Was feudalism really as bad as (((they))) claim it was?

One must consider how most people did not have as large and lofty aspirations, occupying such positions, as most commoners do now in a far more decadent Europe. There certainly was the desire to get ahead of others, present among many people, although I think most peasants would have realized how unlikely it would have been to become even upper middle class in terms of wealth and status.

but thats not how it was.

They are, but with a few extra modern comforts (like medicine, clean water, and slightly larger houses). Regardless it should still give you a good idea of what being a subsistence farmer was like.

most people being lower middle class or poor in even the first world, people have to work way more than you put forward. not to mention the increasing amount of work one has to put in to maintain the same standard of living and expectations to work longer off the books that is becoming the norm if i'm to believe the papers. there's also the fact that your boss can now make you think of work outside the office by texting and emailing you.

you mean 150-160, right?a

It was dull hard work, but it was more boring than miserable

Yes, but now you don't have to do physical labor on the fields

>work much less than a modern person because you can stop working when you have what you need
I see you have literally no clue how feudalism worked.

You are a peasant living in France in the 12th century.
>illiterate
>can't own land since land is the currency by which the King buys loyalty from his vassals and I am not important enough to receive any
>born as a serf on the land of some Count
>most of the work I do is cultivating the Lord's crops for him, backbreaking labor sun up to sun down 9 months out of the year, rest only on holy days
>in return I get a few strips in the fields for my own subsistence
>I can sell any leftovers at the market but its better to save up in case there's a bad harvest so we don't starve, since I have literally no income
>only solace is the Priest says I'll go to paradise when I die so this shitty life of endless toil for bare subsistence doesn't matter

Feudalism at its height was absolute shit for peasants. Things got a little better after the Black Death killed a third of Europe because there was a huge labor shortage which effectively ended Serfdom in England and parts of France, and a few other places in Europe. But peasants were still largely illiterate, couldn't really own land, and had little or no political agency.

If feudalism was so bad, why so many peasant rebellions against attempts to end it?

>It's a pathetic piece of reactionary shit yearns for a backwards and shitty time to live because they're such a failure in the present episode

Most of them know absolutely nothing about feudalism. They have this ridiculous romanticized few of it they probably got from reading 19th century poetry or something. I think it's a symptom of them never having experienced tyranny. They have no concept of it, they literally cannot imagine a society where they have zero control over their own destiny and are ruled over by a Master who has the power of life and death over them and their family.

>They have no concept of it, they literally cannot imagine a society where they have zero control over their own destiny and are ruled over by a Master who has the power of life and death over them and their family.

>they have no concept of the modern day

What did (((he))) mean by this

And then your organs explode because you didn't know how to wipe your ass and wash yiur hands after

Now thinking that feudalism is shit is a jewish conspiracy too? What isn't?

Yore spouting equally potent enlightenment memes tho, not that i disagree with you:^)

See this is what I'm talking about. You're so fucking deluded you have no clue what tyranny looks like. Your only frame of reference is your own present experience. If you think that what you're experiencing now is as bad as it can get then you're remarkably blessed and hilariously naive. You have no clue what real tyranny is.

Very true mostly playing devils advocate here

>being able to choose what you want to do with your own life is a meme
Yeah we should all going back to being tied to the land and trapped into whatever life we were born to. I have no idea why you people born into liberty desire slavery so much.

has nothing to do with feudalism

No

You had more liberty in feudal Europe than in any modern democracy.

Would rather have a tyranny i can see than one working in the shadows through psycological and political mindgames

>Feudualism
>90% going to the lord

Well, maybe if you lived right before the French Revolution, but otherwise, I don't think that there many lords retarded enough to take more than the extra harvest.

Yes, let's bitch about tyranny while our souls starve. I too enjoy trading satisfaction and structure and leadership and tradition for a shitty ideal of the individual being supreme that ends up in an even worse situation.

So feudalism means I would spend most of my time farming shit right?

Well it would be boring but eventually I would get used to it then its becomes super boring.

