SID MEIER’S ALPHA CENTUARI: REALISTIC SCI-FI, Part 4

Hello all!

How are you doing this Monday? Day? Day-day? Hope you’re all doing well.

So, I have to start by saying that I can’t cover all the crazy that could be covered by the Alpha Centauri factions. Each of them is a rabbit hole unto itself; though long and deep, they are all finite. But most of that is outside the scope of this blog or my ability to write, or your ability to pay attention for more than 20 minutes. I’ll have some concluding thoughts as I wrap up the factions, in, I dunno, another week or two? And then I’ll (maybe) finish the other multi-part series I’ve started(?)

So, onto Morgan!

CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morgan Industries; AKA the Morganites: ‘Nwah-boo-dee-kay’, or just ‘Morgan’. Morgan Industries is the Gilded Age capitalism, in space. Makes sense, too.

The Gilded Age was during the Industrial Revolution; it was a term coined by Mark Twain, who with Charles Dudley Warner co-authored the book of the same name in 1873. It is capitalism exploding onto the scene at an astronomical rate, because it happened in the Industrial Revolution, where, it can be argued, that the real revolution was not ‘machine power’ but instead that ‘human muscle power’ was finally removed as a limiter for human accomplishments; perhaps, you can say, human labor became less valuable than tireless machine labor?

But this is all a broad topic, so I gotta start somewhere concrete. Morgan is a diamond tycoon from the royal family of an unspecified African nation. Morgan’s philosophy itself is shameless but honest greed—he even wrote a book, in-game, and titled it ‘The Ethics of Greed’. Like Zakharov, Morgan is an ambiguous economist, in that he can swing for good or bad, and follows a set of rules that are alien to most people. Zakharov has his rules of rigorous science; Morgan has his rules, his morals based around ‘use resources now, because they won’t exist in the future.’

I find Morgan interesting, because his views and morals should and shouldn’t work? Just like an economy, I suppose. (Though, it should be noted that I’m dabbling in amateur economics, because I’m getting tired of learning philosophy.) Morgan understands that life is a competition, yes, but not in the ultra-violent way of Corazon or the Spartan Federation. Life is not about survival, exactly, but the accumulation of resources—energy especially. You only ‘lose’ if you run out of energy or resources, but if you still have some left, keep chugging along! You’ll have a chance to earn more. (Until Morgan loses his mind and becomes the god-emperor of all planetary banking, see his quote on the ‘Quantum Converter’ facility.)

Yes, use and exploit resources now, or else someone else will, or the resources will go to waste. This is a survivalist’s motto, used from the Plains Indians of North America to the Bedouins of Arabia. But there’s a second rule—don’t be wasteful in the exploitation. Somebody else wants it, and will pay for it. Morgan effectively sees human behavior and economics as the same thing (his quote, ‘The Merchant Exchange’)*. Yes, despite ultimately advocating for a laissez-faire**, capitalistic ‘everyone has the right to earn as much money and property as they can’ society (with him on top), there’s a kind of pro-human trend to Morgan. If everyone dies by tearing each other apart—then everyone loses, because who will be there to make money?

[*This is, ultimately, the view of John Locke of 17th century England, but Locke needs his own series to explain how he altered the world into the shape it is today.]

[**Damn the French! ‘La-zay-fair’]

Now, as I mentioned, I’m an amateur learning economics, but I’ve picked up on a few important things real quick. Working backwards, we of course still have this daft debate between Capitalism and Marxism-variants. Marx said one thing, and there are 3 other major schools of economics that jostle each other in the modern Capitalist world. Taken purely as an economist, Marx has the ‘labor theory of value’—a thing is valuable because of the amount of effort that went into it. It is a very simple, elegant calculus based on materialism. A thing is valuable by the most easily quantifiable factors about it! What is it made of? How much effort did it take to get its base resources extracted? How much effort did it take to refine the resource into product? How much effort did it take to transport the product? Bam! Calculate all that into the formula, and you should have a price that perfectly matches it.

But there’s more! Adam Smith had a similar idea in the 1700s, but Marx thought Smith did not figure in enough ‘social factors’ into his equations of value. Marx claims to have figured out what these ‘social factors’ are. Put another way, Smith’s version of value is ‘whatever the product does that saves time or money for the buyer’ but allows for things like taxation or the cost of tools needed to make the thing. Marx tried to include a lot of other factors in his theory, which can be boiled down to ‘how many man-hours does it take for an idiot to build a lightbulb?’ What went into making the idiot, the factory, the lightbulb materials, the hour-clock, etc.? All those minutia should make the light bulb worth more and the idiot worth more pay! And that the bourgeoise factory-owners should stop slapping ‘arbitrary’ prices on products!

