Why were Victorian elites so effective? | Hacker News Reader

Why were Victorian elites so effective?

worksinprogress.co

62 pointskarakoram108 comments

On the last supposition: they've managed something better for themselves, which is an order where they have substantial control over public policy without being subject to the full brunt of public inquiry or responsibility. You would have to force Sam Altman to run for office; Oprah famously laughs when questioned about pursuing the presidency.

Seems like an accurate picture of the Victorian elite, but it sounds like they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked. That was success "on their own terms," as the article puts it, but not something to emulate.

I believe Victorian wealth disparity was on par with today's in America -- perhaps America has slightly more "power law" wealth at the very top of the percentage charts -- but for those in charge of new empires, maybe this article will be very useful and remind them it's better to go party in SF than it is to put in too much time in the office.

Not in the least. Today in the US less than 1% of the population works as home service. In victorian England it was around 10%.

The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.

That's an unusual measure -- and I like it. I wonder what those percentages are in very wealthy communities in America, e.g. Greenwich and surroundings, Nantucket, Hamptons plus labor communities west.

I'm not sure that demonstrates anything. That just demonstrates that people work different jobs than they did back then; it doesn't tell us anything about wealth distribution.

21% of US jobs are service occupations. All you've really done is establish that cars exist so the wealthy have deemed it no longer necessary to allow filthy peasants to live in their mansions.

Nowadays service jobs are externalized. Try to compare how big chunk of the population are in service industries now and then.

Back then they had a private coachman and now you have an independent contractor with the Uber app.

We've always have public coachmen and public bars and restaurants. The fact that there are many more now only means a lot more people can afford them.

Isn't it exactly how the tech industry largely operates today?

Depends who you mean by the elite.

The aristocracy, certainly.

The upper middle class (i.e. professional class - I know other countries define these things differently) that provided the administrators were just good at their jobs and worked hard. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is a great insider view. Histories of the period too.

The upper middle class were decidedly not elite at that time and very much "working class plus"

Still are, arguably. Dependent on earnings rather than wealth.

They did have a lot of privileges, especially when employed in the colonies.

I think we are entering a wierd era where a huge population (baby boomers) are returing with incredible passive wealth compared to any other working class era in history.

This is... a mass elite or more of one that may have ever existed before including the small merchant class of the late 1800s

Baby boomers are aged between 66 and 80, so most of them have already retired. We are not entering the era, we are in it.

And though some are quite wealthy, the average Boomer net worth of about $1.6MM is concentrated in the wealthy top few, like any other demographic. The median Boomer has a net worth of $300-$400K, the largest fraction of which is probably their house (so not income-producing), and that isn't really a lot to live off of in 2026.

Very true. And the way things are going, just in the English-speaking countries, United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, those between 18 and 40 are having more trouble buying that house or condo.

Those luxury apartments are going up everywhere, at least in the United States. $2200 a month with amenities for a one bedroom studio.

On other social media platforms, the boomers are aged 28 to 107. And I'm not exaggerating, you can check for yourself. The muddying of definitions is the root of all evil.

Rent seeking how? As the article says, most government positions were unpaid and to be an MP required paying all your own election expenses out of pocket, which were huge. They did it for the prestige and social rewards, not financial. Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free.

Careful, that's some of that stuff that they teach in humanities and classics courses. You know, what is being labeled as wasteful or impractical in this thread.

And to get a promotion in the army you had to buy it.

Its rent seeking because they’re using the government role to bring in the dough for themselves after they get the role. It just takes a bit of money upfront similar to a landlord buying a house. That’s also how you restrict government roles to the rich who only use it for personal gain. Similar to people who believe that Trump is generously by “donating” his salary back but not realizing that he and his family are earning far more in bribes and kickbacks using his position.

You're asserting a lot of things that aren't in the article. If you want to argue Victorian-era MPs were all motivated by corruption then go ahead but you'll need to cite strong evidence for that, because the general consensus was that MPs of that time were not particularly corrupt. As the article says, they didn't even spend much time on lawmaking at all, so there wasn't a lot of legislation to abuse.

I know! How could these literal landlords be rent-seeking by taking unpaid positions of political influence to increase literal rental income and protect their wealth?

The first rule of success is to own your definition of success.

What if you fell into it by accident? I fell into it because I like computers. and the design department I worked in at the time. started an investment club.

