Kings, Order, and Creative Destruction
Thoughts on monarchy
In case you hadn’t read my essay from last November, I’m a huge fan of Game of Thrones and it’s prequel, House of the Dragon. Whatever else you might say about these shows, I think most would agree they make a pretty convincing argument against their monarchic system of governance. In Game of Thrones, we watch the Iron Throne pass from a drunk, to a psychopath, to a pushover, to a power-hungry narcissist, to an unhinged madwoman— before she’s assassinated, and the throne itself is destroyed. The initial monarch having ruled for 16 years aside, each monarch featured in the show only rules for a few years at the most (on the low end, just one day!), and the death toll of playing musical chairs with the throne surely numbers into the tens of thousands, at least. While House of the Dragon doesn’t feature the sort of throne-swapping we get in its sequel (yet?), this show features a dynasty at the height of its power, and gives us a king who’s well-intentioned, but might not quite be up to the task at hand— and whose actions directly pave the way for a brutal civil war after his death.
On a chance visit to a Barnes & Noble after watching House of the Dragon, I happened on a copy of Fire and Blood, George R.R. Martin’s book on which the TV show was based, and couldn’t snatch it off the shelf fast enough. As I read, the history of Westeros came alive, as the stories of conquerors and heroes, rebels and nobles, and the pious and the cruel played the game of thrones.
Above is my copy of the book, with a few sections separated by bookmarks. The section bounded by the yellow bookmarks is roughly where the first season of the show is drawn from, which goes to show just how much narrative is packed in the book (the second yellow bookmark is also where I stopped reading, since I don’t want to spoil the rest of the show for myself.) The section before the blue bookmark details the conquest of Westeros by Aegon Targaryen and his sisters, his subsequent rule, the rule of his son, Aenys, a weak and somewhat ineffective king, and then the seizing of the throne by Aenys’ half-brother Maegor, known to the histories as Maegor the Cruel.
But it’s the section bounded by the blue and yellow bookmarks that I found the most compelling. Ruling for longer than the first three kings combined, this section details the rule of the dynasty’s fourth king, known later as Jaehaerys the Conciliator or Jaehaerys the Wise. From the book itself1:
Archmaester Umbert famously declared that Aegon the Dragon and his sisters conquered the Seven Kingdoms, but it was Jaehaerys the Conciliator who truly made them one.
Having been handed a war-torn, divided realm, the task set before Jaehaerys was no easy one. But even at 14 years old, the young king proved himself worthy of the mantle. As he ascended the throne, his mother urged him to put to death all supporters of his predecessor, while the hand of the king2 urged him to put the usurper’s supporters on trial. But Jaehaerys was of a different mind.
“There will be no trials, no torture, and no executions,” he announced to them. “The realm must see that I am not [Maegor]. I shall not begin my reign by bathing in blood. Some came to my banners early, some late. Let the rest come now.”… Meanwhile, word of the prince’s clemency spread throughout the realm. One by one, the remainder of King Maegor’s adherents dismissed their hosts, left their castles, and made the journey to King’s Landing to swear fealty… Even the most fervent of King Maegor’s supporters were won over once they met Jaehaerys, for he was all a prince should be; fair-spoken, open-handed, and as chivalrous as he was courageous. Grand Maester Bennifer wrote that he was “learned as a maester and pious as a seton,”… Even his mother, Queen Alyssa, is reported to have called Jaehaerys “the best of my three sons.”
Later that year, Jaehaerys was again offered a chance to prove his open-handedness and skill at diplomacy. His coronation ceremony, in which he was formally crowned king, was attended by many lords, ladies, and knights of the realm, but one knight no one expected to see was a man named Ser Joffrey Dogett. Nicknamed “The Red Dog of the Hills,” Ser Joffrey had been the commander of a religious militant group called the Warrior’s Sons, which had waged what it viewed as a holy war against King Maegor and even King Aenys before him. No one knew whether the outlaw was in attendance as a friend or an enemy, or if he intended to continue his war against the Targaryen dynasty. But Jaehaerys was able to fix the knight permanently by his side and end the war in a single stroke.
