How to Surround Your Castle With Angry Villagers (Audio)
A suicide guide for the ruling class, in ten easy steps!
Step 1: Instruct the weapon-makers and alchemists in your land to conduct secret experiments on making mild seasonal diseases kill more villagers. Use the villager’s hard earned taxes to pay for these experiments.
When they find out, they’re not going to be happy. But first…
Step 2: Have your alchemists release the concocted disease and blame it on dragons living in nearby caves. At this point, many villagers will begin fearing dragons, but some will not, and these are the ones you’re counting on.
Have your artists and scribes working around the clock to pin up parchments on every available wall depicting dragons killing people. Do not let the villagers forget the constant threat posed by dragons, even though they never see one, ever. Many villagers will believe whatever the parchments say, but enough will be suspicious and start to rumble amongst themselves that you made the whole dragon thing up. Thus, the spark ignites…
Step 3: Instruct your villagers that everyone around them might have come into contact with a dragon at some point, and therefore, should be viewed with suspicion and avoided. Have your priests conduct purity tests in which they claim to have a foolproof method of detecting dragon exposure on the villagers. Have them, at random, identify some villagers as dragon-exposed and order them imprisoned in their homes for a fortnight as penance. Some villagers, and even some non-royal alchemists, will point out that these tests identify perfectly healthy people, and that none of this makes any sense. Attempt to discredit them as “dragon sympathizers” and “wanting people to die”, which, of course, will backfire and cause even more people to listen to them.
Tell the villagers that wearing a religious symbol on their face is the only defense against DRAGON1 disease until the alchemists can come up with a cure. Have your priests and officials wear these symbols whenever they make public appearances (though also clearly be seen not wearing them at other times).
This will get the villagers hating and fearing one another, with the hate falling especially hard on the ones that think the religious symbols are a load of codswallop. (Which, in turn, will fall back on you.)
Step 4: Have your alchemists miraculously release the supposed “cure”, for which you of course take credit, but which is even deadlier and kills even more villagers than the disease. Refer to anyone that points this fact out as crazy and a “DRAGON-denier” and probably involved in a conspiracy to de-throne you. Naturally, label the non-believers in the “cure” as selfish, anti-social pariahs that are trying to kill as many people as possible. This will create more anger and division amongst your villagers, and you definitely want that. But more importantly, you will create even more skeptics as more villagers will realize that their loved ones are dying after taking the “cure” and become angered by your refusal to acknowledge it.
Step 5: Use the “emergency DRAGON crisis” as an excuse to increase taxes and shut down villager trades and shops. Instruct your royal treasurers to use inflationary spending tactics to make many goods expensive and unobtainable for villagers. Transfer this wealth to the richest nobles in the land, and have them proclaim openly what an untold blessing the crisis has been for them. Have the news criers announce the increased earnings of the nobility. Have the nobles blatantly ride around in new carriages while they explore the new land they have acquired, and hold exclusive meetings where they talk about more ways to reap even more wealth by making villager life even more unbearable.
Really emphasize the rules for thee but not for me angle of this whole thing. Declare that the villagers must not light fires for warmth on certain nights of the week, and that they must dig for worms for food, while the barons and landowners may hold bonfires and banquets to their hearts’ content. This will create throngs of angry villagers, for sure.
Step 6: As the civil unrest you have created grows, let some of the villagers riot and rampage freely, and even pretend to support them in your castle speeches, in which you refer to them as “justified, peaceful protests” (which anyone with eyes will be able to see plainly that they are not.) Pretend to share the anger of the protestors, which of course, no one will really believe.
Then, when villagers protest you, hurl epithets at them, accuse them of having unacceptable views, and refer to them as anti-royalists and usurpers.
Have your own stewards and seneschals and court guards dress as villagers and commit acts of vandalism themselves to really sell it. Have the royal princess make a speech about how threatened she feels, even though she is never in any real danger. Have the guards let some protestors into your castle and then arrest and throw them into your dungeons on “usurpation” charges. Emphasize how anyone who protests you and your decrees are really haters of other types of villagers—you may create “classes” of villagers freely for this purpose—and convince these villager types to turn against one another.
