Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-65.29.225.205-20130427160705/@comment-8881468-20130512062940

You did not get the point that I was trying to make there...

Okay I shall try again and maybe you understand it this time:

1. a day only has x hours, those are divided on work, sleep and leisure (aka free time you can do whatever you want with)

if we now define work as the tasks you have to do to "earn" your livelyhood and sleep as the time needed to rest and prepare your body for the next day.

2. if we say that acquiring skills is done in leisure time (which will be the case for everybody who works in agriculture and in manufactorums) and taking into account that work in the imperium is manual labor, you will have problems with fatigue and the likes countering attempts to learn, thus creating a pretty solid power structure and preventing upward mobility.

I hope you can follow that.

If Ultramar really was based on Sparta, you would have a different culture, not as much clinging to ancient Rome (Republic, Consuls and the likes), you would have somehting corresponding to the workforce of every polis in ancient Greece, Slaves. You owuld have a stricter control of raising kids in groups, you would not have that much of a link to ancestry.

Why should I admit that it has mroe upward mobility, when your example is only proof of a hereditary oligarchy.

As for musicians, artisand and the likes, that only shows that you have an abundance of wealth and enough people (restricted underclass) working hard enough to provide a society with means to feed people that are not directly involved in the production of goods.

By the way, you should not mix up effective propaganda and facts. It is one bad thing to limit people to serfdom, it is even meaner to make them believe that their working without end is actually something worth striving for, while an upperclass reaps the benefits. Talk about good PR.