Does your Hardholder have it?
Deserve it? Coerce souls for it?
Was it offered, bought, or stolen?
Legitimacy
The principle that indicates the acceptance of the decisions of government leaders and officials by (most of) the public on the grounds that these leaders’ acquisition and exercise of power has been in accordance with the society’s generally accepted procedures and political or moral values. Legitimacy may be conferred upon power holders in a variety of ways in different societies, usually involving solemn formal rituals of a religious or quasi-religious nature –royal birth and coronation in monarchies, popular election and “swearing in” in democracies and so on. “Legitimate” rulers typically require less use of physical coercion to enforce their decisions than rulers lacking in legitimacy, because most of the people are apt to feel a moral obligation to obey the former but not the latter. Consequently, people who gain or hold power by illegitimate means tend to work very hard to discover or create ways of endowing themselves with legitimacy after the fact, often by inventing a new ideology or religion and attempting to indoctrinate the people with its legitimating formulas through various forms of propaganda, thus creating moral incentives for the citizenry to obey their government.
oh… and side-relevancy question for picture validation;
Can a Faceless remain a Hardholder… or vise versa?
If yes, how? If no, why?
At an offhand guess, how many people in the hardhold can even spell legitimacy ?
Awareness or ignorance of a concept does not preclude it’s existence in social dynamics.
How many souls in the hardhold’s demesnes are independent survivalists? The product of homeschooling? Capable of maintaining their own gear and specializations? Worthwhile enough to their neighbors and clansmen, to even bother being associated in mutual survival?
That is how many are likely to acknowledge the concept in some capacity, irregardless of any actual literacy demographics.
Legitimacy is simply a fancy way of saying; will I continue to be obeyed when I’m not around to check up on things?
It is the vested agreement of the society, by valid consent or impressed coercion, to acknowledge an individual or institution as having the authority to issue statements of customary obedience.
Without a measure of legitimacy, unquestioned by the majority of a society’s power to enforce consent or deliver consequence, no authority is present to be obeyed.
Yes, but my way has fewer words.
lol… true!
Sometimes clarity is sacrificed for concision… vise versa.
If the Faceless gained a hard hold and decided to switch playbooks then he could be a Hardholder and he would retain everything that made sense
I would consider it a key criterion for a post-apocalyptic setting that no one has legitimacy. Especially the people who think they do. If someone did, it wouldn’t feel post-apocalyptic to me anymore.
It just struck me as an interesting question resulting from the picture…
…suppose he could be considered a Hocus too, or just a really wacky cult leader.
The first question was the crux of my pondering, the second an afterthought.
I can understand that the immediate results of an apocalyptic event would be a decentralization of legitimacy, but anywhere two or more people gather in power, legitimate agreements begin to establish cultural institutions of custom and jurisprudence.
Legitimate authority is always by consent of this kind of alliance of people, the alliance either holds itself together and maintains a consensus amongst the governed, or fails when faced with a faction acting by a greater display in power to maintain sovereignty.
Third option, both sides enter a hegemony, establish lines of permission under new agreements, and become a new source of mutual legitimacy… an empire of factional competitions.
There is no way to avoid the institutionalisation of legitimacy, and gather a group of cooperative souls Jason Godesky. Unless you don’t consider a post-apocalypse to extend beyond the survival of a single generation of absolutely uncooperative individuals… less than a few years.
Even an anarchistic biker gang has customs and traditions, a central legitimacy of social agreements, that support the authority of the body to self govern, dispense internal justice, and proclaim enemies to it’s interests… and very likely a central figurehead vested with the chief position to present the options and make the proclamations.
That’s not how it’s generally gone, historically. Excepting the past few centuries, legitimacy has had very little to do with the consent of the governed, and much more to do with god-kings, emperors, and divine right. Legitimacy is getting people to believe you have the right to tell them what to do, and that has, historically, been a monumental cultural project that takes centuries to really take hold. The example I know best is that of post-Roman Britain. There, you have a contemporary, Gildas, who writes, “Britain has kings, but they are tyrants.” Tyrants, tyrannos, in this context meaning a ruler without imperium, the Roman concept of legitimacy. This is at least a good century after the official end of Roman rule in the island in 410. Sure, plenty of people claimed to have imperium, but no one could build any sort of respectable consensus, so it was vacuous. Legitimacy is only legitimacy when you can obtain some sort of broad consensus that you have it, and in post-collapse situations like this, it has typically taken centuries for one force to emerge that could gather that sort of consensus.
Legitimacy is legitimacy when it is acknowledged by consent,
…either by force or coercion.
Consent is a social agreement, either by explicit or implicit compliance.
Power is maintained by authority, by tyranny or mutual consent.
Authority is given institutional foundation, by the legitimacy invested by the social customs and traditions.
