Poking history... to explain vampires...
Jul. 17th, 2016 03:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'm interested at the connections between economics and justice.
Like, slavery sucks. It epic level sucks. There is no doubt about it, slavery is a very bad thing.
But slavery used to be used as a punishment for criminals. ... actually, okay, some places have people working in prison, they kind of still do this.
And slavery sucks, so we can say slave owners suck, this is unjust, The End.
But prisons cost money. People cost food. In a society with very tight margins, can you afford to stick someone in a box unproductively and still feed them?
In a society that chucks half its food away you can very clearly afford to feed as many prisoners as free people, so we're back to slavery being unjust.
But that's not the only possible setup, in places with lower yields or more difficult food.
Like, Fae feed on humans. So I don't see how Hecuba Prison was meant to work.
I mean, were they just going to starve Bo to death, or were they going to send for takeout, or were they going to let her feed on fellow prisoners?
Not every Fae species can feed on fellow prisoners, how do they support them?
Stick that many Fae in a box and you have, within the logic of the show, a really complex food problem... that was never addressed because they did the worst most rubbish story instead.
So you can say the Light put Fae in prison and the Dark make them slaves, but, iirc the big guy specifically said that the slave owner is responsible for feeding him, so the Dark have a clear and obvious way to make sure those being punished for crimes actually don't starve.
Unlike the Light. Or anywhere they keep Fae in prisons. And just don't talk about the food.
Actually they were very inconsistent about that 'Fae feed on humans' part at all, they only demonstrated how certain people fed, others just seemed to kind of exist. Was it even part of the definition or what? Because then you'd have a two level system just by food source.
But! ANYway! All these urban fantasy series that postulate a second society of predators run under masquerade within our own: they face this economic problem. I've got very wound up before saying that vampires should just go to prison, but a system that can barely afford to financially support a single Slayer at a time can't afford to build a prison, much less man it. Plus they couldn't successfully imprison one disabled vampire for the length of Cruciamentum, because stupid. So I can see why on a practical level they just stake them. Too costly in time, money, and lives, to treat them as we would want to be treated. Even the government funded Initiative didn't have the capacity to cope with a single Hellmouth, and made the epic screwup of not admitting it, so big problem when it burst. But then that's humans trying to control non-humans.
The non-humans trying to control their own kind have a multi layered problem. Like, you can build a prison, but then you have a building full of pissed off individuals to hide. You can lock people up, but how do you feed them? Especially how do you feed them if feeding them makes them powerful enough to break out. Proper problem there. But even without that, if vampires are locked into a cycle of hunting for survival, if they never have a surplus on hand, how can they imprison others?
Spike tried to hunt enough to feed Dru, and arguably her continued ill health suggests it didn't work right. A whole nest might feed on a single kill, but do they really want to share with an outcast? The Master was fed by his nest for a really long time while stuck - actually that's an assumption, we only know for sure they fed him after the Harvest when he rose out of that pool of blood, so maybe only a medium long time while stuck. But the Master was pretty much worshipped. Why do the same for criminals? Like, these guys are predators, and not pack hunters. They mostly don't get along for long. Setting up a prison and then sharing food with prisoners, that takes a lot of layers of against their natures. And it would take extra effort every time, bringing kills or blood to a specific location every time, endangering the masquerade quite a lot more than being able to spread the kills and body dumps around.
The Master set up his industrial blood draining conveyor belt because he reckoned vampires spend all their time on hunt and kill. He only could do that because they were no longer trying to be covert about it. And I suspect they would get killed with fire in the long term, because it's really quite simple to notice that scale of problem.
So if all their efforts go into killing without being killed, where's the spare for a prison?
But a thrall, a slave, that's something else, especially if there's supernatural backup to keep them under control. You don't have a drain on resources, you have someone pulling their weight but with no claim on any surplus. Pack hunting at its best.
And that's vampires, who seem to be very hungry very often but can feed on pretty much anyone, and in a pinch anything.
Beings with more specific dietary needs will spend longer looking for food and have a smaller pool of it. They might need a large territory to survive on. I mean, Evony feeds on talent, how many talented people are there going to be in a population? Or how much talent per person, obviously. She'd either need to melt a whole lot of mostly talentless people or a few stars, and she seems to have opted for the stars, outside of emergencies where she hasn't fed for a while.
Evony stuck behind a picture shows Fae starve slow, but we Vex talking on his family shows they will, eventually, starve.
So if Fae imprison each other they're either setting up a slow death or they'll eventually need to be able to hunt someone else's very specific prey. Without endangering the masquerade. Tricky.