Then you have the Austrian school of economics, which says that a product is valuable based on how much people are willing to pay for it. No matter what it took to make or what laws may influence taxation or whatever other freak accident you want to include, a product’s value will always be determined by what a human being is willing to pay for it. The Austrian school seems the most… ‘hands off’ of the schools, as the others try to fit in every force that can change a person’s mind about money. The other big schools are the Chicago school and the Keynesian school. If you were to put a Venn Diagram that explains how they are different, I’d never be able to tell, as the two of them cross-pollinate with and reject each other constantly. As far as I can tell, the Keynesian school’s big difference is ‘the government should be allowed more control over money-spending, but does not have control over money-generation’.

The problem of government and money has been there since time immemorial. It’s the king-and-purse problem, where the one with all the power wants all the money. But it’s deeper than that. For the king, or sultan for the fabled bazaars, has a keen interest in keeping the money of his kingdom is ‘healthy’. The king or sultan gets involved into trade, to make sure there is order to it, but he also wants to bend the market to his will as an extension of his power. But why did the king-sultan get involved in the first place? Because an arbitrator was needed to impose laws that were balanced to both parties involved. But what made that happen? Because one man tried to cheat another in a deal. And there is the heart—it is not money, but trust that is the foundation of economies.

I forgot where I heard this—some economist, yes—but it was so simple I swallowed it right there and took it to heart. The economist also used Japan as an example, so that made me happy too, because of my affection for Japanese culture. In Japan, there is a dearth of metal resources and even simple things like abundant hardwoods for houses. In pre-modern times, if something could be made of bamboo or long grass, the Japanese figured it out! Mighty works of stone were difficult, too, because the frequent earthquakes meant that whatever stone buildings were made had to be composites of several materials, not just stone, to sway with the earthquake, and not tumble over. As argued by the economist, the only real resource was trust between people. It is why thieves are so vilified in Japanese culture—Robin Hood would be executed without trial if he wound up in Japan, no matter his good intentions. Being caught in a theft is one of the greatest shames and considered one of the worst fates that can happen to a person, even if that person is a child stealing for bread*.

[*Even more interesting, I learned that rice is one of the hardest plants to farm by human effort. Rice must be tended to year-round, instead of seasonally like wheat; it is back-breaking, because in order to have a rice field, you have to make a swamp and then plough through the mud of that swamp! And then, plant and remove seeds, by hand, into the mud. Malaria and parasites are rampant—but rice is so abundant in food that the pre-modern Japanese koku is based on rice—namely, one koku is ‘the amount of rice needed to feed a man for a whole year’.]

We’re so surrounded by contracts and lawyers, all these nitty-gritty layers of law, that we forget that once, a man’s word was his bond—lest he be an oathbreaker, untrustworthy, and thrown out. Look at the tiny kingdoms of Great Britian, the Dutch Netherlands, the African Kingdom of Mali (now gone) and the even smaller land of the Nabataeans (Na-bah-tay-ens; also long gone). Tiny kingdoms, of a small but concentrated population each, surrounded by stronger neighbors, and filthy stinkin’ rich, each and all of them! For a time, at least. All they had was each other, and it was their economies that rocked the world in their given centuries*.

[*Britain, post-Hundred Years’ War, so 1453 to today, but really it was Britain from about 1600 to the rise of Victoria that I speak of; the Dutch Republic from 1579-1795; Mali was from 1226-1670, and the Nabataeans from about the 4th century B.C. to a little over 150 A.D. Though, Britain and the Dutch continue to exist today, with their own strange blend of successes and problems.]

We’ll start with Mali—forgive me, Mali was an empire for most of its existence, but that would be like saying the American Midwest is also an ‘empire’ based on size alone. Mali was a tribal confederation on the western side of Africa, with its heartland around the Niger River*. Twelve or so tribes, that were big enough to rule, chose an Emperor or ‘Mansa’ from the royal tribes. There were easily a hundred or so smaller tribes or peoples, and none spoke a common language.

