I also believe, Lord J esq, that you're thinking of a military in terms of modern standing armies. In that I agree with you totally, there would be nothing that would resemble a "modern" army in Zeal, as there is no need.
Call me “Josh.” =)
I am not thinking of a military in terms of “modern standing armies.” I am saying that there is absolutely no definition of the word
military whatsoever that could be satisfactorily applied to any institution in Zeal.
My argument was for the police force which I had maintained earlier. In order to ensure the peace should the need arise, put down small infractions, the likes of which you brought up yourself, and to ensure the loyalty of those Earthbound ones working on the Ocean Palace.
I think we are converging on an agreement, then. I’ve already said twice now that I would accept that Zeal had a civil authority responsible for, among other things, maintaining law and order. I would not be willing to call it a “police force,” but that’s outside the realm of this discussion and I won’t bother pressing it further.
Truly, Queen Zeal was arrogant as could be; however, arrogance does not equate with security. As often as it means security, it also means insecurity. It is an inconclusive arguement to use.
Not this time. Queen Zeal’s personality is a classic RPG villain mentality. She is blindly overconfident. Her suspicions and mistrust of others with power are not a sign of her insecurity; rather, they only arise when others use that power to get in her way. She was happy to give Dalton and the Prophet and Schala great deals of power so long as it served her; she only grew angry with them when they opposed or otherwise displeased her.
Being short-tempered, hopelessly stubborn, and hell-bent on achieving her goals, anything that got in her way was a target for destruction. Otherwise, Zeal didn’t much care about others’ doings.
People are by nature evil. Who can say they've never had an evil thought? Now, what if those thoughts were given the power to become reality? That is the peril that those of Zeal would be in.
How come “evil” thoughts assign the condition of evil upon the thinker, whereas “good” thoughts do not assign the converse? That’s a double standard and it doesn’t fly. In the absence of an argument on behalf of your claim, it would be unwise to subscribe to such a dangerous notion as that people are inherently evil, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.
If there is such a thing as evil, it is ignorance and willful ignorance, the latter being more ethically reprehensible than the former but otherwise identical in its end result. “Ignorance” cannot exist without being defined in terms of an intelligence capable of possessing it, and to be capable of possessing ignorance, that intelligence must be capable of
cognition, the very definition of which is antithetical to the possession and promulgation of ignorance. The more we know, the less ignorant we become. It is only by human folly such as our desire for easy answers to hard questions, as by construing religious fictions to explain objective reality, or by refusing knowledge to avoid dealing with its contents, that we stray from our continuing quest for illumination and wallow in mistruths or the deliberate absence of any truth.
Curiously, therefore, the only
objects in the universe capable of evil are sentient beings, whereas these beings are capable of a countless number of evil
actions.
I cannot help but conclude, contrarily to the intentions of the game programmers, that the path to the Kingdom of Zeal is not a road to hell, but the very opposite. Indeed, in the game itself it was said that Zeal was born out of much hard work and sacrifice. What happened is that the Zealish became complacent in their achievements, and from their complacency some became restless, and those who became restless wanted greater achievements but without the difficulties of attaining them. The majority of Zeal’s people, meanwhile, remained complacent, dreamed their lives away, and were complicit in their own destruction while the likes of Queen Zeal and others ran amok, bringing to ruin all the generations of dedication that went into Zeal’s foundation.
Therefore, the
true lesson to be gleaned here is not that “power corrupts,” which is a stupid falsehood that enjoys popular approval in this day and age, but rather that ambition must be disciplined. The fate that befell Zeal could have befallen the most technologically backward cave dwelling troglodytes. It has nothing to do with Zeal’s great advancement as a civilization. The only difference is that when the high and mighty fall, it makes a much bigger splash than those whose faces are already buried in the mud.
Ambition is important. It’s what moves us along out of the dark ages and into the golden tomorrow. But even as judicious ambition is the key to our enlightenment, so is reckless ambition the tool of our destruction…regardless of our technological level.
To summarize all of that, Zeal was not wicked in the it was intended to be, being the way in which you perceived it. Indeed, the Kingdom of Zeal saved the world twice, by producing the likes of Schala and the Gurus. Without all their great power and knowledge, there would have been no way to defeat the ultimate enemy.
