How do you reward men for their toil and dedication in the service of your cause ?i You can surely furnish them with earthly bounties – wine, women, and wages – but in a voluntary, decentralised, geographiless Republic, this distribution is neither practicable nor sustainable. So what do you do ?ii Why, take a page from history’s playbookiii :
It was Peter himself who carried home another Western practice which simultaneously broadened the sophistication of Russian society and saved the state land and money. The traditional Russian manner of rewarding important services to the tsar had been the bestowal of large estates or gifts of money. In the West, Peter discovered the thriftier device of awarding decorations—orders, crosses and stars. Imitating such foreign decorations as England’s Order of the Garteriv and the Hapsburg Order of the Golden Fleece,v Peter created an exclusive order of Russian knighthood, the Order of St. Andrew,vi named after the patron saint of Russia. The new knights were distinguished by a broad light-blue ribbon worn diagonally across the chest and the cross of St. Andrew in black on white enamel.
Thus, for over two centuries, human nature being what it is, these pieces of colored ribbon and bits of silver and enamel became worth as much to Russian generals, admirals, ministers and other officials as thousands of acres of good Russian earth.
Thusly is TMSR’s Lordship – those appointed to deedbot’s L1 – rewarded.vii Good ol’ human nature…
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- Not your purpose, mind. There’s no purpose to be had. ↩
- Assuming you’re MP or one of the dozen extant equivalents on earth. ↩
- From Robert K. Massie’s “Peter the Great : His Life and World,” 1980. The book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography back before the confederates took it over. It’s well worth a read.↩
- The Order of the Garter was founded in 1348.↩
- The Order of the Golden Fleece was founded in 1430.↩
- The Order of St. Andrew was founded in 1698. The Russians are rarely first to the party (unless the party’s in space) but they have a definite knack for execution once arrived and settled. ↩
- In a simpler time, I was myself in the L1 of a bot named “ass,” that which managed the WoT element of what deedbot handles for #trilema. Today, however, I’m merely a boyar – somewhere between citizen and
princeLord – at the intermediate level of Republican participation, a notch below the ever-rising tide of Lordship-qualifying advanced participation. ↩