Right, the Baron fucking your daughter would be an honor and a chance to earn several years of income if he gifts her a brooch or something. The chances of your shit-covered peasant daughter catching the Baron's eye was like winning the lottery.

>just accept the current tyranny because people may have had it worse in the past

Top cuck

>Would rather have a tyranny I can see
Yeah because they totally allowed peasants to hang out at the king's court or sit on church councils and they would have surely understood what was going on.

Well, idealized feudalism means that you spend 6 days a week farming for 9 months a year (not counting religious holidays) and pay about 10-20% of your harvest to your liege lord. The rest is yours to use literally however you want. You can read because church schools, and you can use your farm profits (because burghers have to eat too) to buy some pleasant shit. You're also more-or-less guaranteed a q.t. peasant girl wife.

Not so ideal feudalism means that you work a farm the same amount of time, but you have the same IQ quotient as your pigs because no one teaches the peasantry anything, and you pay cripplingly high taxes to your liege lord. Who is also a total dick. At least when you're drafted into the army (with nothing more than a pitchfork and a helmet), you can steal from other peasants with equally shitty lives.

>le serfs had it breddy gud meme

There is no end to this memeree.

the peasants were ordinary people user, and its not like today's ordinary people sit at government meetings or executive boards

>a lover of feudalism calling anyone else a cuck
lel. You dipshits are literally asking for powerful men to put you in your place and structure your life as befits their purposes and you have the gall to call anyone else a cuck?

pathetic

What the fuck is that retarded math why did you multiply the 52 weeks by two

Difference is, Ordinary people today in Modern democracies can.

t.personyouarentreplyingto

That's exactly how farming works.

They did have good. Hell, random peasants in places like Bhutan or Nepal have it pretty good and we an see it with our own eyes.

youtube.com/watch?v=eOvQ1iz3TK4

>work for some inbred fuck who did nothing to get where he is
>the grand majority of the fruits of my labor go to said inbred fuck
>can die from basic-ass diseases
>no social mobility to speak of unless I somehow become a priest
>can be drafted to go die in some war that has nothing to do with me
But it's all worth it because I'm guaranteed a (good chance of being ugly) wife I guess?

>serf
>france

Serfs are a term invented by historians which refer specifically to the situation in which Russian peasants found themselves in under the rule of the Tsars.

>All peasants were destitute

Wrong. Depending where you lived, you could see some pretty well-off peasantry.

Although they are technically allowed to, how often does the vast majority of modern society actually try to? Not very often (although more than in a feudal society).

see

This looks comfy as hell. Guaranteed marriage and just enough work to make sure that the crippling malaise of boredom does not set in.

Who needs tvs anyways?

>and pay about 10-20% of your harvest to your liege lord.
Did they pay anything to the church?

In the ideal, the church runs off of donations. In the grimdark, the church has its own, separate tax.

In reality, you would pay to the church if you worked a monastery or bishop's land.

Initially they paid the church with their time, laboring in fields or building cathedrals. It gradually shifted to taxes.

>expecting a political system to ever in an ideal fashion
>ever

He's not talking about pure ideology. He's talking about the experiences a serf or peasant could have in the the middle ages. It ranged on a spectrum. Sometimes better or worse. Sometimes in between.

>implying that *I* have argued for feudalism

Keep defending your wage slavery though. Just remember that when you waste your life slaving away for Shekelstein's benefit that it's not cuckoldry because you don't have to call him mi'lord :^)

It's best to list the ideal situation, and the worst possible outcome.

He did both.

1 day per week with 52 weeks per year
>(1[day] / 1[week]) X (52[weeks] / 1[year]) = 1[day] X 52 = 52 days

2 days per week with 52 weeks per year
>(2 / 1) X (52 /1) = 2 X 52 = 104 days

math isn't my strong suit

Look all those starving peasants.

Wouldn't they be happier eating junk food and smoking meth?

They were even ruled by a lord whom everyone know who it was, and could be approached and appealed to. Imagine that! Everyone knows that the way of modernity is to be ruled by unaccountable individuals in secret societies you don't even know exists.

