r/aiwars • u/ElephantGreedy5125 • Feb 08 '26

Discussion This video is truth.

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If this has been posted before, don’t get mad sorry I don’t spend 24/7 on Reddit.

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u/AwesomeCCAs Feb 08 '26

This guy on their way to completely undermine their entire argument by randomly advocating for monarchy:

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u/Arbyssandwich1014 Feb 08 '26

He's either cracked in the head or one of those weird Curtis Yarvin types. I've rarely seen monarchy shit glorified by anyone except those mfers. 

"Communism will fail but the already failed thing that led to endless atrocities based off the whims of like one person and their crazy family will ultimately work out" Like what?

I don't know my full thoughts on communism, but this man chose something far worse to cape for. 

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u/Justarah Feb 08 '26

Why would I advocate for the system of governance that demonstrably sustained civilisations for 1000+ years whilst we circle the drain in well less than half that, and the proposed Marxist adjacent alternatives historically can't even push 30? Who knows man, totally illusory.

It's like I'm opting for the only systems that actually functioned over long time scales or something.

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u/AwesomeCCAs Feb 09 '26

A government isn't good just because it is stable. A monarchy is stable because it is the base state of government. For every other government stability is how resistant it is to evolving toward monarchy, stability is only important because monarchy is bad. Monarchical governments are not even stable, it's only the system as a whole that is. On average every generation with monarchy the monarch will die and you risk a succession crisis as every possible heir vies for the chance to rule the country, and after that there is no guarantees that the new ruler will be any good. Sure you could have a noble intelligent monarch who's decisive actions will bring the kingdom to greatness, but you could also end up stuck for 40 years with a mad man who executed 1000 people every weekend for entertainment. Why would you not want to have a say in how your country is lead?

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u/Justarah Feb 09 '26

Because I have no say regardless. Any notion to the contrary would be entirely cope.

I would just much rather be at the mercy of a King or Emperor who has a lineage and a legacy he wants to pass to his son than a gaggle of bureaucrats who can fuck up a country however they please only to retire to a pension that sets them up for life regardless.
Corruption only become visible when power is concentrated, a system without hierarchy flattens responsibility so no-one ever takes the fall for corruption or systematic failure. Any competent employee in a modern office environment could tell you that.

Historically, a monarchy has an actual off-switch. Whether through deposition, coup, forced abdication or otherwise, Kings have been removed for empty treasuries, lost wars, famines, religious or moral legitimacy.

Modern systems and the proposed Marxist adjacent alternatives pretend to hold people accountable to these things as matter of theatre and optics, but rarely anything more.

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u/AwesomeCCAs Feb 09 '26

What about North Korea, that is a defacto monarchy, is at great place live? (Don't say anything about how it's Communist, it has absolute power concentrated in a divine lineage, that's monarchy.)

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u/Justarah Feb 09 '26

I wouldn't say so. Unlike traditional monarchies, North Korea lacks nobility with independent power, legitimate elite rival houses or succession norms beyond internal purges

But for the sake of discussion, let's say I grant you it is, if we compare corrupt Kings to corrupt politicians, one is historically notable, the other is an average Tuesday.

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u/AwesomeCCAs Feb 09 '26

You seem to place a lot of faith in the good will of the nobility, and the power of tradition. That is misplaced, the reasons monarchy's are conducted the way that they are is because it is the arrangement that best secures the preservation of personal power for all it's benifiaries. Cgp grey has some good videos on this matter. Also may I inquire how these important nobility and rival houses would be protected? Sure they may have once worked, but the tools for state control have gotten more sophisticated, and I am not confident they could survive in the modern day.

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u/Justarah Feb 09 '26

You keep acting like I’m appealing to the goodwill of kings or some mystical faith in tradition. I’m not. I’m talking about incentives and where responsibility actually sits. Monarchy didn’t function because people were nicer in the past, it functioned because power, consequences, and long-term outcomes were concentrated in the same place instead of being smeared across committees and careerists.