Grand Maester Benifer wrote afterwards that the meeting between the boy king and the outlaw knight “set the table” for all of Jaehaerys’s reign to follow… the young king shocked the court by offering Ser Joffrey a place by his side as a knight of the Kingsguard3. A hush fell then, and when the Red Dog drew his longsword there were some who feared he might be about to attack the king with it… but instead the knight went to one knee, bowed his head, and laid his blade at Jaehaerys’s feet. It is said that there were tears upon his cheeks… Within a moon’s turn of being crowed… King Jaehaerys had reconciled the Iron Throne to the Faith and put an end to the bloodshed that had troubled the reigns of his uncle and father.
Time and time again throughout the longest reign of any king of Westeros, Jaehaerys proved himself a worthy and competent ruler of his people, beloved by commoners and nobility alike. He ruled over Westeros for 55 years, until his death of old age.4
But to consider monarchy in a modern context strikes most modern people as wildly archaic, a strange relic of a bygone age. The iconic exchange from Monty Python and the Holy Grail comes to mind.
Peasant: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
King Arthur: Be quiet!
Peasant: You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
While the idea of kings and queens occupies a place in our collective imagination, consistently making its way into our stories and entertainment, I’d never really given the system any serious consideration… so imagine my surprise when the insightful Theophilus Chilton penned the essay Democracy is not Better than Monarchy. Chilton addresses many objections a hypothetical modern might raise to monarchy, from issues surrounding state finances to aggression and expansion, but rightfully points out that democracy doesn’t necessarily solve these issues. I mean, just look at the US. State finances? We’re well over $32,000,000,000,000 in debt. Aggression and expansion? We spent the early 2000’s playing God in the middle east, with disastrous results, and have now sent over $100,000,000,000 to our puppet state in the Ukraine with the explicitly stated goal of weakening Russia. And that’s just the last 20-odd years.
The most salient point raised by Chilton, I think, concerns personal freedom. The rhetoric of the United States as the “land of the free” is deeply baked into our cultural DNA. But does our country actually live up to the story it tells itself?
Let us [examine]… the various democracies we see in the West, both the United States and others. How much do they really respect personal freedoms? In other words, how much do they really embody the “small government” ideal desired by libertarians and other classical liberals? The answer is: not much at all. Western man lives in democracies in which he can be arrested for tweeting “hate speech” on social media. His everyday life is overseen, administered, and commandeered by a body of regulations enforced by entirely unaccountable bureaucrats who have the capacity to trap him into Kafkaesque nightmares of life-altering tribulation. Every aspect of his food, his clothing, his home, his transportation, his workplace – all controlled by the government he (wrongly) believes he elected freely. If he has any kind of well-paying job or business enterprise, he will be paying a tax rate that ancient absolute monarchs would have blushed to even suggest exacting from their subjects. Democratic governments – supposedly by and for the people – intrude into every area of his life (big government) and do so through robust and often corrupt police state apparatuses which are literally willing to break down his door and possibly shoot him and his family for even minor infractions.
What about monarchies? Would a hypothetical kingdom fare any better? I’m reminded of a line of dialogue from House of the Dragon—
King Viserys: Even I do not exist above tradition and duty, Rhaenyra!
This is an important and illustrative point. Kings may rule absolutely, but in many realistic examples they inhabit a world of, as King Viserys says, tradition and duty, which constrain their actions. As Chilton puts it,
While kings often ruled “strongly,” they were not able to rule intrusively. Their subjects were often left with a relatively wide degree of latitude in their personal and economic affairs, and the restraints of custom and social structure tended to be more constraining than the actual deeds of their king himself.
Chilton’s analysis is smart in that it anticipates and addresses many people’s likely objections to a monarchic system. But as I consider his ideas and look out at the crumpling world around me, two immediate benefits of a monarchy assert themselves in my mind. The first is the concept of creative destruction. Like I mentioned earlier, the US is in a truly incomprehensible amount of debt and is the largest employer in the US,5 with some 9,100,000 employees. As much as certain types of politicians love to rail against “big government,” few, if any, have been able to make a meaningful dent here. To try to “right-size” the federal government through conventional means would be a heroic effort, if it’s even possible. But a king wouldn’t face nearly the same hurdles— he’d simply proclaim, “I hereby fire X% of federal employees,” and it would be so. This benefit extends beyond simply hiring and firing employees, but could apply to the entire structure of government itself. The federal government of today is a bloated, bureaucratic mess, which has been totally captured by the industries it’s supposed to regulate, and I think it’s becoming increasingly self-evident that it’s high time for some serious restructuring— before it’s too late.