Customs and traditions are the societal laws and precedents, that the people have explicitly or implicitly expected to be followed.
I guess we have different ideas of what “consent” means, then. To me, force and coercion are antithetical to consent.
If consent is given to the stronger argument, it is given by coercion… regardless of whether it is moral or ethical.
Rhetoric is coercive; sometimes it is delivered in the interests of the many, sometimes it is delivered in the interests of the few. Either way, consensus is established by the consent of the coerced.
Be smart, don’t be coerced into a situation of malignant slavery… it is consensual if you do, a coerced consent if you are given propaganda to support a belief in it being something else.
What I am saying is every social group has legitimacy, whether they acknowledge it or not… A contemporary motorcycle gang, or a tribe of cooperative Neanderthal… the basic concepts are the same; consent, legitimacy, authority, power, prestige, custom, tradition, coercion, tyranny.
Power by the consensus of a tribal clan, by the customs and traditions that are recognized by the clan, makes the sovereignty of the clan self sufficient… legitimacy in the clan’s system of self authority.
A Chief may be elected to represent the pinnacle of the clan’s custom and tradition, but is not always provided authority over the legitimacy of the clan’s customary right to self rule.
Historical support for the foundations of legitimacy are not tied to only Roman imperialism, or Greek city-states… many forms of legitimacy have existed in the world… global recognitions of sovereignty are only recently established.
Previous to the end of European Colonialism, no one really wanted to give up a potential claim on world dominance… so few hegemonic agreements of mutually recognized sovereignties existed.
You’re either with us, or against us!
How I equate these roles of status and authority.
This is a Hardholder…
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_chief
This is an Operator…
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_man_(anthropology)
This is a Chopper’s gang…
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Motorcycle_club_members_ranks
…but the Chopper is probably not the top tier man in a larger tribe.
http://www.ehow.com/list_6103054_duties-motorcycle-road-captain.html
or perhaps…
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serjeant-at-Arms
Though a Driver could be interchangeable with Chopper to cover both positions.
I think the rest get pretty self evident.
Battlebabes & Gunluggers are comparable to Knights and Warrior Braves… although, I’d imagine cowardly soldiers and rouge revolutionists are still possible.
Hocus are basically the Priests and Priestesses of ransacked dead religions, and influential neo-cults of the post apocalyptic culture… or maybe solitary hermit practitioners of their personally manifest dementia
Savvy and Brainer heads are whacked-out mental cases, except when they are true Wizards at their craft… no, even then they have a few screws loose.
Skinners are carrying forward the time honored Bardic traditions of the fourth-of-state… except maybe when they are just prostitutes for the most powerful politicos… nope, still technically fourth-of-state.
Angels are the hospitallers of a very post-apocalyptic order of neo-Hermes cultists… with little in the way of a true organized order, or any uniformly recognized traditions… what am I saying, all the ones I know are founders of an assassin network.
ymmv… this is just a generalized hierarchy as I see it.
Jason Godesky, I don’t think we have different ideas of what “consent” means. But we may have different ideas about what validates “antithetical” terms…
I don’t extend it into a supportive role of false dichotomies.
qui tacet consentire videtur. Silence is consent.
The price of freedom, is eternal vigilance.
When conceiving of Post-Apoc settings, I find the best reference sources to be Dark Ages/Early Medieval/Late Antiquity/Fall of Rome histories, poetry, and fiction.
When everything falls apart and the choices are starvation and worse or working for those that at least can keep you safe, few people choose to starve in freedom.
Then again, bandits and wolves are free too.
Good analogies. Those periods of history were the results of apocalyptic events, within contexts and scopes of their previous environments. Which illustrates the danger in being too dismissive of elements that might exist in a post apocalypse world.
At what point does the specific comforts in a time-before, create expectations on the time-after. Some evidence suggests that there is still not a comparison of equality in contemporary civilization, with what has been lost in aeons past.
Consider the series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century; which is set in a post apocalypse world. Making a comparison of the world of the 25th Century, with the world before the 1988 Nuclear War… who is the more civilized, free, scientific, enlightened?
The cultures are so alien to each other, no easy comparison is really possible. The absolute absence of things common to civilization of the 1900s, is both positive and negative. The wilderness of the 25th century is still full of “barbarous tribes” of “renegades and mutants” …while the utopian interstellar port cities are “enslaved” to the AI Council, as “pets in a gilded cage.”
Where is the line that marks an end of a post apocalypse, other than the beginning of a new apocalyptic event?
Will the AI Council ever be challenged, overthrown, or ask too much?
Freedom is more a sliding scale of degrees and awarenesses… as such, even bandits and wolves are not completely free.
Bandits are bound to the social contracts and customs of their own cooperative authority.
Wolves may not have a fully sapient awareness of their pack dynamics, when going through the motions of instinctive survival.