transcendent end of human persons, a belief that ordered their lives and generated their culture, what does a consumerist culture take as the highest good? What is the end of our lives if not the ash heap? This can only produce weariness and distraction and entertainment that has no patience for authentic play or for the kinds of efforts that outlive us. There is no love in consumerism. There is no heroism. There is no genuine awe inspired by a great, honest-to-God promise. There is no festivity or celebration. The salt has lost its flavor and is good for nothing except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
A large amount of labour is dedicated to the search problem. “What is valuable?” is a tough question. Pepper, nutmeg, mace made us a seafaring people. Easy to think “what if we only did the stuff we need” but is meaningless sentence. “What we need” is not something someone can state.
"One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat."
What an insult to human dignity ugly architecture is. You can infer the manner in which human life is valued in a culture by the architecture and the art it produces, especially relative to its means.
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