History shows that human nature does not change. Give me a series of examples that show how humanity has changed from the past to now. Let us not forget, the most dire of all wars, both of them, in all of history were fought this very century. Plainly, human nature has not changed, and it is warmongering. Unless those of Zeal were not human, they would fall into this as well. Their ambition and zealous nature proves that they are at least in the darker aspects human; if they are so perilous, why would they not have a military?
I disagree with your assessment, “history shows that human nature does not change.” What interval of history are you looking at? If you go back far enough, we didn’t even have the neurons capable of possessing the “nature” we do today. I think you are underappreciating the vastness of time. If you have ever lived a full day—a really full, meaningful day full of insights and revelations—how could you possibly multiply that by hundreds of millions of years and say that human nature is an immutable constant? That’s shortsighted folly, it is!
The dawn of civilization was at least ten thousand years ago. Since that time, I will agree that our fundamental psychology has changed very little, as has the underlying neurobiology. I honestly wouldn’t expect it to be so different, because ten thousand years isn’t really a very long time in the context of biological evolution. And because any change in human nature would necessarily be tied to some type of evolution, by the forces of nature we would therefore be likely to have changed very little in the exact interval you happen to cite! So while you are correct in your observations, you are nevertheless wrong in your analysis of those observations. Wind the clock far enough back in time, and our nature as we know it today simplifies right out of existence. “History” shows exactly the opposite of what you claim.
What about human nature in the future?
An interesting question. You would think that this trend of increasing complexity in human nature would slowly continue. And that would indeed be the case, if biological evolution were to have remained the dominant evolutionary force upon us. However, it no longer is.
In contrast to our biological evolution, human culture has come a very long way in those ten thousand or more years since the dawn of civilization. And indeed there is a second type of evolution at work here: cultural evolution. Whereas biological evolution depends on natural selection, cultural evolution depends on what you might call sociological selection.
Importantly, the medium of transfer of cultural selection is the
meme, and it supersedes the gene. As a result, all things with which humanity has any contact are now subject to the effect of human cultural evolution. For example, this is why rice is such a successful species. Through no effort of its own, rice has become a choice human staple, and we have developed the technology to make it prosper, so that we too can prosper in our own way.
What am I talking about, you ask? I am saying that human nature, once tied to our biological evolution, is now tied to a much faster form of evolution, cultural evolution, and that human nature is therefore changing more quickly than our genetics would suggest.
This is a testable claim. If human culture has accelerated the growth of human nature since the dawn of civilization, then some things about us will certainly have changed in the time interval you used. Can you think of anything about us that has changed in the past ten thousand years well beyond the boundaries of what we would expect the plodding pace of natural selection to suggest?
In contemplating an answer, now it becomes apparent why I wondered in an earlier response to you what exactly it is we define human nature to be. You see, so much about us has changed in the past few millennia. But, in the same regard, some things about us have not changed nearly as much. Again, because it’s cultural evolution we’re looking beyond simply human biology, much of which has changed very little. Instead we’re looking at human sociology. But is human sociology a component of human nature? For that matter, is human biology?
I want to define human nature in a very simple way. And in fact I checked with the dictionary and it mostly agrees with what I had in mind. Human nature is the sum of our psychological traits as a species. Why? Because everything we do that is not an instinct is psychologically driven. And because we’re using the word “human” in “human nature,” the term must apply to the mean of humanity as a whole. This is important, in that otherwise we would be talking about subsections of the species rather than the entire species. Notwithstanding the very young and the mentally infirm, so long as the two most dissimilar people remain sufficiently similar as to make a psychological bridge between them reasonable, the concept of human nature will remain valid for all people.
Human psychology would indeed be answerable to both forms of evolution that I have discussed so far. The neurochemistry at work is a result of our physiology, which answers to biological evolution and sets the maximum psychological parameters of which any given human being is capable. The cultural factor in the equation, which on the personal level reduces to individual experiences and introspective interpretations of those experiences, also affects the state of our minds.
Example time: Today in America fat women are a big social taboo, an object of outright contempt in some quarters. It didn’t used to be that way, and there’s no genetic reason why people now react with such spite toward an abundance of body fat which is itself meaningless in physical terms—unless we’re talking about a positively huge abundance, which in this case we are not. However, there is a perfectly good cultural explanation as to why female fat, sometimes an object of adoration and sometimes of indifference and sometimes, as with today, of contempt, elicits such diverse states of mind within those who are sexually attracted to women. The reason itself is unimportant; what matters is that it is a cultural reason, not a genetic one.