I don’t think that’s a helpful explanation. This period was the age of empires. Why were the Victorian elites so much more successful at it than their counterparts?

One way of thinking about it, the success of the elite (meaning the aristocracy) may be separate from the success of the empire. Most of the work behind the latter was done by the industrial bourgeoisie, engineers, workers, colonized people, etc., so the question is, how big a direct impact did the elite have on the empire? How successful they were individually is a different question.

Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants who did their laundry, cooked their food, poured their Port and generally did all the work.

This is addressed near the beginning as the Orthodox view:

> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true.

Also:

"Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically."

And also millions of poor and suffering people from the colonized countries. Millions of them died of famine. I'm not sure how much we can learn from those elites.

other than the fact that success is mostly just luck (and lack of morality), not hard work.

I wouldn't say there was a relative lack of morality compared to other elites. Quite the opposite actually.

I don't know man.

The great famine of Ireland, The great famine of India, and even The late Victorian Holocaust is a thing.

It is also well documented where other empire wanted to help the starving people, but denied because it would make them looked bad.

I really can not see that they are not lack of morality.

Elites are generally immoral, even today. I mean only in relative terms, they were no worse than others. On the positive side, they did quite a few pro-social things as well (abolition of slavery, for example).

This always comes up.

Those famines were not created by the Victorians. They were all originating in natural disasters that the locals were unable to handle for themselves. The claim that the Victorians did something immoral is an ideological one, as it's effectively a claim that even though they did try to help they could have tried even more - and not rising to that level of assistance (determined arbitrarily by moderns who were not there) was somehow evil.

This view is usually also implying without stating that it is uncharitable or morally wrong for governments to not suspend free markets and impose a communist planned economy the moment there's a natural disaster. That's a highly controversial view (and a wrong one if you want something that works), but it gets slipped into criticisms of the Victorians all the time.

This is the same logic that says shutting down USAID killed people. It's an attempt to convert the possibility of charity into a hard moral obligation - but if accepted, that would make it no longer charity.

Specifically:

• The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.

• In India they did also provide aid, organized relief camps, suspended tax collection, and spent large sums of taxes and Victorian Brits made large numbers of charitable donations. It didn't look so different to the various aid campaigns for Africa in the 20th century.

• There is no such thing as the "late Victorian Holocaust". That's a concept from a book written by a Marxist in 2000 that argues that capitalism is the same thing as genocide, and frankly seems incredibly offensive to survivors of the actual holocaust.

It´s true that some Victorians organised aid for Ireland during the famine, it is also true that other Vicorians, English origin who were landowners in Ireland courtesy of the Cromwell invasion in the 1650's, exported large amounts of food from Ireland during the famine, to pay some of the bills mentioned in the article. Many land owners in Ireland were heavily in debt, with mortgages on their property. Potatoes were peasant food, and the failure of the crop, combined with lack of control over the food suppliers, led to the death and forced immigrations of millions. The population of Ireland is still lower in the 21st century than it was in the 19th.

So we can take a look at it with 21st century eyes, and consider that actual control is a nebulous thing, and that the absentee landowners were protecting their interests, while some at least of the local ones, including anglo-irish intervened to try and help the people on their estates. but then we also have to dig into the fiasco that is the 1847 Poor Law extension relief act, which sets up systems for relief that effectively dispossess people of their land, and makes the entire thing much worse.

Did the people creating the act understand systemic behaviour well enough to predict the consequences? Do we even understand these things well enough now? The interaction between debt and market pricing, and its inevitable consequences are playing out in real time now with AI.

Countries that were not under an empire also had famines and other disasters (China had a civil war with 50 million killed, IIRC) as well as endemic practices like slavery.

Sure. But we're discussing Victorians here.

It did mention the colonial empire up near the beginning.

> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.

> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.

The essay is intentionally exploring an alternative to the obvious one. I think the essay does brush off the cruelty of the empire too quickly, but cruelty isn’t inherently profitable, so there’s still some explaining to do.

World War I killed so many victorian elites off and destroyed their culture because it proved honor culture inferior to industrialized killing

> cruelty isn’t inherently profitable

agreed. But it takes tremendous amounts of stupidity to not be profitable while cruelly exploiting millions of people and their resources.

Because it was not any different from any other aristocracy in the world at the time. The question the article is trying to answer is "why Britain?" Of all the competing european empires what made that particular one especially successful?

