Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

The "king's men" have gone by many different names down through recorded history: knight, samurai, centurion, sheriff, mob enforcer, crusader, inquisitor, brownshirt, Red Guard, endless variations of government agents - the list goes on and on. While the names have changed over time, variations on the theme of the "king's men" have long performed the same function - enforcing the will of a self-declared ruling elite on a resistant population.

The king's men of medieval Europe provide a particularly clear example, so it's not surprising that they've also lent their particular label to the general concept. Romantic fiction would have us believe that the knights that roamed Medieval Europe were men of high honor and sterling virtue, but the reality was far different.

To the extent the romantic myths have any basis in reality, they only reflect the perspectives of members of the ruling elite who expected to benefit from the actions of the knights. The very different reality experienced by the common citizens/peasants has been largely omitted from the popular history.

The key to the power of the king's men has traditionally been the nature of the weapons of the day - or perhaps more accurately on the difficulty in effectively using the weapons of the day. A great deal of training and constant practice were necessary to skillfully use any of the traditional weapons (sword, bow and arrow, spear, etc.).

Being both productive and skillful with weapons was a very hard combination to maintain. The king's men didn't have to be productive, and so were able to devote sufficient time and effort to maintain their skills with weapons. The peasants were obliged to focus their attention on being productive, and so were at a substantial disadvantage if they dared to resist the demands of the king's men.

During the period when the imbalance of power was due entirely to ability to use available weapons, the maximum degree of abuse was limited to some extent by the remaining vulnerability of the king's men to a determined effort by peasants armed only with farming implements. It's not surprising that the development of ever more effective armor was popular with the king's men. Armor was expensive and far beyond the means of the peasants, and could provide the wearer with near total immunity to any weapons available to the peasants. At the peak of their power, the king's men were effectively immune to any resistance the peasants could mount, while the peasants were effectively helpless to resist the demands of the king's men.

It has long been recognized that power is a dangerous mistress. Folk wisdom offers the insight that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The most minimal exposure to the twisted tale of human history, or just paying too close attention to the minor annoyances of everyday life, provides endless confirmation of the distressing truth of this bit of folk wisdom.

Power isn't yours unless you can abuse it. Those who use the power with which they have been entrusted, to accomplish the purposes of those who entrusted that power to them, make themselves the servants of the powerful. Only when an individual abuses power does the exercise of power become an extension of the individual. Only the powerful can abuse their power, and only by abusing their power can the powerful prove that they are powerful.

While nominally mandated to enforce the edicts of the ruling elite, the imbalance of power between enforcers and subjects provided an irresistible incentive to abuse. This abuse was further encouraged by a perverted legal system that granted the king's men immunity for violence they committed against peasants, while a peasant daring to cause harm to a king's man was treated as a capital crime regardless of the justification.

Popular history glorifies the king's men with tales of heroic combat between knights, and rescuing fair damsels from distress. This perspective may have had some similarity to the real world experience of that tiny minority of humans that constituted the ruling elite. There have arguably been some king's men who did attempt to live truly honorable and ethical lives even in their encounters with those outside of the ruling elite. However, the real world experience of the king's men by the vast majority of mankind has been as arrogant thugs who raped, robbed, and murdered with impunity.

Not surprisingly, the mere presence of king's men intent on demonstrating that they were powerful men was a valid cause for terror among the peasants - even when they were complying with the abusive demands of the ruling elite.

The king's men were a major factor in delaying the Industrial Revolution, and perpetuating the misery and privation of the primitive feudal world. Ever since man first learned how to wield a club, both violent aggression and effective self defense have largely been a factor of weapons technology. The paradox begins to appear when you consider the state of weapons technology until just before the start of the industrial revolution. A great deal of training and constant practice were necessary to skillfully use any of the traditional weapons (sword, bow and arrow, spear, etc.). Since doing either even moderately well pretty much consumed all available time and effort, being both productive and skillful with weapons became a very hard combination to maintain.

The irony is that if you worked hard enough to produce something of value, you weren't likely to be powerful enough to defend it from any gang of thugs who wanted to take it away from you. If you were good enough at fighting to defend yourself and your possessions, you were too busy practicing with your weapons to produce anything worth defending. And even the most skillful individual could usually be overcome by a larger number of less skillful adversaries. As a result, the largest and most violent gangs of thugs were able to seize power because the only way to oppose them was to assemble an even larger - or at least more effective - gang of thugs. You were forced to become your enemy in order to fight him, inevitably destroying the very thing you sought to protect even before the first blow was struck.

