An Emperor and Kings

Say a country has twenty leaders who want to rule the country.  Only one can rule at a time.  As the current leader, would it be best to...

Eliminate all who aspire to be rulers
Allow your rule to expire so others may rule
Deny further rule until you have a successor
Imprison/restrict others who want to rule or reduce them to poverty
Allow them to rule as governors or subordinate leadership positions

If you choose the last option, how do you prevent them from turning on you or revolting? 

The lattermost solution seems to have the best chance in the long run: a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush, and is not worth 1/20 of a larger bird unless the bird is over 20 times larger.

In other words, how do you coexist with megalomaniacs who seek power, and still maintain your power?

i would kill them. clean and simple.

>>4
gb2 north korea

>>1
Sign the magna carta. All 21 of us would get the priviledges of court. I would be as powerful as the next lord, except I will be a trusted figurehead with 20 lords with their private armies, spies and their strong grip on various provinces as my allies. My alliances and signing of the magna carter will affirm the status of the firm fair king, an egalitarian unifier, like the young King Henry VIII. To begin with it will just be a loose oligarchy to prevent others from slipping up and prevent the mutual calamity of a civil war. As time goes on the lords will see more worth in development and trade and less in a destructive civil war and eventually become completely pacified and loyal to the state as a whole.

>>5
go back to liberal pussy land. i realize that delegating power is useful and needed but i would not give power to people who would benifit from my death.

and i can't just grab their power. they would have to die.

read machiavelli. you'd learn a lot there...

simply instute governors below and if one of them fucks up, let him be executed as an example. the people will love you, because you saved them and the others will be too frightened to do something. why side with the people? because it is too hard to reign against them and every successor will have a hard time in reigning with terror. so if you'd survive a military coup, they'd want you back.

the problem of this is, that you'd need a strong army of your own (to prevent foreign nations from conquering you and securing yourself against other possible leaders) and you have to deny your governors to have their own forces

>>1
>>4
>>7
stfu, bush rulz he didn't take powers from anybody you fucking liberals!!!1

>>9
We're talking about people with private armies here, not some thug who is in a position to speak to you. The peasant population is well under control and the only ideals are going to be fucked up non-libertarian ideals and corrupted religions aimed towards the soldiery rather than ethnic minorities and people who prefer penetrating men's stank assholes to fat juicy pussies like nowadays.

These people are in a position of power to begin with because that's what they have and if they didn't they would have capitulated to someone else more powerful or been killed and your aim as king is to make sure they decide not to march their army over and try to take over more lands or exert their will even if it may be beneficial to them. Your only allies are your soldiers and very blunt ideals of persuading the powerful that the time for civil war is over and we are better off with mutual cooperation with you as the figurehead.

This is a situation purely to do with power and negotiation. The powerful are influenced somewhat by idealism and religion, but moreover they are influenced by greed and the only way you can keep the peace is if there is no way that they can possibly expand any further by harming your interests. For instance if the only way they can attack you is by going through a wooded mountainous area or by sea and your navy is powerful and you guard the wooded mountainous boundary. After this physical peace is attained the next step would be to push for idealism a little more by declaring yourself the figurehead, possibly even by capitulating a little in the world of greed. By performing services for your allies or paying tribute. Once that ideal is in place in the future perhaps it will pay off and you will have more power.

At least that's the vague idea.

>>9

reading machiavelli isn't necessarily an answer to anything, particularly not this problem.
the world described by >>1 is too abstract for anyone to claim any sort of perfect solution.

Fall down a well and die.
Politics = fail.
NEW SYSTEM: GET

>>13
14 GET

>>12
That's the point, when scientists want to find something they perform tests and keep some factors the same and change others to see how the properties change. You are the equivalent of the yammering faggot who smells like body odour and diarrhea who somehow finds his way into a science conference room and declares in an incoherent manner "The tests you have performed would have never occurred in real life, therefore their results are incorrect and never happenned!".

Indeed this has never actually happenned, but you can look at similiar occurances in history, namely civil wars where by you would get a situation similiar to this to develop ideas about what would happen and the major factors involved.

>>15

You don't get it... the scenario itself is flawed.
The prompt doesn't address the favor of any of the candidates, the perceived virtue (in a phenomenological sense) of any of the rulers or the previous ruler... it doesn't address the status of citizens in the contrary the government style the GNP or world-status of the country discussed
it's quite impossible to glean from the prompt any information about the imagined world that would actually facilitate the development of any "[USEFUL] ideas about what would happen and the major factors involved."
The point of my post was "why fucking bother? You're dealing in some dumbass illusory ontological notion of politics in which too many environmental factors are blatantly overlooked."
This was not intended, as you suggested, to suggest that because the scenario was unrealistic that it wasn't viable as a test case, but rather that the prompt needed more clarification before any legitimate political analysis could be done.

and GOOD motherfucking job reading machiavelli... i guess that makes you pretty fucking special huh? get over yourself, narcissist.

oyeah...
"ou are the equivalent of the yammering faggot who smells like body odour and diarrhea who somehow finds his way into a science conference room and declares in an incoherent manner"
this isn't witty. gtfo.

>>16
HAHA shut the fuck up stupid asshole.

P.S. Nice lack of addressing the point at hand.

Ok, I'll make it clearer.  You are the leader of Somalia, and you want rival warlords to be loyal to you without fighting each other and without fighting you.

>>18
There is no clear cut solution, but there is a way to increase the likely hood of them not attacking you and each other which consists of 2 major factors which can be influenced in different ways.

*Power.
*Personal satisfaction.

First of is power, military power, power over the environment. The purpose is to gain and keep power, so you can gain and keep more power.

A warlord wants to achieve personal satisfaction, power is just a tool to ensure this and it can be done in hundreds of different ways. There are many issues that shape our own lives and there will probably be a lot more which shape their's. Things like religion and idealism, or even the knowledge that you are powerful itself.

Personal satisfaction saps from power, but is dependant on it so a warlord will not take so much money that he cannot afford to feed and arm his men, but he will take a lot so he can surround himself with whores and live in luxury. He may sacrifice opportunities to gain power aswell or welcome the possibility of losing power for certain ideals and religions, if you can persuade the person to do this.

This is why religion was so powerful in the middle ages, the people at the top wanted their lords to be religious and dutiful and it went all the way down the feudal system.

Have a think about that.

http://anatjon.liveadulthost.com/