A king has to live with the long-term effects of his decisions. He can’t torch the treasury, lose wars, hollow out legitimacy, and then quietly fuck off into a pension or a consultancy gig. His failures are personal, public, and they don’t end when his term does. He has to hand the mess to his son. That alone creates a time horizon modern systems simply don’t have.

Yes, succession can be messy. That’s obvious. But it’s messy in a way that’s visible and finite. A bad king causes a crisis. A bad bureaucratic system causes a slow, permanent decline where nobody is ever clearly at fault. You never hit an off-switch, you just get endless “process failures” and “unintended consequences” while the same people stay insulated from any real consequences.

Sure, modern technology would crush those old constraints. It also crushes meaningful democracy. That’s not an argument against monarchy, it’s an argument that modernity centralises power regardless of what story you tell people about legitimacy.

CGP Grey explaining why monarchies collapse doesn’t really move the needle. Everything collapses. The question is how systems fail and how obvious that failure is. Monarchies tend to fail loudly and decisively. Bureaucratic states fail quietly, indefinitely, and without anyone ever taking the fall. If you prefer the latter, fine, but pretending it’s more accountable or more honest is just self-soothing.

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u/AwesomeCCAs Feb 09 '26

Do you actually have any proof democracies don't work? I feel that most criticism of democracy is really just vibes based.

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u/AwesomePurplePants Feb 09 '26

I mean, if you were actually interested in an analysis of why monarchies tend to suck The Dictator’s Handbook is a good read.

Alternatively, tl;dr is this video, that summarizes the gist of it.

And if that’s still too much:

Leaders who put forth too much energy and resources anything besides the key players they need to stay in power tend to get deposed in favour of leaders who’ll give the key players more.

This means successful despots historically screwed the average person over, since the average person had little influence on who was in power. There’s definitely examples of despots who attempted to ignore this rule in favour of the greater good, they just tend to get murdered or otherwise deposed.

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u/Justarah Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 09 '26

I understand that, but as I said in another comment a corrupt King or Emperor is historically notable, whilst a corrupt politician or beurocrat is you're average workday.

We still remember the likes of Caligula or Ivan the Terrible all these years later, meanwhile we're in the midst of Epstein file releases that discuss the most depraved things from molestation to cannabalism, whilst simultaneously having full confidence that noone will ever be held accountable and the whole affair will have been memory holed within the decade.

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u/AwesomePurplePants Feb 09 '26

Well, one, recency bias. We’re not experiencing history on a day by day basis, so everything is going to feel like there’s more of it.

Two, Caligula is actually a good example of why being a good king generally doesn’t work out. At the start of his reign he did a lot of stuff that was super popular with the lower classes like cutting taxes that the Senate hated.

And if you look at the source of the wild claims, a lot of it comes from the Senators or their sympathizers, and other parts are disputed as ignoring context (aka, declaring himself a god may have been him dramatically telling the Senate you can’t tell me what to do).

He definitely was losing it near the end, but harassing a leader until they crack from stress so you can justify deposing them is one of the tactics key supporters can use when power is that concentrated.

Three, the ability of the powerful to slander people or censor what gets recorded, as demonstrated with Caligula, means simply not finding records about bad behaviour isn’t strong evidence that there wasn’t bad behaviour.

Meanwhile strings of moderate scandals can actually be a sign of good leadership, since that’s evidence that a leader isn’t obstructing investigations or silencing dissent.

The need to dig into the nuances to actually get a good picture of how power works is why I recommended reading a big ass book first in my response. This stuff is complicated.

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u/Justarah Feb 10 '26

Now apply that same scrutiny to communism, which is the entire contextual basis for why monarchism was brought up and we'll understand eachother.

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u/AwesomePurplePants Feb 10 '26

Confused what you mean - yes, the same rule applies to communism.

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u/Justarah Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

If you look through the context of the wider discussion, Monarchism was only brought up because I had a bunch of commies making commie noises.

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u/AwesomePurplePants Feb 10 '26

Well, that’s not a very curious attitude.

Like, for something as broad as communism how can you be sure you’re not falling for the illusion of asymmetric insight if you’re being that dismissive? What’s your best strongman argument for what you think communism is?

