[World Building] Alt-History TL 8 Earth with open RPM

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by ajardoor

It's not so much "slaves" so much as it is "giving up a significant degree of freedom and pledging service in exchange for a high standard of living and guaranteed high income"

I hope you do realise that this is essentially the deal Russians went into with their government? And that unsurprisingly, they ended up losing both after the government changed its mind? Surely a similar thing happened in other authoritarian/dictatorial regimes. It's just another variation of "Sell a bit of liberty for a bit of security/comfort", and you know where that leads.

Originally Posted by ajardoor

It is not perfect or certain, but it is a preferable situation to a war, a violent descent into chaos, or a dictatorship.

It is a de facto dictatorship of the mundanes, unless the mages overthrow them. It makes 'people are equal, but some mages are less equal than humans' a fact, covered up in lots of legalese talk, but no amount of talk can completely cover that. It's certainly not preferable to a harmonious equal coexistence that real-world humanity clumsily strives for in most of the civilised world in regards to other groups of people.