Humans have a really wide range of foodstuffs but need to eat them three times a day (ish) and have historically had roughly 80%-95% of adults spend all their time making the foods. If they need 95% of the work then they've got less room to support prisoners (for instance they would probably have trouble with the USA's current 0.91% of adults in prison; really? I googled, but really?). Margins would be tight. Unless convicts work too.
Economics of justice.
But then there's other ways, like fines, which historically have been applied even for murder back when society was very thin on the ground. That's still making them work to pay back, it's just got the option of stuff they've already worked for. It doesn't restrain them from further wrong actions as much as imprisonment or closely supervised slavery, but it does mean they're going to have to work harder to build up their reserves again, which maybe might keep them out of mischief.
And then of course there's pain. Cruel and unusual punishment for the fail, obviously. ... by the way we count justice. There's a Stargate Atlantis BDSM AU crossover with the main-ish 'verse where each society is horrified by what the other calls justice. Making people sit in a box for years? Why not just whip them and call it even? Imprisonment is an aversive, it's an experience nobody really wants, that's half the point of using it to stop crime. If other aversives can be applied instead then the theory goes they'll maybe train people out of wanting to do crimes. Except historically that has worked really poorly. Really really. So it gets confined to the rubbish bin of history, and nice justice prevails. But! It leaves convicts very probably able to work in much shorter lengths of time. So again, if you have a society that's marginal, say for instance a tiny colony with a whole lot of enemies, it is so very much more useful to do something painful and then put them back to work, especially if that work is bringing in the food supplies because somehow they didn't bring enough with them. Hurting people is a bad thing, but so is starving because the only guy you brought with you who could do the thing is currently being bored in a box.
... I, personally, come down firmly on the side of 'hurting people is a bad thing'. Full stop.
And societies that seem to have ample resources yet still use pain are, well, usually only in the stories to be maximum evil. Super evil. Evil with an evil cake dessert.
Mirrorverse Star Trek Enterprise where Reed helps invent a machine that gives maximum possible pain with no actual damage, for example. That's just there because they're evil.
... except they're on a spaceship, again, so locally they're very constrained as to experts. Recent local history has had big problems of survivability ie the post atomic horror. Coming out of that with slavery (because you need that much of the society to work) and pain punishments (because then they go back to work) kind of makes one set of sense. Ish.
And if pain punishments are standard in that society then inventing something that inflicts variable amounts of pain without any damage is, well, kind of merciful. They only suffer for as long as the punishment prescribes. There's a backwards logic to it.
But since we see the main universe we know that the planet and its population could have survived very well without slavery and with prisons, so then it looks cruel and unjust to no purpose.
So I'm wondering where the economic point is that makes prisons a viable way of controlling crime. I mean, I'm also wondering whether prisons control crime, that's a whole area of study. But I look at history and just wonder if what we'd call justice is a function of crop yields.
... and also feel icky about these thoughts. Clearly hurting people is wrong. Slavery is super wrong. That is not up for debate. Must be excellent to each other and acknowledge the rights of others.
And while it's interesting to think about with stories about vampires and Fae and so forth, who have different and much more expensive needs, it gets creepy to translate back into real world terms, because it occurred to me there are prisoners with very specific and more expensive needs, and then it turns into an argument about providing medical care to prisoners? And wow that should not be up for debate. Everyone should get medical care.
... but I can say that because we live in a society that makes more than it needs, for all its citizens, even the ones its not currently happy with. If there's rationing then an argument appears, and I do not like it at all at all.
I like better when vampires are being a metaphor for the aristocracy and the super rich. People that require large numbers of humans to feed them in the manner to which they are accustomed, cause they don't directly grow their own food.
But aristos don't have bigger needs, they won't starve if required to live the same way as everyone else, so it don't quite mesh.
The other method of controlling crime, historically, was exile or transportation. Just send everyone you can't be having with to another world, or continent, or country. Shove them over a border and make it as difficult as possible to come back. Declaring them Outlaw did similar things within their own borders, just nastier, because as well as not trying to support them any more local people could just kill them, and there wasn't as often a handy way to leave town included in the sentence.
This could have a lot of fuzzy overlap with people who want to set up colonies to get away from certain laws.
So the idea of establishing a mutant homeland or mutant homeworld kind of looks like deciding to exile the lot of them, only cheaper. And I guess with the possibility of getting visas to go back again later.
But mutants could probably feed themselves. Vampires couldn't feed themselves without bringing food. A supply of animals wouldn't cut it, Angel needed human blood to make his brain work after he was starved. So exile for vampires would mean starving until they lost their minds.
