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Originally Posted by Gem
Nice. Good to see a deeper context to the discussion  . |
When knights in the movies say "I'm the servant of the king", we often think of it as some kind of a figurative statement, an assignment, but in history that was meant very literally. It was the permanent state of existence. Everybody was somebody's servant and the purpose of their individual lives was to fulfill their duties as a servant.
From the Western point of view, we can hardly grasp how inequal the old world was, in every sense. It wasn't just with the rulers, but with everything. In the families, kids were very much *not* told to go live their lives, fullfill their own dreams. The most well-known example of the generational order are the royal families, but it was like that for all families, aristocrats and peasants alike. Nowadays in the West we think of this generational power pyramid as a temporary state that is only for the childhood but for thousands of years, it used to be a permanent state of existence that lasted into adulthood
Reading about all this stuff has made me passionately value and love the modern, Western world. It's such a free place, full of possibilities and choices. The inequalities we have nowadays are usually a mere, fading shadow of the all-consuming inequality and the oppression of the old world.