Of course, just waving your hand and drastically cutting your employee count is unlikely to improve things, which is where the creative part of creative destruction comes in. As an astute British physicist named Derek Price observed, 50% of work done in a domain is performed by the square root of the total number of people involved. This means that in a company of 100 people, 10 people do half the work, with the other half of the work being done by the remaining 90. If we apply this lens to the federal government, this means that of the federal government’s 9.1 million employees, roughly 3,017 people are performing half of the government’s work. That’s a pretty sobering thought on its own, but we can speculate further. For the sake of argument, let’s say these roughly 3,000 star performers are ten times as productive as their slacking counterparts. This means we’d need to hire ten employees for every one star, making the optimal total employee count for the federal government around 33,000 people. According to this analysis, a good ~99% of government employees are superfluous. Of course, this isn’t a precise analysis by any means, but effectively employing creative destruction— keeping the top talent, allowing them maximum flexibility in doing their jobs, and getting rid of most other employees— could yield a small but strong government, one that’s effective without being intrusive, which is how Chilton characterizes monarchy in the previous passage I quoted.
The other benefit to a monarchy is… well, trickier to put into words, so I’ll borrow a quote from another favorite author of mine.
“I think the reason kings are staging a comeback has to do with the condition we find ourselves in. When chaos and complexity reign, people yearn for order and simplicity in equal amounts. The monarch represents the apotheosis of both; an ultimate authority who can carve order from chaos, like Marduk with his sword.” - Mark Bisone
Whatever else you might say about modern life, I think most would agree that it’s pretty fucking complicated. This in and of itself can be a problem, since the more complex everyday life becomes, the more of your citizens on the lower end of the cognitive distribution won’t be able to keep up. Modern life has also acquired an ideological component, as elites parade around with nonsensical luxury beliefs, which you’d better at the very least pay lip service to— or else. Rob Henderson is the definitive expert on the subject, having coined the term himself, and has written extensively about it, see Be Wary of Imitating High-Status People Who Can Afford to Countersignal and Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols for examples. Combined with the bloating of the federal government that I discussed earlier, American’s daily lives are becoming increasingly complicated and kafkaesque.
As this process continues, the archetype of the great king stands ever larger in our collective imagination. The great king cuts through the red tape and the bullshit, meting out justice where it’s due and caring deeply for his people. There’s a reason that one of the many titles claimed by the king of Westeros is Protector of the Realm. I actually like better an alternate formulation used by Aegon Targaryen on crowning himself king, which is Shield of His People. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’d apply these sorts of descriptors to any president in my lifetime. Joe Biden is much more Puppet of the Elite than anything else.
This gets at another, tangentially related benefit of a monarchy. There’s an aspirational, transcendent quality to a king, looming larger than life and commanding respect wherever he goes. It’s not a coincidence that many monarchs throughout history have claimed a divine mandate. But modern day politicians, on the other hand, generally inspire nothing but eye rolls and contempt. And as the culture around us falls further into nihilism and postmodern moral relativism, the idea of a straightforward, ultimate authority who’s word is law becomes ever more palatable.
So after all this discussion, would I personally recommend monarchy? Well… not exactly. The phrase absolute power corrupts absolutely comes to mind here, and while I don’t think that’s necessarily true, giving absolute power based purely on progeny seems un-ideal. For example, it worked out really well for Jaehaerys, but not so much his two predecessors. I began the essay citing shows that exemplify monarchy’s flaws, after all.
King Viserys: [Prince] Daemon has ambition, yes, but not for the throne. He lacks the patience for it.
Otto Hightower: The Gods have yet to make a man who lacks the patience for absolute power, your grace.
If I’m not recommending monarchy, why bother with this analysis at all? For two reasons. The first has to do with a favorite phrase of mine— traditions are the solutions to problems we forgot we had. And there’s certainly a long tradition of monarchic governance throughout human history. Even if I’m not going to go as far as to recommend the system, I think it’s worth at least seriously thinking about. And that leads to the second reason, which is that considering the benefits and drawbacks of a monarchy can shed light on the benefits and drawbacks of our current system.
