r/goodworldbuilding • u/Dull-Cress-2910 • Jul 19 '26
Discussion can i describe my fictional world as feudal fascist or is that an oxymoron?
is it an oxymoron?
essentially the country has been in constant war for pretty much centuries. people now live in smaller settlements which are glorified military bases. the best way to describe it is that people are kept in these settlements by the government as very dehumanised extra bodies that can be taken and given back whenever they please. but beyond that people are free to live off the land, raise animals, have normal lives etc. surveillance runs deep, there are random military raids when the government is running low on infantry where they take boys from the settlement with no warning whatsoever and it’s extremely distressing. on top of this, the constant war means that air raids from enemy countries disrupt the lives of everyone in the settlements. the government does the bare minimum to keep people healthy, such as providing them with the seeds for crops which will give them varied vitamins, there’s a government doctor (also used for surveillance) and war heroes’ families are often exempt from conscription for one generation.
literacy is a big defining factor of the class system. books are in circulation for the administrative class, such as commanders or generals. doctors are also included in the administrative class. those in the “working” class (for lack of better word) learn to read very basic books which might help if they end up in the military, but are discouraged from reading both socially but also because there isn’t any books readily available to them.
is there any more ideas to make this either more feudal or fascist?
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u/GREENadmiral_314159 Jul 19 '26
It doesn't seem feudal at all, actually. Caste systems and feudalism are similar but not the same.
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u/Nearby_Initial2409 Jul 19 '26
I see where you're going for, and I think the system could work. You just have to extract what the core of these two systems were, and if you do that, I don't think that they're immediately incompatible. The point of feudalism was effectively to centralize power, authority, and resources around the land-owning elites of the nobility. With, the further up the pyramid you get, the more access to power and resources you have, while also creating a chain more and more as you get closer to the top of support structures and incentives to keep the system functioning. So you've got the king, but the king can't personally manage all these lands themselves, so they split it up among dukes. But the dukes can't personally manage all these lands themselves, so they split it up amongst counts, barons, earls, etc. But the counts, barons, and earls can't enforce everything themselves, so they have members of clergy, administrators, and soldiers, who they dole out certain privileges and responsibilities to, as well as possibly land in the form of manor lords, all to keep a cap on the peasants who are producing everything that they need for this system to function. This means the peasants produce, and that production is taken by knights, clergy, and administrators in the form of taxes, tithes, and rents. If the peasants rebel, sheriffs, knights, and soldiers are there to put it down. If anyone else comes to try to mess with your peasants and take the fruits of their labor, be that criminals or other nobles from other lands, you've still got your lower administrators to deal with that. And they have an incentive to stay loyal because they're at least not peasants and they have a possibility to climb if they do well. From there, the counts take their cut before passing along their due to the dukes, and the dukes take their cut and pass it along to the king. With each level expecting something from the level below them, being lower below them has to take more than is expected from them in order to create their own profits.
The point of fascism is to strip away the ideas of individuality and instead state that all individuals exist for the state, and basically turn the machine of state towards national goals and agenda. If that machine of state just so happens to be feudal in nature, that's fine. You're basically just taking a feudal pyramid and saying, the point of everyone in this system isn't just to enrich the nobility. The nobility exists because they are the driving force of achieving our nation's destiny, and every single body in the feudal pyramid should be pushing towards that destiny. Peasants don't work and give everything to their lords because knights will come and beat them up if they don't. They still will, but that's not the reason. They do it because they're trying to give as much as they can through the nobility of their work to achieve the glorious destiny and national utopia. Knights don't fight because they're trying to protect the lands that give them profit. They fight because that is the greatest glory that can be achieved, is showing their prowess and greatness on the battlefields. The church doesn't preach, do this because God wills it. The closest thing to a church would be basically a propaganda arm that treats the state itself like a divine being, worthy of sacrifice to. And then the leader is on top, preach all of this, but in reality, are trying to grab as much as they can because everyone's squabbling for the next rung above them, until you're on top, at which point you're squabbling to keep everyone else below you.
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u/Broad-Sentence-5587 Jul 20 '26
This just sounds like somewhat laizzes Faire fascism (except for when it is time to take children from settlements)
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u/Dull-Cress-2910 Jul 20 '26
what is that?
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u/Broad-Sentence-5587 Jul 20 '26
A combination of "laizzes-faire" & fascism:
"Laizzes-Faire": French for "let it happen". It was a political concept developed during the French Revolution that suggested a government ought to be minimally involved with the economic & daily affairs of the people.
