Randomized universal basic nobility RUBN. Every year 1% of land with titles is handed out by lottery to random people who pass a basic sanity and presentability test, get put through a finishing school, and get to hold the estate for lesser of 3 generations/100 years.
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Finishing school will teach basic things like being rude, conditioning to believe in your bones you can never be wrong, dressing frumpy-expensive, cultivating Epsteins, etc.
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Kidding aside, while the virtues of a monarchy are kinda theoretical and depend on the reality distortion field of a fragile bit of magical thinking, hereditary nobility has some interesting properties (good or bad) that don’t seem to exist in technocratic institutionalism.
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Like dark age survivability
But it has to be genuinely arbitrary, without even a whiff of justification. So billionaires as de facto nobility doesn’t work, no matter what Americans think. It’s not arbitrary enough.
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Basically a thread of civilization justified by nothing more than near-naked hobbesianism, ready to step in if more idealistic institutions weaken
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Needs a Reverse Hunger Games element though to weed out the failsons
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Replying to @shawn_dubs
Yes, but 42 incumbent Plantagenets will fight you in Reverse Hunger Games for it first
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Perhaps all startups could have to pick random citizens to hold equity that they can’t sell or vote on
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It's something of a ideological point to claim that nobility was totally arbitrary. They punched above their weight as soon as you start measuring things like science/technology contributions, beyond (IMHO) just "well they had more time to get educated".
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