Britain had large amount of colonies and therefore access to a large market. The markets were designed to extract wealth, see for e.g. https://averyreview.com/issues/57/empire-salt-tax

The industries in Britain had access to such huge monopolistic markets, so not really a surprise.

I love comments like this... they say "well like just build amazon, easy as that"

The legal framework was a big part of the puzzle. Britain's lawyers and legal system were head and shoulders above their peers. Colonies and companies in charge were controlled by complex legal contracts guaranteeing profits to those in charge, from the Crown down.

In most cases, the indigenous populations signed their rights away first through clever negotiation and the companies subsequently used force to enforce their contractual rights. Over time, the companies themselves could not muster sufficient force to maintain status quo as they relied mainly on mecenaries who could only be sourced from the local populations and were notoriously fickle, so the Crown inevitably took charge.

The Industrial Revolution hugely increased production and improved logistics.

The Navy was the best in the world.

There was a capitalist investment culture which linked elements of the aristocracy with inventors and traders, so ventures were relatively easy to fund.

The Royal Society helped spread scientific research and insights.

Private military ventures like the East India Company were closely linked to the state and 'too big to fail' (at least for a while.)

The educational system produced administrators, adventurers, soldiers, and politicians with an unshakeable, almost cult-like, sense of patriotic entitlement.

Britain was isolated physically, which meant the possibility of a distracting land war stopped being a risk after Waterloo, and sea war more or less after Trafalgar.

Basically England was a mature nation state with stable borders and a workable (if brutal and very imperfect) investment-oriented economy, while the other European powers were still fighting each other and - in many cases - trying to self-organise a national identity.

The UK, not England!

The article says.the education they received was less rigorous than schools in France, Germany or Italy. Despite this and the educational focus on the classics Britain made huge contributions to science and technology. Maybe schools did not matter that much educationally, but did, as you say, create loyalty and character.

How's this different from modern-day "aristocracy"? Don't they get servants who do their laundry, cook their food, pour their Port, and generally do all the work?

> Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants ...

OK but we're talking about a period where the UK was the world's first superpower.

I understand you want to portray the despicable conditions of servants living in rich people's houses in Victorian britain but...

Wanna have a talk about the living conditions of people in, say, Eritrea at the same time? (Eritrea has never really been colonized btw so the whole "it's because of colonialism" angle doesn't really work).

Or even just the living conditions of poor people in Britain who happened to not have jobs as servants for the rich?

My great-uncle (a radiologist) and my great-aunt (she had a pharmacy) had a servant during a bit part of their lives, Tess: and she was basically part of the family. Sure she did the laundry and cooking and cleaning but she never struck me as some oppressed human being living in misery. What I remember from visiting them was my uncle in his office, always working (analyzing radio from patients, writing (snail) mails to other doctors, etc.) and Tess always working too: just a different kind of work.

People getting paid to work for other people doesn't imply slavery. We could of course also have a talk about actual slavery, what were the last countries to officially abolish it, who were the biggest slavers in the world, which countries still have actual slaves (and sex slaves) today, etc.

I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.

> Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. The exact share varied, but the classical languages took up generally at least half of teaching hours, and sometimes as much as 80 percent, especially earlier in the century.

That's so weird to me. How did that tradition hold on for so long? Where did it come from? Who thought that was a good idea?

Signals must to be costly in order to be effective

Also also hard to fake and easy to slip in. You throw in a Latin quote in your conversation and either the other person gets it and you both know you're the proper class, or they don't and you both know you're higher up the ladder than they are.

This is why grammar schools are so called, they're talking about Latin grammar

The term comes from the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Yes grammar is literally part of it but more generally it's the learning of facts and definitions.

Who thought understanding, in depth, the fundamental bases of their legal system was a good idea?

Academia in Britain was intimately connected to membership of the church and, thus, to the ability to speak Latin to hold services. It held on beyond that tenure out of both momentum and prestige.

That was true in medieval times. From the start of the early modern (e.g. Henry VIII) the Church of England used English for services.

The prestige also accrued because it was the language of the educated in Europe for a long time.

I agree, but latin was the language of the educated in Europe because of the (Catholic) church, and the universities pre-date the C of E by several hundred years.

I was going to answer with just "the church" but the OP specifically asked about academia.

It was the language of the educated because of the Roman Empire. The elites used to study how to be Roman elites before the 5th century, and when Rome fell they just continued, as it was the established sign of higher class. The elite has been educated by Cicero for the last 2 millennia, and continues to be so.