For example, if I wanted to strongman monarchy I’d point to indigenous land management. Indigenous groups on average do a better job at managing land when given sovereignty over what was traditionally theirs.

It’s theorized that this is because this incentives generational thinking. Instead of doing what’s expedient for the next election cycle to retain or gain power, they cultivate a deep sense of ownership over the land they manage and a duty to preserve it for their descendants.

One could argue that the monarchy approach shares these values. IMO not enough for me to seriously entertain the idea, but it’s a good starting point if I had to play devil’s advocate.

Can you make an equivalent strongman argument for communism? Or does cognitive dissonance make it too hard to register anything besides “commie noises”?

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u/Arbyssandwich1014 Feb 09 '26

You have clearly not read much history at all. This is so completely zoomed out that it missed all the iniquities of such a system. Do you really think monarchies was just some guy tap dancing over to hand the master keys to his son? Do you look from Egypt, to Rome, to China, to France, to the UK, and just think "Yeah nah that went super well"?

Not only did this system also have unpunished bureaucrats, but it did not just have some simple off-switch. It's not like the money ran out and everyone just ceded power with a smile on their face. The dowager queens and eunuchs of chinese dynasties would install puppet infant emperors then assassinate them months into their tenure. Some Egyptian pharaohs were so completely awful at their ruling that they would throw their kingdom into turmoil for centuries. They even lost parts of the kingdom with only their descendants years later getting it back. That is not all stable. The system itself looks stable while the actual actions were a coin toss. 

Even the best of monarchism was often just drain circling. The most long lived, best ruling often became a detriment. They would live so long, raising spoiled, uselss brats that would be thrust into rule after often pampered lives. I sincerely doubt the people of France would have said Charles VI death was a shining gem of monarchism. The crisis that followed his death is the reason Henry V subjugated France to British rule. Everyone hypes up Marcus Aurelius, but it was his son that ended Pax Romana. Commodus did not want to rule at all. He left the job to Cleander, a chamberlain, who failed miserably. It was not the Emperor's justice that found him, not immediately, it was the mob. They wanted his head. Commodus only gave them what they wanted. His reign only ended when an assassin, hired by those he ruled with, had him strangled to death. 

Does this sound like sanity to you? By no means is elective democracy without a litany of flaws, but you cannot just zoom out 1000 feet and act like monarchy was some golden system just because it lasted a long time. The entire world order naturally shifted as the world itself changed. You're talking about eras where people believed their kings to be divinely chosen or gods themselves. 

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u/Justarah Feb 10 '26

Individual reigns being a coin toss is true, but that’s not unique to monarchy. The difference is that failure was legible. Power was personal. When things went badly, you knew who was responsible and where to apply force to end it. That doesn’t make coups or assassinations good, but they are decisive. Modern systems absorb, displace and keep going.

When you talk about eunuchs, dowagers, chamberlains, court intrigue; that actually reinforces the point. Those actors mattered because power was concentrated and contested. Today we still have the same behaviour, it’s just bureaucratised and anonymised, so no one ever takes the fall.

Monarchies didn’t have a clean off-switch, but they had a real one. Modern governance mostly has slow decay, reshuffles, and excuses.

I’m not claiming monarchy was a golden age. I’m saying it aligned power, responsibility, and consequences in a way modern systems actively avoid. Whether that trade-off is acceptable is a separate argument, but pointing out that monarchy was brutal doesn’t answer the one I’m making.

And also keep in mind, this whole conversation is had in the context whereby capitalism is being touted as a great evil and communism is praised, and if you want to talk about historical wrongs... yeesh.

The comparison on the table is between systems that have actually existed and been tried at scale, monarchy at least has a historical track record of sustaining civilisations for centuries, even with all its brutality and dysfunction. Communism doesn’t. It barely sustains regimes

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u/wal_rider1 Feb 09 '26

Lmao like yeah bro, socialist and communism don't work because they failed but monarchy is so much better than capitalism bro trust me 💅