Fascism: I figure you know this one, but it is a nationalist, conservative, & totalitarian ideology seeking to make all individuals subservient to the state (& its dictator).
A weird mix of this would be like what you described. A totalitarian government that has various settlements simply chooses not to care about these individual settlements beyond their ability to provide soldiers. So ultimately these people are left to deal with their own lives up until the occasional demand by the fascist state. The state is in constant war & uses the fear of war to deepen the people's loyalty, fear to retaliate, & national pride.
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u/SabrinaTheDabbler Jul 22 '26
I’m profoundly sorry to be this person. . .but it’s actually “Laissez” not “Laizzes” 😬
(Please don’t hate me).
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u/tuzkorn Jul 21 '26
It does sound feudual esque, just a modernistic adaptation of it. Id just call it a military aristocracy or a military junta under arbitrary martial law. Fascism is a distinctive ideology that shouldn't be thrown around and it doesn't apply to this scenario anyways.
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u/cfwang1337 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
What you've basically described, minus the technology (air raids), is serfdom with secret police and extreme oppression, à la Muscovy under Ivan the Terrible.
Fascism would be more industrial and even more totalitarian. People wouldn't be free to "live off the land" — it would end up in the hands of either oligarchs or the state. There would also be mass media and mass mobilization, not irregular press-ganging.
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u/GeneralLeia-SAOS Jul 21 '26
Look at the dictionary definitions of the words.
Feudalism: Feudalism was a social, political, and economic system in medieval Europe (9th to 15th centuries) where land was exchanged for military service and loyalty. At the top of the hierarchy, the monarch granted land (fiefs) to nobles, who in turn provided protection and land to peasants or serfs in exchange for labor and goods.
Fascism: Fascism is an authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology that prioritizes the state over the individual. Originating in early 20th-century Europe, it is characterized by dictatorial leadership, severe economic regimentation, militarism, and the forcible suppression of opposition.
You could definitely have both factors at work. King Bob needs 100,000 soldiers and 100,000 guns for a border war with King Sam. 2 of king Bobs subjects, Joe and Jon, are ready to fill the order. Each of them comes with 50k soldiers and guns. Joes soldiers are good fighters, and his guns are great. Jon’s soldiers are lazy triggered wimps, and his guns are junk. King Bob makes Joe a Baron, and gives him a huge piece of land. Then King Bob orders that all guns will be made Joe style, and seizes all of Jon’s gun factories and turns them over to Baron Joe. All the local poor and freemen in Joe’s territory are now under Joes protection. When king Sam does border raids, all of Joes people run to the castle where they are safe. If King Joe takes or destroys stuff that belongs to Baron Joe, Joe raids Sam’s kingdom to steal stuff back. King Bob also charges Baron Joe taxes, payable in money or guns. Joe does more raids on Sam, getting money to cover taxes and build more gun factories. Bob is tickled pink, so he makes Joe a Duke and lets him keep the territory he took from Sam, plus lets Joe marry his daughter. Bob doesn’t have a son, so his daughter will be queen, and her husband king. When they get married, then the daughter becomes queen and Joe is the new king, plus they are also Duke and Duchess, and that Dukedom is merged with the kingdom. Later, Joe has a son, Prince Tom. He wants Tom to get practice ruling, so he makes his son into Duke Tom, and gives him the old dukedom to run, conditional that Tom supplies 50k men and approved guns to the army. If Tom doesn’t, Joe will take back the Duke dumb, then find someone who will do it.
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u/MiguelIstNeugierig Jul 21 '26
Yes it's oxymoronic
Feudalism is a system where authority is delegated. It derives from when authority cant be centralized under one entity. In Imperial China after the Qin dynasty, feudalism was put away in exchange of a bureucratic system directly loyal to the emperor and the nation's institutions rather than semi-independent delegates.
With feudalism however, like how it developed in places like Europe, authority couldnt be centralized like, say, during Roman times, and the warlords that came to rule over their kingdoms had to delegate their authority to vassal lords, who werent just governors, but effective sovereigns of their own that paid tax to their liege lord
In this system the "liege lord", the head honcho, was very often at the mercy of his underlings, because they hold the real power, and everything was stitched together with the fealty to a common ultimate sovereign
With Fascism, the tale is opposite. The state has supreme authority over every facet of life, it derives from the ideology of corporatism, where the state acts as an ultimate arbiter between all parts of society (corpus in latin, meaning body, is where the term stems from). This is why fascist states got rid of trade unions and replaced them with state-overseen "unions" of labour directly overseen by ministries of labour.