A good analogy is French being the language of the elite in Britain, well after the Normans got merged into the general population.

All academia used latin until quite recently. Because all books were written in latin.

Why do you think all animal species have a latin name? You think the ancient romans classified them?

Genuinely bizarre comment. Why do you think the books were written in latin?

They were written in Latin until well into the modern era. Newton wrote his major work in Latin, for example.

Because other languages didn't have a writing system, which is why every western language is using latin alphabet now.

This theory continues in modern elite American Universities -- they exist not to provide job skills but to deliver a "liberal education" -- one that teaches students to think, be moral, etc. (I read from the brochure here).

Those Ivies that have more job-oriented programs tend to have (at the least) those schools looked down upon in comparison to the more 'pure' academic pursuits, e.g. Cornell's Hospitality school.

While Ivies are not tied strictly to America's true upper class, serving more as a means of entry into the upper-middle and lower-upper, this sort of signaling is an important part of some of the soft benefits they provide students -- it would be gauche to be worried about a job, ne c'est pas?

n'est-ce pas ? Sincerely,the French grammar police

It's a thing in other countries as well. Schools which teach the classical languages in Belgium are called humaniora (literally 'more human'). About 30% of my classes were Latin and ancient Greek but we would also have more in depth art history classes.

They would lack in other education (like math and sciences) in theory but as it's also the place the best students get their education they tend to just force you to learn both (which is against some protocols afaik).

To know another language is to possess a second soul - Big Chuck aka Charlemagne.

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote an entire journal in Greek in the middle of enemy territory. "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.". Historians criticize his Greek fluency.

Remember that religious study was the driving force behind much of the education that went on for a long time. If you view some version of the bible as literal divine word, learning the language it's written in makes sense.

The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s. If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.

What a fantastic read. An interesting perspective on schooling. I've been thinking a lot lately if booze is actually a useful thing, it seems the Victorians saw that it is.

(Modulo d'oh because of the industrial revolution and the relatively easy wealth extraction that that enabled;) because the British public had internalized (I would venture to this day) the distinction between upstairs and downstairs and did not present a revolutionary risk to the elite. This then allowed the wise decision of the elite to permit social mobility to those who would work to further the broader cause of the Empire, in all domains including sciences. This is likely a very goldilock moment for any civilization: higher valuation of reason over dogma; a techological and economic production jump that enabled a categorical raising of one nation over many others; a mass population that did not think less of its 'betters' because they were slothful extravagents (as long as they 'acted' superior); and finally the creation of a productive and resourceful middle class that was satisfied to help in the administration and operation of an enterprise that was deemed a national cause: the empire.

Slavery and Imperialism money.

Completely faulty premise. The British Empire was already globally dominant before the Victorian era. You cannot attribute success nor failure to something that came after the fact; I suppose the Victorian elites were not time travelers. That the Empire has since collapsed does not give an especially strong vote of confidence in their stewardship, however.

Moreover, the article presupposes the notion that STEM is associated with "success", but it has never been associated with the elite in any capacity. Generously, STEM might be considered elite for a peasant. Let us not forget who the current US president is, or the general makeup of both the American and British political systems. Hint: it's not composed of scientists and engineers.

Who is it sitting with Donald Trump at regular meetings? Who is it who was just put in charge of the American Military?

Are you really sure of what you are saying?

You have several comments in this thread. They would all be more useful if you would just plainly state your point and drop the condescending tone.

My point is asking people to sharpen theirs. When they fail to do so, the faults in their statements are exposed, and we all learn something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method

As for condescension, I'll kindly note that it was you who was instructing me how to engage people and how I should be writing. When someone is writing a statement that directly contradicts even the news of the past few days, I have to ask if they are sure. I'm not sure if I can be much more deferential than that.

The Empire ended far after the end of the Victorian age.

Within a lifetime or so, which is certainly within a range you would expect for a global empire to collapse; that rarely happens overnight. That said, it is an unfalsifiable supposition, as much as the article's supposition is, although I framed mine in less certain terms than the article claiming it as factual that said elites were effective.