All of this comes together to paint a picture of a human nature that continues to change with the times, both biologically and psychologically, and looks extremely likely to do so indefinitely into the future.
Ergo, your allegation that human nature doesn’t change seems rather oversimplified. Yes, we went to war ten thousand years ago and two years ago. And I might even agree that, from a faraway perspective, the reasons for those ancient wars and our modern ones were much the same. In fact I will even go an extra step and agree with you that the reasons were almost exactly the same. Throughout history, I would feel comfortable saying that practically every war ever fought was a war for power. It doesn’t matter what kind of power—natural resources, treasures, security, honor, cultural sway, liberty, or even simple indignation—all of these can be defined in terms of the power they bring to the holder…mostly in the form of prosperity, which I would daresay is the application of power and itself an equally broadly defined word.
That has the corollary that human beings sought power ten thousand years ago, and seek it today. Here’s something in our nature that hasn’t changed much at all.
And in fact there are several such traits that, since the dawn of civilization, have changed very little. We are curious, we are ambitious, we seek power. And I will bet you a steak dinner that
these are the sorts of traits that you are talking when you say human nature never changes. Well, you’re still wrong. Go back in time far enough and even these traits eventually dissolve. But they definitely are more central to who we are. It is only natural, I think, that being sentient would lead to all of these things…curiosity and ambition chief among them. They are the mental scions of the survival instincts that predated consciousness. Maybe on another planet they might not have evolved to be so important, or perhaps they really are an endemic property of all life. If the latter is true, then we can say that maybe even though human nature as a whole does not change, all living creatures share something in common. But that is the closest we can come to meeting your rather obstinate claim that our nature does not change, for in that sentiment time has ever proven you wrong, and will do so for a good while to come.
I want to say a few last words on your negative usage of the terms
ambition and
zeal. Ambition is the spice of life. Without it, we have no reason to exist. Our society condemns ambition in these times, and more often assigns that word to villains and evildoers, but, as is so often the case, society is simply wrong. Ambition—look it up in the dictionary—ambition is our way of saying that we are imperfect, and want to change that. How could you ever call such a wonderful quality “evil”?
Instead, it is only the objects of our ambition that can be classified as good or evil, if you are so inclined to speak of achievement in those terms.
As for zeal, zeal is a way of describing the passion that motivates us to seek out our ambitions. Again, it is a word misused by society. Its two most common usages are both negative, being zeal such that one is excessively passionate, and religious zeal, which is even more unpalatable than the first. But real zeal, the good stuff, is simply the mechanism that puts our lives into motion, and by these daily undertakings, we achieve value and meaning, for a life has little worth until its liver proves otherwise.
Heh…“liver.”
Let us not forget that [Zeal] DID possess a store of weapons: it was locked away on another continent. Who carried these weapons, then? The commoners?
It is true that Zeal controlled the elementals, and had forged powerful elemental weapons. But it might be worth asking, how many of these weapons were there? Just as the existence of the Masamune does not necessitate the existence of a multitude of other holy blades and legions of legendary warriors to wield them, neither would the existence of “elemental weapons” necessitate a great number of them. Indeed, Crono & Co. only found two chests inside the ruins of the sealed palace, and of those two they were only allowed to keep the contents of one.
We simply do not know how many elemental weapons there were. Perhaps they were the exclusive domain of the highest lords. Or perhaps there were thousands of them, enough to arm an entire military. But because we shall never know, the speculation is counterproductive. The only pieces of evidence we have is that Nu sold these powerful instruments, implying a market for them, and that Crono & Co. had such a meager selection to choose from at the ruins. Both of these, I would thing, point to a small, personalized collection of a very powerful weapons as opposed to a vast collection of lesser weapons. But, even though I would construe this scant evidence in my favor, I really don’t think the speculation is warranted. We just can’t say.
Meanwhile, your question of who carried those locked-up weapons is a bit silly. But if I may assume you meant, “Who carries ‘em when they’re
not locked up?” I suppose we run into the same problem as before. Not knowing the number of weapons, it’s hard to say who would use them.
Simply by looking at the Zeal graphics, I would think that the Zealish population as a whole had little need to carry functional weapons, but possessed a strong aesthetic affinity for collecting them as art pieces. This would not imply a military.
Dear me! Zealish! There's one I haven't heard before! So far there are Zealot, Zealian, Zealish... a lot of different ways. Personally, I say Zealim, but that's an odd quirk I won't bother to explain.