I kind of wonder if that's what happened to the ubervamps? Like, maybe they were the kind of demon that mixed their blood with humans to create vampires, that works. But maybe also they're just what happens to vampires if they get locked away from food, in a pocket hell, where they don't die but just lose their individuality. The oldest vampires started to look like ubervamps. Maybe that's just what happens when you lock all the vampires in a box together and leave them to starve.
... if there's no way back from that then wow, nasty.
... and Angel's mind might have been irretrievable them other times, so a vampire can indeed lose themselves.
... nasty.
Likewise with Fae, you lock them in together, they maybe live thousands of years... if they can feed on other Fae. But feeding on Fae was why that one Fae elder in the test for Lauren was getting a spongy brain, so, problem. Probably a lot of Fae would starve that way.
Oh, and factor in the Dawning - if a Fae under about 200 gets sent to prison, they either need training in prison, or they're going to devolve into Under Fae when they hit that Dawning age without knowing how to cope with it.
That's a lot of special needs.
And Fae are rich, collectively, because they send people to do jobs the community needs and then tax hell out of them... huh, that's not capitalism. But, if Fae are plenty enough rich, then it looks like they should be able to set up an institution that suits the prisoners needs, and pay for it out of taxes.
But setting it up so one specific Fae has control and responsibility of one specific criminal Fae could also work? And instead of getting orders from all the guards they'd just get orders from one? And as we saw, that one could be someone they actually like, if they have the connections or if someone is willing to fight to the death for it. I mean, that looks like a functional system, just not an equal one.
But Fae could be matched to experts who knew how to control and feed them, either way.
I don't know, I just get dissatisfied with stories looking at the horrible cruel way things have been done in these fantasy societies and telling them off for not being modern Americans about everything. Like, they have a different set of needs and a different economic situation, can they afford to be modern Americans? And is modern American really the model we want to go for here? That discussion could be usefully had.
I think it's pretty obvious that the modern world can afford a whole lot of very nice and kind justice.
But I don't know if that has always been true.
Or if it would be true in these fantasy worlds where you'd need, for instance, a steady supply of blood donors to keep your prisoner fed.
So then what could you do, what are the parameters, what would justice look like under those different conditions?
How to be maximum nice under difficult circumstances?
Like, slavery sucks. It epic level sucks. There is no doubt about it, slavery is a very bad thing.
But slavery used to be used as a punishment for criminals. ... actually, okay, some places have people working in prison, they kind of still do this.
And slavery sucks, so we can say slave owners suck, this is unjust, The End.
But prisons cost money. People cost food. In a society with very tight margins, can you afford to stick someone in a box unproductively and still feed them?
In a society that chucks half its food away you can very clearly afford to feed as many prisoners as free people, so we're back to slavery being unjust.
But that's not the only possible setup, in places with lower yields or more difficult food.
Like, Fae feed on humans. So I don't see how Hecuba Prison was meant to work.
I mean, were they just going to starve Bo to death, or were they going to send for takeout, or were they going to let her feed on fellow prisoners?
Not every Fae species can feed on fellow prisoners, how do they support them?
Stick that many Fae in a box and you have, within the logic of the show, a really complex food problem... that was never addressed because they did the worst most rubbish story instead.
So you can say the Light put Fae in prison and the Dark make them slaves, but, iirc the big guy specifically said that the slave owner is responsible for feeding him, so the Dark have a clear and obvious way to make sure those being punished for crimes actually don't starve.
Unlike the Light. Or anywhere they keep Fae in prisons. And just don't talk about the food.
Actually they were very inconsistent about that 'Fae feed on humans' part at all, they only demonstrated how certain people fed, others just seemed to kind of exist. Was it even part of the definition or what? Because then you'd have a two level system just by food source.
But! ANYway! All these urban fantasy series that postulate a second society of predators run under masquerade within our own: they face this economic problem. I've got very wound up before saying that vampires should just go to prison, but a system that can barely afford to financially support a single Slayer at a time can't afford to build a prison, much less man it. Plus they couldn't successfully imprison one disabled vampire for the length of Cruciamentum, because stupid. So I can see why on a practical level they just stake them. Too costly in time, money, and lives, to treat them as we would want to be treated. Even the government funded Initiative didn't have the capacity to cope with a single Hellmouth, and made the epic screwup of not admitting it, so big problem when it burst. But then that's humans trying to control non-humans.