>you don't know they exist
>but somehow you know they rule you

Really buttered my almonds there.

Even if you aren't a congressman or something, there's a lot more transparency over the proceedings AND you have the political and literal literacy necessary to understand what's going on (with a minimum of research maybe, which you have no problem getting thanks to all the resources at your disposal.)

>This painting proves that feudalism is a-okay and that peasants were living in fine, grand positions!

How brave of those knights to fight the giant snails too!

That is true, but can a common man influence those proceedings any more or less than a peasant could influence his lord's judgments?

Not sure honestly, but I was originally replying to that post:

the netherlands was one of the most well fed regions in europe. it was so urbanized because the region had long been running a surplus in specialized crops were traded for baltic grain.

So noted, I'm just saying that despite a change to power technically coming from the people, not much has changed about the political class, be they lords or senators

You know what it means when a dude spends his life fantasizing about and painting fat people and abundant food?
Either he has a weird fetish or he grew up eating moldy bread.

Also that's a fucking wedding ""feast""

Not remotely.
Don't talk about shit you don't know you have no idea what challenge these people faced since the Mao usurpers.
They were doing much better during the Imperial and Republican rule. It doesn't even fucking compare.

>Subsistance farming
you don't even know what you don't know.

that's a commissioned painting of an actual scene, retard.

Plebeans who thinks hes got it figured all out and society is scaled to his pea brain.
Besides, he's off point, we know very well about these societies and beyond that if you had any idea how policy making and public administration worked you would shut your fucking trap.

>there's a lot more transparency
>he says this when lobbying is a thing

You're a fucking retard.

>that's a commissioned painting of an actual scene
Proof?
Also for the irony:
>Some authors have even suggested that the groom is not even included in the painting. Van der Elst speculated that this could be the depiction of an old Flemish proverb: "There is an old Flemish proverb: 'It is a poor man who is not able to be at his own wedding.'

Others who think it's not even meant to be real:

>Some argued that it is a presentation of the mystical Wedding of Cana.[4] Lindsay and Bernard Huppé speculated that the painting was a Christian allegory, symbolizing corruption, depicting the corrupted Church, which was supposed to be the bride of Christ, but the groom has not appeared to claim his corrupt bride.[13]

Incidentally here's another take on the Wedding at Cana, you might notice a few differences.

No, but it wasn't very good either. Living in fear of hell, not being able to leave your crappy village, and living in a society where images and literature are rare sounds, at best, very dull.

There's thousands of paintings representing medieval and renaissance rural life from that time. Even if you argue that Bruegel was somehow improvising everything and not basing himself on real models.

You're choosing to make your last stand on the most retarded nitpicking imaginable.

This, feudalism is just big fuckery

Maybe stop talking out of your ass if you don't want people to "nitpick" your bullshit?

say what you want about feudalism but it's better than slavery. it was a christian innovation on slavery that eventually lead to our society today. and like says it would be better today if the mass of scum on the streets today were bound to a piece of land somewhere rather than bound to prison and a criminal lifestyle

nice rebuttal.

This is why I quit /pol/ 3 years ago, being shut in what is essentially an echo chamber that makes the world seem evil and horrifying with no real point of reference from actual experience of it. Neckbeards shouldn't talk about things outside of their basement in that respect.

It wasn't meant to be one, dipshit.

>neckbeards
>projecting that hard
>implying that anyone is normal on this japanese softcore animated pornography website

The main reason why people are attracted to feudalism after all this time is this. An actual example in history of a society where everyone has a place and an important role to play. You may not have the riches of capitalism or the total security of communism, but you know that you matter and that you have work to do, which can be considered more important than any sort of materiel wealth/safety net.

Feudalism as a system?