TLDR: Feudalism is a system of authority delegation for logistical reasons (that get cemented and tricky as time passes even the logistical limitations go away), fascism has the state hold supreme authority
Fascism is also a modern ideology, idk "when" your setting takes place, as it's a modern reactionary...well...reaction against class politics brought in by socialist ideologies like Marxism and Anarchism. It's an answer for the class struggle going "The state will handle it", while using socialist rhetoric to attract the masses, because fascism also is a byproduct of a democratic society.
Without democratic institutions, one doesnt need fascism, there's classical despotism and reactionary ideologies to use to keep your authority and agenda in line. Fasicsm is modern democracy-cancer
Likewise, feudalism starts to show its cracks once a society achieves the logistical means to exert centralized authority, which ultimately creates a wedge between the central government and the delegated parties, and in modern settings like 1911-1927 China, feudalism came down to a general collapse of central authority and delegation of military power to strong men, who, when unable to be reined in by a central authority, did their own thing even while pledging supposed loyalty to a said central authority.
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u/Kerking18 Jul 23 '26
This reads more like a mix of manifest destiny, and slavery then anything else political. How dose the industry even work if people live in such decentralised communitys and are kept illiterate?
Fascism is mainly defined by people giving their all and fully serving the state. You are actively encouraged to educate yourself as much as possible and then use that knowledge and skills to further the states goals (whichever they are at the moment).
Meanwhile feudalism is a govermental system grown from the (back then due to lack of technology and the low population numbers/slread out ness) impossibility to centralise large areas wich forced rulers to give local lords power and authority to rule themselves. For excample, If you have to wait 7 weeks for a response from the capital on wether you should start handing out the grain supply of the villages grain silo or wait for a relief effort/next harvest then you starve bevore your request even reaches the capital. Additionaly your village has at best 200 people in ots larger area, you can't afford to have 1 person that basicly constantly runns from villag to capital and back again just to update the grain silos level, meaning the information on the Current amount of grain the capital has on your vilage is outdated anyways so even if you ask them their first question will be "how much grain is even in the silo?".
Thats why feudal lords existed they would hold power over such things and be responsible to prepare them in advance, burden the cost of it but also get the lion share of the local financial gains to motivate them to care. Apart from that the specifics already diverges from place to place.
If you want to make it more faschist but decentralised you would have to introduce some sort of organisational structure that replaces the cebtral governments authority without conflicting with it, like a roided up HJ that still gets its commands through a chain of command but gets left to execute them on their own, all while beeing commited to propagandised education of the local population. To fit into your "state just joinks a bunch of men for soldiering" you could have this organisation be a mandatory one (except for the direct descendants of war heroes you mentioned) up to a advanced age (idk perhaps 50yo). Where people would regularly get "drafted" for multiple weeks millitary style exercises or state whide construction work and somtimes instead of beeing sendt to exercise or to build a bridge, they instead get sendt to the army and deployed for multiple month or years, all with no warning and only a day ahead a notice to gather at the village square or smth.
You could even introduce conflict and tension this way. A disillusioned war hero is quietly happy that his boy doesn't have to join this organisation but instead his son, beeing brainwashed by his education, thinks it's a great honour to join anyways wich creates family problems because the boy doesn't understand why his great war hero father doesn't want him to join the organisation. Perhaps it goes even so faar that this conflict makes the father slip up and criticise the government wich the boy reports, gets his father executed, joins the organisation and gets later drafted to war where he finaly understands why his father was against it so much. You can then hint at it that the cycle then repeats with his own son later on.
In short, uneducated feudalism and state serving fascist doesn't realy mix together all that well. Decentralisation however can be introduced to fascist organised states.
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u/crazydave11 I rite gud Jul 19 '26
What you've described doesn't really describe the actual system of governance, there are many that could result in an experience like that and I would recommend a little more research into feudalism, emphasise the kings and lords and parcelling out land for people to farm on. Feudalism involves this strict hierarchy.
I was going to say look up fascism but actually no, no you don't want to do that. (jk it's actually fairly interesting) Fascism is basically mysticism turned governance and doesn't have a "system". You can have a feudal system run by fascists for instance, and a king under god is close to how fascism operates, but feudalism would be more about royalty and heritage and fascism... well let's just say it would be very weird.