The non-humans trying to control their own kind have a multi layered problem. Like, you can build a prison, but then you have a building full of pissed off individuals to hide. You can lock people up, but how do you feed them? Especially how do you feed them if feeding them makes them powerful enough to break out. Proper problem there. But even without that, if vampires are locked into a cycle of hunting for survival, if they never have a surplus on hand, how can they imprison others?
Spike tried to hunt enough to feed Dru, and arguably her continued ill health suggests it didn't work right. A whole nest might feed on a single kill, but do they really want to share with an outcast? The Master was fed by his nest for a really long time while stuck - actually that's an assumption, we only know for sure they fed him after the Harvest when he rose out of that pool of blood, so maybe only a medium long time while stuck. But the Master was pretty much worshipped. Why do the same for criminals? Like, these guys are predators, and not pack hunters. They mostly don't get along for long. Setting up a prison and then sharing food with prisoners, that takes a lot of layers of against their natures. And it would take extra effort every time, bringing kills or blood to a specific location every time, endangering the masquerade quite a lot more than being able to spread the kills and body dumps around.
The Master set up his industrial blood draining conveyor belt because he reckoned vampires spend all their time on hunt and kill. He only could do that because they were no longer trying to be covert about it. And I suspect they would get killed with fire in the long term, because it's really quite simple to notice that scale of problem.
So if all their efforts go into killing without being killed, where's the spare for a prison?
But a thrall, a slave, that's something else, especially if there's supernatural backup to keep them under control. You don't have a drain on resources, you have someone pulling their weight but with no claim on any surplus. Pack hunting at its best.
And that's vampires, who seem to be very hungry very often but can feed on pretty much anyone, and in a pinch anything.
Beings with more specific dietary needs will spend longer looking for food and have a smaller pool of it. They might need a large territory to survive on. I mean, Evony feeds on talent, how many talented people are there going to be in a population? Or how much talent per person, obviously. She'd either need to melt a whole lot of mostly talentless people or a few stars, and she seems to have opted for the stars, outside of emergencies where she hasn't fed for a while.
Evony stuck behind a picture shows Fae starve slow, but we Vex talking on his family shows they will, eventually, starve.
So if Fae imprison each other they're either setting up a slow death or they'll eventually need to be able to hunt someone else's very specific prey. Without endangering the masquerade. Tricky.
Humans have a really wide range of foodstuffs but need to eat them three times a day (ish) and have historically had roughly 80%-95% of adults spend all their time making the foods. If they need 95% of the work then they've got less room to support prisoners (for instance they would probably have trouble with the USA's current 0.91% of adults in prison; really? I googled, but really?). Margins would be tight. Unless convicts work too.
Economics of justice.
But then there's other ways, like fines, which historically have been applied even for murder back when society was very thin on the ground. That's still making them work to pay back, it's just got the option of stuff they've already worked for. It doesn't restrain them from further wrong actions as much as imprisonment or closely supervised slavery, but it does mean they're going to have to work harder to build up their reserves again, which maybe might keep them out of mischief.
And then of course there's pain. Cruel and unusual punishment for the fail, obviously. ... by the way we count justice. There's a Stargate Atlantis BDSM AU crossover with the main-ish 'verse where each society is horrified by what the other calls justice. Making people sit in a box for years? Why not just whip them and call it even? Imprisonment is an aversive, it's an experience nobody really wants, that's half the point of using it to stop crime. If other aversives can be applied instead then the theory goes they'll maybe train people out of wanting to do crimes. Except historically that has worked really poorly. Really really. So it gets confined to the rubbish bin of history, and nice justice prevails. But! It leaves convicts very probably able to work in much shorter lengths of time. So again, if you have a society that's marginal, say for instance a tiny colony with a whole lot of enemies, it is so very much more useful to do something painful and then put them back to work, especially if that work is bringing in the food supplies because somehow they didn't bring enough with them. Hurting people is a bad thing, but so is starving because the only guy you brought with you who could do the thing is currently being bored in a box.
... I, personally, come down firmly on the side of 'hurting people is a bad thing'. Full stop.
And societies that seem to have ample resources yet still use pain are, well, usually only in the stories to be maximum evil. Super evil. Evil with an evil cake dessert.
Mirrorverse Star Trek Enterprise where Reed helps invent a machine that gives maximum possible pain with no actual damage, for example. That's just there because they're evil.
... except they're on a spaceship, again, so locally they're very constrained as to experts. Recent local history has had big problems of survivability ie the post atomic horror. Coming out of that with slavery (because you need that much of the society to work) and pain punishments (because then they go back to work) kind of makes one set of sense. Ish.