So what form of governance would I recommend?
Aristocracy. The rule of the best.
You’ll note that aristocracy isn’t a formal system, and that’s because I don’t actually think the system of governance matters nearly as much as the quality of the people who inhabit positions of power. But, of course, there’s a thorny problem here, which is how do you define “best”? There’s also the issue that we live in a culture that trips over its feet in a rush to assure people that they’re okay just the way they are, and that in some sense, everyone is the same. All men are created equal in terms of their worth and dignity as human beings, but not all men are equal in terms of their choices, accomplishments, and capabilities. In this sense, yes, some people are better than others. It feels taboo to say it, but it’s self-evident, and I think it makes perfect sense that we as a society should want the best among us to wield power.
We live in strange times, to say the least. From a material standpoint, we’ve reached a level of prosperity almost unthinkable to most human beings throughout history, yet we’re more unhealthy, mentally ill, divided, and atomized then ever. Chilton argues that the American Empire is near collapse, and I’ll admit, it’s a theory that’s becoming increasingly hard to argue against. Whatever the future may hold, it’s the duty of those who can to think deeply and creatively, and to imagine what a more perfect union may look like… since it’s always a possibility we could be called on to create it ourselves.
Recommended Reading
The ideas I discussed here certainly weren’t thought up in a vacuum! A few recommendations that got me in the headspace to write this…
Cocytarchy by Kulak - This piece is one of my favorite Substack essays of all time. Aristocracy is the rule of the best… cocytarchy is the rule of the worst. It’s a dynamic that’s much more prevalent than you might think. I highly recommend Kulak’s tour through the American inferno, from prison gangs in Texas and California through the highest echelons of the US government.
“We Wuz Kangz” by Megha Lillywhite - Megha’s essay was one of the most immediate inspirations for this piece. I was going to tie it in here, but my essay ended up headed a different direction. Still, though, she offers an insightful take on kings and conquest, and refutes the silly idea we keep hearing of “stolen land.” Thought provoking and well worth a read!
Force and Legitimacy by Grant Smith - A wide-ranging and smart meditation on, well, the two things named in its title. One of my favorite observations here is that two extremely important qualities for any leader or institution to have are to be humble and principled. Essentially, see yourself as you are and don’t be a hypocrite.
And The Dance Begins by Me - I cited House of the Dragon here for its plot elements and specific lines of dialogue, but the show itself is excellent, with well-constructed and complex characters and a compelling yet ultimately tragic story. If you’re okay with a few small spoilers, consider checking out my review!
Thanks for reading! Happy 4th of July, give this essay a like and a share if you’re so inclined, and see you next time…
And lightly edited
Second-in-command position, answering only to the king
The Kingsguard was an order of seven knights who protected the king personally, and being named to the Kingsguard was one of the highest honors in the society of Westeros.
House of the Dragon begins during the reign of Jaehaerys’ successor and grandson, Viserys.
Interesting ideas. I admit, I haven't overcome my instinctive aversion (as an American) to the idea of a monarchy being legitimate, so it’s hard to give the possibility a fair hearing. I do look at the British monarchs today, and though I know they no longer govern, they support all the wrong causes and are in deep all the wrong people. A monarchy is only as good as the monarch, which is a real roll of the dice. I'm skeptical it would be an improvement. Your idea of an aristocracy would be better, but how would the "best" among us be selected? And how would the integrity of that process be safeguarded, so it doesn't devolve into mere credentialism, which the pathocrats can just game (like they've gamed the current credentialing systems)?
I don't have the answers, but given how corruptible most people are by power, whatever system involves breaking up concentrations of power as much as possible is probably best.
But you raise some interesting questions, which will probably only become more relevant because the corruption and incompetence and decay in the current system seem to be terminal at this point.
Great essay! I especially like the notion that the spirit of aristocracy can be applied to any structure of government. No reason we can't work to promote leadership at all levels based on virtue and excellence. I won't deny that there are incentives working against that in our current system, but that doesn't mean success is impossible.