[*Always a river…though they aren’t nice. The Niger river is hostile to boats; the Nile River is predictable but its many waterfalls prevent boat trade; the Yellow River of China is vital for farmland but it floods so violently that it alters the landscape; the Tigris and Euphrates are slightly salty, and ironically dried up the Fertile Crescent after a 1000 years of irrigation.]

Yet Mali was the great trade empire of the Sahara. To the west was the Atlantic Ocean, to the south were hills and mountains that fenced out the inner jungles, and to the north was the impossible Sahara itself. Mali was a mixed religious makeup, with the ruling class being Muslim (with some traditional paganism) and the common people having regional pagan faith. There were so many regional dialects that there wasn’t a common trade language outside the larger cities. So, the Silent Barter was used. Professional caravanners, who rode the camels across the Sahara, would stop by a certain place outside a village, and place goods on a stone table. They would leave. The villagers would then come to the place, and place their goods on the table, bartering what they thought was a fair exchange. Then they left, the caravanners returned, took the exchange of goods, and left. Anything from food to gold dust to seashells were traded in this way.

Mali, like the other nations mentioned, was isolated geographically. Mali had no external enemies except raiders who lived in the hills and jungles; a Mansa was judged by how well he kept them under control. To the east were, surprisingly, city-states, who controlled the oases (lakes) on the road to the Middle East, but they were usually on good terms with Mali. No, the only real enemies were internal, as the tribes politicked against one another. Most disastrously, there was no formal law of succession; when the Mansa-emperor died, a civil war shortly followed after. These wars built up, so that Mali fractured, and smaller empires squabbled over the pieces (though Mali did survive the longest). Their legacy, was gold, that was found all over the Middle East and North Africa.

The Nabataeans are famous for Petra, the city carved from a canyon in the state of Jordan. They are a tough desert people, who traded from Persia to Arabia to Egypt to the coast of East Africa all the way to Gaza, Judea, Israel, and even parts of India and Greece (though they had other people sail the boats). Similar to the Malians, the Nabataeans were desert walkers, and never figured out how boats worked. The Nabataeans were smaller in number, but lived in cities built atop mountains or, like with Petra, in sandstone canyons. Their genius lay in that, they figured out pipes and plumbing! Their mountain homes had running water by pipes coming from hidden aqueducts. They were clever, in that they kept their trade routes across the deserts secret; when enemies invaded—like the Greeks of Alexander or the Romans or the Persian or the Arabs—they merely hid in their mountain cities and waited for the desert to burn out their enemies. Their end came when, after centuries of trial and error, competing nations discovered safer routes across the deserts—and an earthquake struck Petra, their capital, so all their water-engineering was destroyed.

The Dutch, as the European joke goes, are a bunch of swamp-Germans who were bribed by a bishop to live in a swampland he bought, and then the Dutch turned the swamp into profit! While famous for the windmills that keep the sea away from the land, the Dutch were clever enough to build cities and castles, in swamps, and use the entire swamp as a giant moat. One city, Candia, was under siege for 20 years—though it also was a port city on a swamp with access to the sea. Small country, surrounded by enemies—Germany, France, Belgium, Britain, Scandinavia and the Danes from Denmark, and Spain bullied it, too—and having to use geography to survive. In this case, the water, as next to the British the Dutch were one of the premier sea powers from the 1600s-1700s. They never did much conquering on land, for the other land powers would stomp them, but they did break open (in multiple senses) India and Indonesia and Japan to western markets*. They stopped being a world power because the land nations like France and Spain got jealous of their money and stomped them—but the cost to take the Netherlands was so expensive that France and Spain didn’t get much out of it.

[*Despite what propaganda goes about these days, the British were fairer to their colonies like India, than the Dutch were to theirs. The Dutch—or rather, their joint-stock company—effectively razed their colonies to the ground to exploit them. The nations that were former colonies of the British can complain all they want, to make Britain look bad, at least they still exist. The Dutch colonies aren’t around to complain at all.]

As for the English? Ruled the waves, waived (ignored) the rules. Dense population, bigger neighbors, got beat up/invaded by Vikings and Normans, then they beat up the Vikings and married the (French)Normans, and then they beat up France (badly) for 100 years and then defeated the Spanish at sea, and then ‘hey! We control all the boats now!’ …Okay, yeah, that is a bit silly for a summary, but you do have to realize how strange it is that Britain was once a province of France, and though the underdog beat up a united Spain and the larger France for several generations—and then they became a naval trading power? How did that happen? Well, boats, yes, but better boats that could sail across the whole world. And, of course, the foundation for trade was already there—England pre-Age of Sail was already industrious, and sold off more products (like wool) across the English channel. Small population that produced more than what was needed—and this was before the Protestant work ethic.