And if pain punishments are standard in that society then inventing something that inflicts variable amounts of pain without any damage is, well, kind of merciful. They only suffer for as long as the punishment prescribes. There's a backwards logic to it.
But since we see the main universe we know that the planet and its population could have survived very well without slavery and with prisons, so then it looks cruel and unjust to no purpose.
So I'm wondering where the economic point is that makes prisons a viable way of controlling crime. I mean, I'm also wondering whether prisons control crime, that's a whole area of study. But I look at history and just wonder if what we'd call justice is a function of crop yields.
... and also feel icky about these thoughts. Clearly hurting people is wrong. Slavery is super wrong. That is not up for debate. Must be excellent to each other and acknowledge the rights of others.
And while it's interesting to think about with stories about vampires and Fae and so forth, who have different and much more expensive needs, it gets creepy to translate back into real world terms, because it occurred to me there are prisoners with very specific and more expensive needs, and then it turns into an argument about providing medical care to prisoners? And wow that should not be up for debate. Everyone should get medical care.
... but I can say that because we live in a society that makes more than it needs, for all its citizens, even the ones its not currently happy with. If there's rationing then an argument appears, and I do not like it at all at all.
I like better when vampires are being a metaphor for the aristocracy and the super rich. People that require large numbers of humans to feed them in the manner to which they are accustomed, cause they don't directly grow their own food.
But aristos don't have bigger needs, they won't starve if required to live the same way as everyone else, so it don't quite mesh.
The other method of controlling crime, historically, was exile or transportation. Just send everyone you can't be having with to another world, or continent, or country. Shove them over a border and make it as difficult as possible to come back. Declaring them Outlaw did similar things within their own borders, just nastier, because as well as not trying to support them any more local people could just kill them, and there wasn't as often a handy way to leave town included in the sentence.
This could have a lot of fuzzy overlap with people who want to set up colonies to get away from certain laws.
So the idea of establishing a mutant homeland or mutant homeworld kind of looks like deciding to exile the lot of them, only cheaper. And I guess with the possibility of getting visas to go back again later.
But mutants could probably feed themselves. Vampires couldn't feed themselves without bringing food. A supply of animals wouldn't cut it, Angel needed human blood to make his brain work after he was starved. So exile for vampires would mean starving until they lost their minds.
I kind of wonder if that's what happened to the ubervamps? Like, maybe they were the kind of demon that mixed their blood with humans to create vampires, that works. But maybe also they're just what happens to vampires if they get locked away from food, in a pocket hell, where they don't die but just lose their individuality. The oldest vampires started to look like ubervamps. Maybe that's just what happens when you lock all the vampires in a box together and leave them to starve.
... if there's no way back from that then wow, nasty.
... and Angel's mind might have been irretrievable them other times, so a vampire can indeed lose themselves.
... nasty.
Likewise with Fae, you lock them in together, they maybe live thousands of years... if they can feed on other Fae. But feeding on Fae was why that one Fae elder in the test for Lauren was getting a spongy brain, so, problem. Probably a lot of Fae would starve that way.
Oh, and factor in the Dawning - if a Fae under about 200 gets sent to prison, they either need training in prison, or they're going to devolve into Under Fae when they hit that Dawning age without knowing how to cope with it.
That's a lot of special needs.
And Fae are rich, collectively, because they send people to do jobs the community needs and then tax hell out of them... huh, that's not capitalism. But, if Fae are plenty enough rich, then it looks like they should be able to set up an institution that suits the prisoners needs, and pay for it out of taxes.
But setting it up so one specific Fae has control and responsibility of one specific criminal Fae could also work? And instead of getting orders from all the guards they'd just get orders from one? And as we saw, that one could be someone they actually like, if they have the connections or if someone is willing to fight to the death for it. I mean, that looks like a functional system, just not an equal one.
But Fae could be matched to experts who knew how to control and feed them, either way.
I don't know, I just get dissatisfied with stories looking at the horrible cruel way things have been done in these fantasy societies and telling them off for not being modern Americans about everything. Like, they have a different set of needs and a different economic situation, can they afford to be modern Americans? And is modern American really the model we want to go for here? That discussion could be usefully had.
I think it's pretty obvious that the modern world can afford a whole lot of very nice and kind justice.
But I don't know if that has always been true.
Or if it would be true in these fantasy worlds where you'd need, for instance, a steady supply of blood donors to keep your prisoner fed.
So then what could you do, what are the parameters, what would justice look like under those different conditions?
How to be maximum nice under difficult circumstances?