The Patriarch manages the state without disturbing the de jure monarchical institutions. A repeated plot line is foiling attempts to bring back an actual king. One lead character is antimonarchist Sam Vines, commander of the City Watch, whose ancestor deposed the last actual king
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The ideal de jure leader is an empty throne. The ideal de facto ruler is someone who makes sure nobody ever tries to occupy it, while solving for normalcy one day at a time, without getting in the way of natural-rate progress or entrenching a status quo of cronyism.
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If you like James Scott’s anarchist model (the art of being ungoverned), Vetinari embodies the closest thing possible to practical ungovernance in a technologically complex society. The protector of the illegible against illegibility. Keeper of goose that lays golden eggs for all
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A pragmatist who resists both progressive and reactionary utopianism but not as a direct ideological adversary to utopian instincts. But by simply accepting the existence of utopians of all sorts and positioning oneself as a foil to all of them, arranging them in a balance.
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That’s how you solve for muddling through and slouching towards utopia in a complex world. That’s how you keep things boring and protect normalcy during the weirdest of weird times (which is all the time in Discworld).
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