Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

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?

> 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.

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.

Ceasar's assassination was politically motivated, and performed by many of the most powerful people at that time - other Roman Senators.

I'd describe it more as a power struggle between 'elites'/the people running the country that got violent (indeed, it led to a civil war), rather than a "even the rich are at the mercy of random violence".

In other word, Ceasar dying is basically 'the system' at the time, the Roman Senate, or at least a large part of it, deciding that, actually, Ceasar had a little too much power, and the way to fix that was stabbing him.

I view it closer to Louis XVI being guillotined than Franz Ferdinand being assassinated - the former is a violent transfer of power between elites, the later is an elite being killed by a member of the common people. The former happens because the elites (and sometimes the people as well, although AFAIK Ceasar was quite popular with the commoners in Rome) are unhappy, the later happens despite the elites being happy. The Vienna upper-class probably quite liked Franz Ferdinand, but that wasn't enough to save him. The Parisian upper-class, however, did NOT like Louis XIV, and that got him killed. Similarly, the Roman aristocracy (or rather, a large chunk of it, obviously Ceasar had his fans in the Senate) had an issue with Ceasar, which got him killed.

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.

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.

Except this tends to only get really "interesting" at the top. That's because the middle layers can call on their peers or even on their superiors in times of crisis. Hence peasant rebellions basically never succeed, since their aristocrats will simply apply to the king or to their peers to help them crush it.

But the king has no superiors and even his peers are not quite as much available, so the politicking at that level gets much less stable.

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.

Hire relatively stupid people, pay them well, have several security organs and nurture a sense of competition between them.

>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.

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.

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.

Those are not good examples. OP is asking about things like military coups, where the seizure of power comes from within the existing establishment.

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.

>"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)

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