…Can we get back to Space-Capitalism? Yeah, sure, but we’re skipping a lot more in-between to get to the space capitalism of the Morganites. Oh, fine. Look up the South-Sea Bubble of 1711-1720, which was effectively the first world-wide stock market crash in modern history. Happened in England. Or look up the Jews, the Chinese living in Indonesia, and the Igbo of Nigeria, and see how they are all tight-knit but small communities in foreign lands, who are all filthy stinkin’ rich because they have a unique skillset that their host population doesn’t have. Or how the Catholic monks of Europe were economic centers of property because some saint told them “HARD WORK IS HOLY” and the monks lived, worked, and prayed all day except for their literal fifteen-minute break*—and (for a while) these monks basically gave away their money and goods in the pursuit of holiness!

[*Not joking.]

There is something wildly bizarre, that good deeds and good behavior are rewarded with good stuff. This makes sense for us in our capitalist mindset, but you have to remember how unmotivated people were to work in the past. Work hard for survival, yes, but no more than that, because some powerful person would steal your extra stuff you made. More than just paying taxes—a social superior could pull rank and demand that you give him your pretty horse/camel/dog/cow/daughter, and you could not say no. Even the powerful stole from the powerful, in terms of money. I can’t tell you the number of times when reading through ancient military history it was brought up ‘king-general-emperor-pasha So-So brought the whole of the royal treasury with him so that his retainers at home wouldn’t steal from it while he was off to war—and then king-general-emperor-pasha So-So was defeated in battle because some no-name hooligans pillaged his army camp while he was fighting a battle, right now, and KGEP So-So had to retreat from the battle so that he could chase down the hooligans stealing his stuff.’

The protection of property, the equality of persons before law—these and so much more are needed to even have what we have! It’s why I can’t take Morgan seriously as a faction. It’s the same reason I don’t ever take politicians seriously, because most of them are morons with too much power. The same with the dreaded ‘megacorporations’. They’re morons with too much money, that’s all. Megacorporations rise and die in similar ways to political entities. They are not nor ever will be invincible. A megacorp is not robust enough to survive on its own; even the English and Dutch trading companies over in India had to have a lot of help in getting the initial funding together, and they needed political support from their home nations, lest they (the companies) be declared an ‘independent nation’ and then be warred upon by nations like France and Spain. Oi! But even then, nations do not make trade and trade does not make nations—they’re too complicated.

The Morganites are effectively impossible as a faction, because too much goes into making them exist. Yes, the Morganites are supposed to be the epitome of Western Liberal Capitalism (WLC) and are supposed to be the epitome of financial wizards of our era. Taking finance-wizards and putting them on a hostile death-world will NOT make money unless the finance-wizards become tough bastards, or are at minimum placed over in charge of a bunch of tough bastards who can survive a death world, but the discrepancy in cultures between the finance-wizards and tough guys will cause more friction that can be smoothed over. The tough guys can just enslave the finance-wizards, for example.

The Morganites are a caricature and a bad one at that, because sure, they are WLC incarnate, but like with science, the caricature glosses over the concepts needed for WLC to exist. The emphasis on individuals, for example, or the emphasis that (like Locke said) individuals are rational actors out for their own best interests, and the emphasis that wealth prevents violence by giving people what they want; an idea shared by both sides of the Cold War, but played out differently on both sides. And then 9/11 turned that worldview upside down.

The Morganites are hedonists, sure, and they don’t lie about it. And they’re all pansies. None of them are the tough S.O.B.s that made the premier trade empires of the past—I haven’t even mentioned Carthage on the Mediterranean or Majapahit of Indonesia—and the cutthroat capitalism that they can pull off, in-game, just can’t work without a big population! Carthage and Majapahit, Mali, and the Nabateans, who are pre-Locke, and Britain, the Dutch, and the USA, who were made by Locke.