The decline and fall was within a lifetime. Not just a random person's lifetime, but that of a single famous individual. By any of the usual endpoints (Indian Independence, Suez Crisis, Winds of Change/South Africa's withdrawal from the Commonwealth) the Empire ended while Winston Churchill was alive- he was born in the 1874, at the height of the Empire, graduated Sandhurst and joined the British Army in 1895, took Queen Victoria's shilling in several colonial wars, then was Secretary of State for the Colonies in the 1920s, and died after Britain had withdrawn from most of her African holdings.

Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, both trained engineers albeit ideologues, just received leadership roles at the pentagon

Disclosure: I did not read the whole thing. I, too, felt the premise was faulty and not worth reading beyond.

First paragraph: "Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours. This last point generates particular excitement, and descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors."

Why are we taking the CEOs words at face value? They are notoriously known for doing and saying whatever will most help them succeed. Do they say they do these things? Sure. Do we know if they do? If they look like they workout, they probably do, but otherwise how do we know what they do with their day? Anyone who probably actually does know probably has to sign some crazy NDA. Will lying about their routine help them succeed? Quite possibly. CEOs rarely work their way up in the same company over decades, starting on the factory floor. They are MBAs that hop from one company to the next. So they are incentivized to promote some kind of mystique about themselves to make them seem more deserving over the next hopper. Knowing the lack of ethics associated with CEOs, it is not a stretch to assume there is a lot of fluffery in their self-proclaimed routine.

Yeah, exactly. British power came from technological advancements that occurred before the Victorian era: steam engine, spinning jenny, railways, electricity, etc. By the time the elite depicted in this article was running the country, they were largely inheriting that technological lead, and arguably had already lost it by the turn of the 20th century.

you're missing the point: this is a submarine propaganda piece to get the STEM nerds to low-key accept aristocracy

been seein a lot of it lately, yarvin eat your fuckin heart out

I would say that being sexually abused by older boys (which what the male relationships at schools largely were) was in any way healthy of helpful to anyone.

I think its possible that humanities based education made for efficient administrators.

Why do you believe that most male relationships at school involved sexual abuse?

I mean the male romantic relationships the article mentions. I did not think this was even contentious with regard to these - its generally known. The "self-government" the article talks about was largely by giving older boys enormous power over younger ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging

Its mentioned in many memoirs and biographies. Even when apparently consensual the younger boys were far too young to meaningfully consent, especially given disparities in age and power

I think that extreme prosperity like this (another example - Baby Boomers in the US) is a lagging indicator of geopolitical/industrial power.

Britain was prosperous in the 1800s because of colonialism and the industrial revolution. The US was prosperous in the second half of the 1900's because they capitalized on not being decimated by WW2.

IMO Britain's success in this era was actually sustained prosperity driven by the working class, and the failure to maintain global leadership followed from the victorian attitude of the elite.

They got nothing on American Elites - the current regime is packed to the gills with TV personalities who are incapable of actually doing their nominal jobs, yet they've all done extremely well for themselves.

This article really should not be surprising - the elite go to school to learn to rule - to socialize and develop networks of trust. Doing stuff is for the class below (PMC in today's terms).

Those who automatically gain leverage of information network, rent seeking, and labor superiority are able to use immense leasure time to better process directional changes. This isnt' automatically true, many Victorian elites went bankrupt, but it is true for some.

What the protestant work ethic is either wrong or intentionally dishonest about, is hard work may inform you of the technicalities of labor, but it rarely gives you the time, enenrgy or education to understand its organizational effeciencies or opportunties.

This is incredibly timely as we have stories and visual evidence of our current oligarchs clearly high on drugs, drunk, or generally indifferent in a leaisure way to the serious science of running our society and business, yet seem to continually get the upper hand in doing it.

Ask yourself ... why?

Something I've always wondered: What keeps the guards and thugs of the ""elite"" from just killing the elite and taking their money and position?

The boss usually doesn't have any actual physical strength (unless maybe you're Genghis Khan or something)

Imagine 2000 years ago: A merchant prepares a caravan of goods to trek across the wilderness to a far-off settlement. He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.

What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?

Or a landlord hires some goons to go beat up a tenant for not paying rent on time. Why don't the goons beat up the landlord and take the income from ALL his properties?

Or, after a miserly old oligarch pays off his bodyguards a few times, they'll eventually learn where he keeps all his money. What keeps them from torturing him to give it all to them?

Why didn't Bronn just stomp Tyrion Lannister? He could literally SEE the chest where Tyrion kept all the gold! Why walk around with him and risk getting injured or slain?