Technological developments could often be more of a curse than a blessing to the common citizens. Technology that resulted in increased wealth would inevitably attract a gang of king's men intent on seizing it by force. The Chinese learned early on that nearly all change brought undesirable side effects to a defenseless peasant population - hence the ancient Chinese curse of "may you live in interesting times". This well justified aversion to change also explains why the Chinese discovered but made no meaningful use of so many technologies that played critical roles in the industrial revolution (gunpowder, printing, metallurgy, etc.).

The production-exploitation paradox dominated the human condition until it was broken by a revolutionary breakthrough in weapons technology - the personal firearm. The body counts of history adequately document the negative direct tangible effects firearms have had on various human populations. But the intangible positive effects of wide spread possession of firearms on human civilization have been far more profound - effects that are largely overlooked or even actively denied today.

The most important result was the profound restructuring of human group dynamics. The preeminence of physical violence on the individual level as the primary factor in human group dynamics, was greatly reduced by the development of effective and reliable personal firearms. For the first time in human experience, a weapon was available to the average person that with minimal training and practice would allow him to effectively defend life and property against substantial numbers of would-be parasites and exploiters.

It's no accident that the first product of the revolutionary new "mass production of identical interchangeable parts" technology so critical to our modern world was a rifle. The industrial revolution would have quickly sputtered to a halt if it had not first produced the means for its participants to defend themselves and their production. It's also no accident that America - the nation that for over a century has been the primary driving force behind the global industrial civilization - has both the highest level of personal freedom, and also one of the highest per-capita rates of personal firearm ownership. History endlessly repeats the lesson that you can't possess something that has value to others unless you're willing to defend it.

Only after it became possible for productive citizens to cost effectively defend and retain the fruits of their labor did meaningful technological progress become possible - and practical. An explosion of progress occurred as a direct result of this shift in the availability and control of "intentional violence" away from organized groups and into the hands of individual freemen. For the first time in human history, it was possible for an ambitious freeman to be both productive and effectively protect the benefits of his efforts from even the most aggressively violent parasites.

The industrial revolution became inevitable once technology had provided enough motivated individuals with sufficient personal power to change the - until then - brutally simple rules of group dynamics.

The result was the rapid progress in improving the human condition, and unprecedented prosperity of our modern world. Unfortunately, meaningful understanding of how our modern world evolved, and the unique group dynamics that make it possible, are rapidly vanishing from the public awareness. As a result of the increasing ignorance of the past there are now ever increasing short-sighted demands to repeat the tragic mistakes of past.

Incremental measures to protect and facilitate the lives and activities of government agents are having the accumulative effect of restoring the old feudal imbalance of power between the king's men and the citizens.

The police routinely protect fellow police from accountability for crimes against citizens, while any self-defense by a citizen being wrongfully assaulted by police officers is likely to result in the citizen's death.

Citizens have been reduced to seeking after-the-fact justice for violent abuses from a justice system that is heavily prejudiced toward protecting government agents from meaningful accountability to the citizens. The courts have granted the police the "right" to intentionally lie to citizens in order to deceive them into "voluntarily" allowing the police to violate their constitutional rights. But while lying to citizens has become standard practice for government agents, lying to a government agent can easily became a far more serious "crime" than whatever infraction the agent was supposedly investigating.

While lip service continues to be paid to the concept that a citizen is innocent until proven guilty by a jury of his peers, the preemptive intentional violation of his rights has become the standard practice of the police. The physical process of arresting even the most compliant "assumed to be innocent" citizen has been turned into a violent physical assault in all but name.

On a physical level, there are ongoing efforts to disarm the citizens. Incremental restrictions and prohibitions have been imposed on the range of weapons available to citizens, with the primary focus on those weapons that would be most useful in defending against abusive king's men.

Body armor is being developed to protect soldiers and police from the weapons of enemies and criminals, which seems like a good idea on an immediate superficial level. However, this also has the effect of increasing their immunity to the valid self-defense of citizens.

There is a growing public acceptance of the concept that the king's men should be physically immune to the level of force citizens are allowed to possess. The ability to overcome the level of protection provided by body armor is commonly used as justification for further restrictions on the range of weapons the citizens are allowed to possess.

Our modern world is the direct result of the empowerment of the enlightened individual freeman. A free society can only exist where the citizens are truly free of arbitrary ruling elites and the king's men who enable them. History shows all too well that freemen citizens can only be free of those who would make themselves rulers and king's men when individual freemen possess the right and effective means to defend themselves and their property from the abuses of the king's men.

The increasing power and immunity from personal accountability of the resurgent king's men should be disturbing to all who value the benefits of our modern world. The return of the king's men will also restore the conditions that historically obstructed the creation of our modern world. Regressing the balance of power between the king's men and the citizens back to its former state will ultimately also restore the misery and privation of the feudal world.