it would kill my career as a sperm donor. is job retraining available?
A place with universities, routine surgery with general anesthesia, and other trappings of modernity, but also massive undervaluation of skilled labor and a hereditary monpoly on professional employment and business ownership?
An economy so profoundly screwed up economy that a person with a 1 in 1000 intellect can’t do measurably better than his forebears while keeping all his body parts?
It sounds like our fearless, ball-less leaders have done considerably worse than the testicularly endowed despots in other lands. Let’s kill them and their aristocratic collaborators. It was probably a mistake for them to let us keep the testosterone-fueled aggression all to ourselves.
It’s an interesting question that basically boils down to would you rather have a family and be poor or be rich and alone. Poor sucks but so does alone. Since both options suck I’ll take the one that leave me intact.
Sure you can join the underground resistance, however as you know the eunuchs are the masters of secrets and have spies everywhere. There is a one in 100 million chance you can change anything and a 99,999 percent certainty you will instead end up with your intestines spread out in public view after a long and messy execution.
Again, such societies actually existed, in Persia and china and were stable for hundreds of years.
Success and fertility was reserved for the nobility, which you weren’t born into. Fight it if you want, but the odds are massively stacked against you.
Oredigger77: no you don’t have to be alone, eunuchs can and do have lovers of either sex, you just can’t have children.
With my luck, I’d become a eunuch and then be given the job of guarding the Harem.
Historically, Eunuchs were often lovers of women in the harem, and the Caliph didn’t care because the eunuchs couldn’t get them pregnant, so the certainty of fatherhood of any children from women in his harem was assured. Again, Eunuchs can and did have an active sex life.
In game of thrones terms, we are NOT talking “root and stem”. This is surgical removal of testicles only, under general anesthetic, with a 100 percent recovery rate.
Thing is, in real life when this sort of thing happened it isn’t like any poor kid can just volunteer to join the caste of eunuchs. You have to be a promising poor kid, not some farmer boy with shit on his boots.
So the point is that the aristocracy picks out a few promising commoners and meritocraticly lets them join the elite. But just them, not their family of origin or their future families, because commoners who hold power have to be castrated so they don’t form a new aristocracy and displace the old aristocracy. There was never a vast army of eunuchs, because in these societies almost everyone was a farmer or an artisan, with a small middle class of random professionals, and a tiny aristocratic elite. So farmboys can’t volunteer to become eunuchs because there’s only room for a small elite corp of eunuch bureaucrats.
So to fight the hypothetical, a society “much like ours” but with all middle class jobs reserved for eunuchs doesn’t make sense. We don’t have a vast working class of peasants and proletarians. I mean, you can argue either that, say, software developers will be treated as proletarians with commensurate pay and social status, or that software development is reserved for eunuchs.
But if software developers–and equivalent “middle class” jobs are reserved for eunuchs, what percentage of the population are you going to have to castrate? And WHY? What benefit do the aristocrats get from this? Middle class jobs don’t threaten the aristocrats. Our modern economy consists LARGELY of middle class jobs.
The society as presented makes no sense. Yes, a caste of elite Eunuch bureaucrats makes sense in a feudal economy as a way of making use of the occasional smart peasant without threatening the noble families. It can’t make sense in the modern world, because a world where the aristocrats still hold all political power and wealth is a world where our modern economy can’t happen.
But suppose for a moment we suspend our disbelief. No, of course most people aren’t going to volunteer to be castrated just so they can get a middle class job rather than a working class job. The people in real-life who did this were going from subsistence farming or slavery to the upper-crust elite, not from working class to middle class.
:eek: um, no. :eek:
I’m not using the damn things anyway. Orf wiv 'em.
Donate 'em to some [party of your choice] politician whose need is far greater.
Not that big of a deal to me. I’d say go ahead and take 'em.
Well obviously the power structure as described makes this society quite different, I meant a similar level of technological development. I do believe such a society could exist and be stable over a long period. As to how it could arise, imagine a world where the Roman Empire never fell, steam engines were invented first as engines of war in 400 AD. The Roman / Byzantine empire colonized the americas in 700 AD and ran into the fleets of Imperial China who in this world did not destroy their fleet and starts colonizing the west coast of the US. Technology develops in an arms race between the Byzantine and Chinese empires. Five hundred Years later you end up with 21st century technology but power is still held entirely by nobility and a eunuch class. Slavery was abolished 400 years ago for the same economic reasons as in our world.
Of course various popular uprisings and communist movements have flared up, but so far all have been ruthlessly stamped out.
Testosterone is highly overrated. In my case, castration would have no effect on my life whatsoever.
But I have one question: How is this society “run by a hereditary [sic] patriarchal nobility” if “you are disqualified for life if you have any children”? How do you get to be a patriarch without offspring?
Thats only for the eunuch civil service. The nobility of course have children and own all the land, own all the businesses etc. How you get to be one of the patriarchy, be born into that class of course. However for the purposes of this poll, you weren’t born into the ruling classes so your only chance of advancement is to sign up and lose the nads.
If I were a man, and born and raised to think this was normal, I’m sure I’d jump at the chance. Most people would, I’m sure. Our cultural lens doesn’t allow us to think that way anymore. So uh, I guess you made your point, good job, pip pip and such.
I read somewhere years ago that Arab sheiks used castrated slaves to guard their harem when they had to go away, thinking the women safe from, you know, hanky-panky. The funny part is that castration apparently does nothing to the ability to become erect, so these guarders of the “gates” would screw the hell out of these women until the men got their nut, which, of course, was NEVER. This just kills me !
HELL. NO. If I was ever in a situation where I was physically incapable of ever having kids, I would probably want to kill myself.
So infertile people (or gay people) should kill themselves?
Would you stop trying to put words in people’s mouths? He said that he, personally, would probably want to kill himself. He did not say that he, personally, should kill himself if put in that situation, or that anyone else would want to.
He’s implying that life is not worth living if you can’t reproduce and as you might imagine quite a few people might have a problem with that.