But this requires something that I and the house and Adom did not manage to synch up on, whether it’s a tight enough box, or a sufficiently high level of ground safety and trust, or individual self-discipline, or what.
There’s a feeling I’ve been playing with over the last year whose True Name is something like “I would follow this man into battle.”
I think many people nowadays have pretty screwy relationships with authority due to having spent a lot of time being forced to submit to authority figures that they didn’t choose or respect (e.g. parents, random teachers in school), but that in principle a much healthier relationship is possible. Nearly the only example I can easily find and point to of this dynamic is fictional: it’s the way Rider from Fate/Zero interacts with his army. When you respect / love / whatever your commander enough, things you are doing on their behalf should not feel in any way like impositions / homework, they should roughly feel like things you do for your romantic partners but with a different emotional tone.
I would wildly guess that the basic emotional alignment with the commander necessary to get something like Dragon Army to work is that 1) every member feels this way towards the commander, and 2) this fact is common knowledge. Unfortunately if you don’t have a reference experience for what “I would follow this man into battle” feels like, you have no idea how to tell whether you’re feeling it or not. I’m fairly confident I never felt this feeling before the last year, and although I now think I’ve felt a few weak versions of it I’d guess I haven’t felt it at anywhere near full strength.
There’s a feeling I’ve been playing with over the last year whose True Name is something like “I would follow this man into battle.”
I think many people nowadays have pretty screwy relationships with authority due to having spent a lot of time being forced to submit to authority figures that they didn’t choose or respect (e.g. parents, random teachers in school), but that in principle a much healthier relationship is possible. Nearly the only example I can easily find and point to of this dynamic is fictional: it’s the way Rider from Fate/Zero interacts with his army. When you respect / love / whatever your commander enough, things you are doing on their behalf should not feel in any way like impositions / homework, they should roughly feel like things you do for your romantic partners but with a different emotional tone.
I would wildly guess that the basic emotional alignment with the commander necessary to get something like Dragon Army to work is that 1) every member feels this way towards the commander, and 2) this fact is common knowledge. Unfortunately if you don’t have a reference experience for what “I would follow this man into battle” feels like, you have no idea how to tell whether you’re feeling it or not. I’m fairly confident I never felt this feeling before the last year, and although I now think I’ve felt a few weak versions of it I’d guess I haven’t felt it at anywhere near full strength.
A long time ago these sorts of relationships were much more common. In the history literature, one such pattern is called comitatus.
I imagine the modern literature on the subject mostly falls under cults of personality.
Weber called it “charismatic authority”, so there’s another search term.
I would guess there are some commitment & consistency effects involved here—once you’ve followed someone in to battle, you tend to identify with that.
*person