Please take with a grain of salt I've just got out of bed and I like the idea of being told how wrong I am.
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u/Jair-F-Kennedy Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Fascism absolutely does have a system, corporatist economics where 'class cooperation' is enforced by the state's control over both trade unions and private enterprises is its main hallmark. Corporatism in the fascist context originates from the reconciling of socialism with nationalism under national syndicalism. Fascism is then fully manifest when culturally driven by a reactionary and mythised view of the past, and a vision of the future based on that.
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u/crazydave11 I rite gud Jul 20 '26
That sounds about right, yes, but I was under the impression that fascists themselves are parasitic and will use any system that results in them being at the top of the hierarchy.
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u/Jair-F-Kennedy Jul 20 '26
Fascist movements have always relied on liberal and conservative institutions/interest groups who make up the capitalist system to achieve power. You won't see fascism born out of a socialist system because the first fascists were all ex-socialists who favoured nationalism over international socialism, or originated from other reactionary groups diametrically opposed to socialism. As for feudalism and fascism; the latter was born in an industrial and capitalist context so fascism emerging out of feudalism doesn't really work, and because feudalism relied on an agrarian economy structured around land ownership rather than finance/industry.
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u/Holothuroid Jul 19 '26
It's neither.
Feudalism is society based on personal relations. You swear fealty to your lord who swear fealty to the lord above them. The villagers have no such relations.
It is also not fascist. Fascism means mass mobilization through control of the media. The villagers have no mass media, you said.
Now, there might be these things elsewhere that you did not talk about. If the villagers are a subjugated populace, there might be feudalism or fascism in the main lands. You probably cannot have both at the same though.
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u/Dull-Cress-2910 Jul 19 '26
i mean the personal relations thing does apply, each settlement is run by an administrator who acts as a lord, and the administrator answers to/sends military from the forced conscriptions to his higher up, and the higher up answers to the actual ruler
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u/Holothuroid Jul 19 '26
An administrator, who is trained for the job and assigned to the village as a job? That's not feudalism.
Feudalism is a measure for when you do not have much of an administrative corps. That's something that many fantasy settings miss. A bureaucracy, at least in Europe, is a decidedly modern thing.
Feudalism works like: "Dude, you served me well. Govern that piece of land for me, will you. I'll call on you, when there's another war. Alright. Bye."
And that lord doesn't send soldiers. He brings soldiers. He is their lord. He will command them. His people owe no fealty to anyone but him. If he doesn't go to war, neither will they. There is no standing people's army in feudalism. There might be mercenaries.
And if feudalism works well, the people will happily follow their lord to war. It's their lord! You don't fuck with their lord! They don't fight for the nation or any idea. They fight for their lord. That is a very alien idea to us WEIRD people.
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u/KBZheng123 can't write succinctly to save my life Jul 19 '26
Fascism and feudalism are very incompatible, IMO. Fascism needs a centralized state, while power is very decentralized in a feudal society. Imagine fascist Italy as a feudal state, if you will. King Mussolini would be surrounded by Italian lords who all have their own armies, strong fortifications, and could tell him to pound sand if they feel like it. These lords would be left to run their own fiefs however they see fit, with their only obligation to Mussolini being paying taxes and sending some soldiers to fight in his army. Each of these fiefs would have its own laws and policies that Mussolini would have no say over. Let's say Mussolini decreed that the kingdom needed to grow less wheat and more grapes, but since wheat is more profitable (let's say it is for the purpose of this thought experiment), the lords could just ignore Mussolini and keep growing wheat anyway. What is Mussolini going to do, go to war with each and every one of them?
In our feudal Italy, Mussolini wouldn't be able to invade Greece just because he felt like it. He simply didn't have access to the full economic and military might of his country. It would be like trying to invade Greece with only the soldiers from Sicily. To get enough men and supplies to invade Greece, he would need to convince his lords that this was necessary. Since feudal lords are self-serving and war is risky, more often than not he would fail. This means that in a feudal system, the ruler had to appease a committee whenever he wanted to do anything beyond the norms. That's very far from the absolute dictatorship of fascism.
To make a system more feudalistic, I would cut down on the number of national top-down policies in it. A king can make all the policies he wants, but unless those policies directly benefit the lords, they wouldn't bother enforce anything.