That is why societies with effective legal systems are more successful than those without.

There were legal system and courts well before 1000 years ago.

I mean, Ceasar's assassination 2,069 years ago showed that no matter how much "power" the "system" agrees you have, you could be removed at any time by the person standing next to you with a dagger.

Yes, but the stronger the rule of law the greater the deterrent.

It does not really stop assassinations, but it lets the rest of us get on with life without worrying when a thug will take our stuff.

Why beat someone where some negative consequences are likely to follow, if the same person can give you immunity to infinitely beat and extort large group of people only for your pleasure and at your whim? This is called society.

>What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?

This does happen but yes obviously attempts are made to prevent it, the guards my not be familiar with the journey, other guards may be family members or trusted friends. Often then the guards become the Merchant then.

You see this with the billionaires building luxury apocalypse bunkers in New Zealand and other exotic locales that are like mini theme parks. It slowly dawns on them that when society breaks down that's exactly what it means. You can't depend on normal social norms or laws anymore, how do you stop your security team from kicking you out of your own bunker, how you do you charter a flight to your bunker? It's a problem with no guaranteed solution.

Prepping is different as it doesn't involve depending on others. Just yourself and your preparations.

> It's a problem with no guaranteed solution.

You can bet they're considering AI killbots as a possible "solution" to the "hostile bodyguard" problem...

Fortunately AI still can't compare to human intellegence. So they are just putting a target on their back, advertising that there is a prize inside.

>"Something I've always wondered: What keeps the guards and thugs of the ""elite"" from just killing the elite and taking their money?"

Read Leviathan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)

All hierarchies work like that. In order for the top to gain benefit from wielding the power of the entire hierarchy of lessers, it necessarily means that the coordinated power of each level is greater than that above them (at least on average).

Take a simplified model of a king, a bunch of nobles, beneath whom are a bunch of knights, beneath whom are a bunch of serfs. Collectively, the nobles control more power than than the king. But if an individual noble defects while the others remain loyal, then the King maintains enough power to crush the uprising. So as the King, you have to proactively maintain a status quo where the nobles can't easily collectively plot against you. Classic strategies include maintaining some kind of nebulous ranking, where nobles are constantly competing with each other to garner favor, and thus likely have more to gain outing a rival noble's conspiracy than joining it, keeping the nobles sufficiently comfortable such that the risk of losing that comfort acts as friction against plotting against you, and in times of extreme distrust, keeping the nobles close at hand such that you can take decisive action against the individual noble before the forces they control can show up.

At each level of the hierarchy, recursively apply similar strategies. Nobels need to keep control of their knights, knights need to keep control of their peasants.

It has happened a few times in history, e.g. the French revolution and the Bolshevik revolution.

However once they killed the "elite" or "oppressor" they couldn't stop the killing, and kept redefining who the "oppressor" was, until it was anyone who had one more cow than the rest.

That kind of event happens sometimes.

The first reason it’s not more common is that wealth isn’t so static. Landlords have to collect rents, oligarchs have to skim off the top of their corrupt enterprises etc. A guard who kills the landlord, then manages to organize rent collection for the benefit of other guards, has essentially become the new landlord.

The second reason is that a guard doesn’t just have to kill the landlord, a guard potentially has to kill all the other guards who want all the landlord’s wealth for themselves.

Since rent has to be collected anyway, and an individual guard has a low chance of surviving against all other guards, remaining a guard is a lower risk option.

> He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.

> What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?

You shouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Let the merchant do the merchanting and make the profits and you hang out and get your paid vacation.

If you take all the profits, the merchant won't stay in the business and then you don't have a client.

The answer is really what power is: people willing to do something for you. This very much did happen multiple times in history what you describe. A legion of roman soldiers uplifting their general to the status of emperor and marching on rome is a common theme in history. Mob bosses realizing they have enough support from other capos to take out the don and run the operation. Maybe that holds up, maybe that doesn't. Power is sometimes quite loosely held in history. There are people who claimed title of Emperor of Rome for less than a month. It can very much be like a game of Juggernaught in Halo.

You need the backing of social organization. Who gets to replace the elite positions or obtains or distributes their wealth? It takes a lot of work to build real consensus for people to just be like "okay, sure!"

And nobody in power is going to allow you to organize to any real extent before interseding. They force you to play with their rules to get in the game. The only away around it is to already be a well known and publically liked figure that people will rally behind.

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