But what’s the end-goal of Morgan, then? What is wealth? I’ve never thought too hard on it myself; I have only one line from C.S. Lewis*, from one of his sermons or another (I forget), but in one line he mentioned ‘self-sufficient like wealth.’ He was either talking about God’s grace or elf kings, I can’t remember, but there’s truth to that. Look at money! It is based on a promise—that somehow, this coin is representative of effort, that it will save you labor and provide for your material needs. You can say that an unlimited amount of money, in a place where it is valuable, can make a person self-sufficient up to a point. It’s amazing when you think about it, because money is not necessarily arbitrary; partly is, partly isn’t. Did you know, that in ancient Greek, a symbol was a special coin? It was two words, sym- and obol, the former ‘union’ and the latter ‘coin’. As part of a contract, business men would split a coin in two, like two puzzle pieces, and keep the unique pieces as proof of contract?

[*Yup, all the thinky-thinker types seem to talk about everything. I don’t know if it’s annoying or endearing.]

So, what does Morgan want? I think Morgan wants life (see his quote on ‘The Longevity Vaccine’). Sure, he wants to live forever, by his own admission, but strangely I think he understands on some level that life is more valuable than wealth, but that (in his mind) wealth makes life worthwhile. And what can money do? In the right amount, make most of your worries disappear. We forget that there is more to life than—well, more than money. Our poor Western capitalist society seems more obsessed with work than money—almost as if for us, money is a badge, a symbol of not our power but our capability to…work ourselves to death? Isn’t that just weird? Sure, yeah, greed means you value unliving objects more than living people, but there’s something demented is obsessing over the expenditure of effort. And sure, one of the quirks of capitalism is that you can earn a demented amount of money. But for what end? At least with Morgan—greedy life-loving mogul with a god-complex that he is—he at least understands that life is more worthwhile than drudgery. What does raw work, with no end goal, really get you?

Morgan Industries Playstyle: So, as money-making space-capitalist stereotypes, who are also hedonists, the Morganites have an innate penalty to population and military. They refuse to have children, to save on money, so the Morganite cities are not allowed to grow past 4 units until they research a specific technology (other factions can have 7 units of population normally). The penalty to military means that their cities can support one military unit for free per city—any more and they have to pay extra in upkeep.

Their bonuses? They make money. They make energy-money without even trying, and they get more money when you enter into trade deals with allies. With a little bit of tech research, each of their workers can produce 1 energy-money unit a turn, when other factions have to have a worker exploit a tile that specifically gives energy-money.

Overall, a small population (at the start) and a weak military is a bad combo for survival. The Morganites are easily wiped out if they don’t have a geography that gives them good protection. In my experience, Morgan almost always gets wiped out on a given playthrough if you don’t babysit him—and playing the Morganites yourself is playing on hardmode. For the Morganites to work in a survival situation, they have to make so much money that they can afford the waste of an inefficient military. And, they also have to make so much money that they can ‘fast-buy’ (instantly build) a unit or building, every turn. And, of course, they have to make friends with everybody.

They are a pure builder faction, but they have to play extremely well in order to not get bulldozed by brute force factions. Now, it would be cool if the Morganites had a unique navigation tech, so that they can explore through the fungus jungles or sail the seas easier, but there is no such innate bonus, nor do any of the in-game story elements imply that the Morganites are interested in making space-caravans.

More to follow!

[Extra Economic Trivia]

[[[So, banking is built on trust. We got banking from the Crusaders, the Orders Hospitallers, and then that was copied by the Italian city-states. The practice of holding money came from Crusader knights who were entrusted by holy pilgrims to look after their stuff while they (the pilgrims) were traveling through the Holy Land. And, to donate their money if they were killed. The Italians took their idea, and developed the ‘paper bank notes for money’ concept, but it took a generation for the idea to really take off in Europe.

The joint-stock company, which Britain and the Dutch had in spades, is based on trust, in that with a JSC everyone is pooling their money and resources together, and assuming that nobody steals from the pool. It is shared loss and shared gain, because if something goes wrong with the business venture, the losses are shared across the people in the company, rather than one person becoming completely ruined. The gains are shared, fairly, if there is success*.

[*Even more crazy is the use of derivatives. They were growing in use across Europe among the merchants. Derivatives are like if you cross-bred gambling with insurance, in that at the time, a product’s ‘value’ was derived from the value of other products—‘Pork is 5 schillings a pound but goes up 1 schilling if apples are cheaper but goes down 2 schillings if butter is more expensive!’ Derivatives and their refinement—a Medieval concept—is the development of the stock market.]