Of course, a growing percentage of the villagers will see through these ruses and become even more upset at your tactics. You’re well on your way now!
Step 7: Surround your royal decrees in a veil of secrecy, yet make it blatantly obvious what you’re attempting to hide. Tell the villagers they’re not allowed to question the origins of DRAGON, they’re not allowed to question the cure, they’re not allowed to treat the disease with their own remedies, they’re not allowed to question your competency to rule, and they’re not even allowed to question why their tax money is being spent on supporting foreign wars. If they do question such things, brand them as lunatics and witches and heretics and traitors.
Instruct your priests and guards to go amongst the villagers to the inns and taprooms where they congregate and exchange ideas. Have them silence those discussions and make the most on-target truth-telling villagers disappear. You can even have them bribe the innkeepers to do the silencing themselves, then claim that it is all the innkeepers’ fault”, since, after all, they make the rules in their own inns.
This can all be done discreetly at first, but eventually it will be obvious to any villager paying attention. Then, you may do it openly and declare that the silencing is for the villagers’ own good, since they cannot be trusted to decide on matters of truth and falsity for themselves. Tell them that from now on truth is what you say it is, and to disagree is a punishable offense. This is sure to inflame some rebellious hearts.
Step 8: Lament the villagers’ loss of trust in important institutions like the monarchy, and the priesthood, and the schools of alchemy, and the palace guards, and the royal scribes, even as you use these institutions to spread obvious falsehoods and to harm villagers. Tell the villagers that trust is not earned, it is given blindly, especially when doing so is sure to result in making their lives worse. This will really raise some hackles.
Step 9: Tell the villagers that what they’re seeing is definitely not what they’re seeing. They love to hate hearing this. They think that the evidence of their own two eyes is their birthright. When you insist that they ignore what their eyes are telling them and to instead see what your mouth is telling them to believe, they get super riled.
Step 10: Throughout this entire process, ignore the intelligence and perceptivity of your villagers, and treat them as idiot children. Though they are calling out your every move, ignore this, and convince yourself they are fools who will believe any nonsense that you make up. Pile falsity on top of falsity until you can’t get any more absurd. Bugbears, undead, goblins from outer space… really go for it.
One helpful tip is the rule of opposites: tell them that war is peace, that hate is love and inclusivity, that criminals are victims, that men can give birth to children, that up is down, and that the sky has switched placed with the ground. Deliver a speech in the nude in which you tell them to praise your fine clothing. Treat them as if questioning any of this nonsense is some kind of act of heresy, and that good villagers should simply eat your royal horseshit as fast as you can shovel it into their starving mouths.
And that’s it! It will all hit a breaking point where not one more instance of nonsense and villainy can be tolerated.
Sit back and enjoy the show.
Behold the spectacle of millions of torches marching toward your gates. Watch as the torch-bearers tear down your towers and ramparts as though they were made of wet sand. At this point, some of your personal retinue of guards will tuck tail and flee, or join the villagers, thus guaranteeing your inevitable destruction.
Congratulations, you have become some of the worst, most reviled, most blatantly villainous rulers in history, and created a ruin of your kingdom.
Your end will be spectacular, and the villagers will speak of your disgraceful reign, and fall, for many decades to come.
Now for my next article, How to Guarantee Your Own Head Ends Up on a Pike…
Make sure you capitalize DRAGON in all future documents—it reads as screaming.😱
Love the how to format. Our memes are the modern catapults to mock them in their rotting towers.
Rational Science, like Rational Humans, don’t mind their dogmas,axioms,hypotheses, principles, facts, conclusions, etc questioned or debated at any point in time. In fact, it’s inherent in a strong society and strong human being as well. That’s how we get closer to TheTruth™️ and was what The Enlightenment Era Zeitgeist was. The Spirit of Curiosity, Debate, Scientific Method,Logic/Reason and the Questioning of EVERYTHING.