There's less freedom in general, i.e. getting levied to fight on a war that your lord is obliged to provide troops for, even though it's at the behest of an even bigger lord in some other location.
You're pretty well tied down to a piece of land, and your landlord has every right to take a sizeable chunk of your produce. You also don't technically *own* anything, though there's people to whom that's not important.
If your lord wasn't a disinterested cunt, he would at least provide some things so you could get work done, all the necessities are locally available, you live in a small/tight-knit community (I can't think of an example of large-scale feudalism, though I feel like Soviet-style communism had elements), and I'm sure feasts/holidays had fun times
It's a very paternalistic system (imagine being a legal child all your life), but to some it's nice to have those provisions, simple/straightforward lifestyle, and lack of certain responsibilities.

Feudalism as it existed in the Middle Ages?

You have to be ridiculously delusional to think it didn't suck, unless you were the lord, and even then the vast majority of comforts we take for granted are gone in exchange for a higher place in the hierarchy

Yeah except it's basically just wishful thinking by lazy socially-crippled underachievers who believe they would totally work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps if someone just put a shovel in their hands and told them where to dig, ignoring the fact that they would run back to their dark and cool basements as soon as they start sweating or feeling the sunburn.
See:
econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/how_can_there_b.html
For that matter, they could just enroll in the armed forces like so many poor or directionless people have done. Hell, you can even land a comfy high paying office jobs if you have some education. But no, you have to run a few lapses, that's literally torture.

>You're pretty well tied down to a piece of land, and your landlord has every right to take a sizeable chunk of your produce. You also don't technically *own* anything, though there's people to whom that's not important.
Woah, nothing has changed.

Taxes were a joke back then compared to today.

>For that matter, they could just enroll in the armed forces like so many poor or directionless people have done. Hell, you can even land a comfy high paying office jobs if you have some education. But no, you have to run a few lapses, that's literally torture.
Spoken like someone who has never worked a day in his life.

except you have more freedom to move somewhere else these days

taxes varied. it could be less than today, or it could be ancien regime tax farming where it's like 90%

I'm quite happy with my job thank you. The point is that they should fuck off and join the army if they long for physical effort and utopian servitude instead of regretting that they were born too late to experience eating cabbage soup every night and dying of the plague-du-jour.

Not him but you also aren't liable to be executed for leaving your home county or selling your melons in the wrong part of town in modern society. But yeah I see your point. Political freedom is nothing to shake a stick at but in terms of economic freedom the basic terms haven't changed overmuch for poor people.

>move somewhere else these days
Where it's basically the same thing. Or worse

> or it could be ancien regime tax farming where it's like 90%
Stop reading Warhammer lore books.

Have you even been in the army?

>working in the shadows through psycological and political mindga

Do you hear yourself, son?
You're basically admitting you're so free you have to invent villains to keep yourself from getting bored.

>waaaah i HATE all this stupid individialism where's my lord waaah gibbe servitude

For fucks sake, Shirley, man up and change your diaper.

>Not him but you also aren't liable to be executed for leaving your home county or selling your melons in the wrong part of town in modern society.
>What are regulations
Same thing, different context.

The only thing that was punished with death was poaching. Just don't poach man.

You would simply make a better point talking about the instability and rampant hooliganism going on that mostly went unpunished.
Yeah this is something that we don't experience today. But then some say as a species we're supposed to experience these kind of things and this is why we're all apathetic, depressive nervous wrecks.

>>implying that anyone is normal on this japanese softcore animated pornography website

Most people are, and you can thank /pol/ and /b/ for that, ironically enough.

I know maybe two dozen people who have been in the military, including my father and a guy my age for whom it was his Plan C to find long-term employment.
Opinions went from "it was okay, would recommend" to "it was fucking shit, don't ever go" but all of them would agree that they prefer that to being a medieval peasant or even a modern subsistence farmer (they've toured third-world shitholes, they know what they're "missing")
I also happen to know many people who were rural Eastern Europeans, namely my grandparents' entire generation, and while they have a lot of gripes with the communists' modernization programs they certainly don't miss their childhood homes that had dirt floors and parasites, no running water, no electricity, no TV, no phones, no appliances etc. Especially now that they're too old to enjoy running barefoot.