=)
I used “Zealian” for a while because that’s what the Compendium was using, but I think the –ian suffix is way overused, and “Zealian” sounds a bit dull anyway. “Zealish” has a nicer ring, so I use that. I don’t think Schala wouldn’t mind.
As for what you said here, I think that in some measure you are correct. As much as I stand against that sort of thinking (my writing is very fatalistic), I do concede that that is indeed what the series makes apparent. All but in the case of Zeal, where their attempt to transcend their humanity ends in ruin. So while some succeed, others fail. Thus if Zeal is one of those who failed, I think they would stand with the darker, milatristic, crowd.
I think it’s a very insightful observation of you to make. This points out an epistemological contradiction common in RPGs—specifically, the role of technology. The Chrono series is strong anti-technology, and yet it is technology that saves the day all over the place…the Masamune, the Pendant, the Chrono Trigger, the Epoch, and on and on. Our dear Lucca is even a rabid technophile scientist wannabe. It’s like Mr. Kato wanted to have his cake and eat it too.
Likewise, the rise of Zeal mirrors the adventure of our heroes…a quest to overcome obstacles, smash limitations, and become more than we are. And yet Zeal ended in death, while the heroes succeeded wildly.
I think we can trace this to a Japanese society, which today holds a great deal of romantic affinity for the premise of the young hero on a noble journey. In that language, Zeal’s founding and Crono’s adventure do not share a meaningful parallel. (I’ve noticed that RPG heroes are almost always “Chaotic Good” on the D&D scale. Zeal is many things, but “Chaotic” is not one of them.)
I call to my side the proof of every power that has ever arisen in the world, from the Akkadians to the Hittites, to the brutal Assyrians, to the might of Hellenic Alexander, imperious Rome, the Normans, England... each one had a grand military to secure its power. I concede a chance that Zeal did NOT. But that has a problem: it is so atypical to what we know historically to be a truth of our world, our minds, or at least my mind, cannot help but think it too far fetched.
You concede the chance that Zeal did not have a military, but you would think it implausible because it would be historically unprecedented. Well, I grant that. But by the same token, how many world-dominating floating kingdoms of magic have we had in our real-world history? I think Zeal is just the one-of-a-kind place that it would take to buck the trend of historical precedent, for the reasons I have discussed in my previous posts.
[To cite an example of why the world is bigger than the CT map.] Chrono Cross. Where is El Nido (I know it did not exist yet properly, but the area must have been there, nonetheless.) This proves the world is larger than Chrono Trigger shows. ZeaLitY has brought up the point of the horizon being similar, thus making the world comparible in size to our own.
El Nido is an anomaly. It was created by the Cronopolis denizens, either pulled up out of the ocean or beamed back in time. Plus, it is extremely small, and does not qualify as the “significant” landmasses that I asked for. The thing about RPGs is that they always show you the important stuff, but never many of the details. If there’s a town in an RPG, they’ll give you three houses, an inn, and a market. Obviously the town is much bigger than that, but the rest is left to the imagination. Using that fact, we can reason why there would not be any unseen continents on the CT world map.
Also, during the Day of Lavos sequence, we see the meteor impacts wreak havoc across the entire world map; in order to fully convey the magnitude of the apocalypse, the Director would have been looking at nothing less than a map of the entire world.
As for the size of the horizon, that’s not a good comparison. Only on very small worlds, far smaller than would hold an atmosphere (and therefore uninhabitable by humans), could the naked eye discern a meaningful difference in the curvature of the horizon.
I have studied the history of the world, actually, or at least in general with a few specifics. I have a certain love for classics, actually. I still remember the Hittite kings I had to remember for the last midterm. Though I don't think that many militaries of those days were disbanded. They never existed as a standing military (except for a few cases) until Rome. And there it was never decreased and, when it was shrunk, who was it... Marius or someone like that made great pains to bolster the ranks. The whole world wasn't actually frozen ice. This ice age is supposed to parallell our world... so what of the equator? I still think that a military existed.
If you check again you will find that pretty much every country that has ever had a military—including Rome—has downsized its military force peacefully at some point. An example from Rome would be that of the Emperor Augustus, who honored his veterans for their loyal service with huge land grants and, later, monetary compensation after his conquests drew to a close.
You seem to be implying that military forces only ever reduce in number in direct combat. That’s just not the case. Throughout history, military forces have been downsized for all sorts of reasons, including lack of need, lack of funds, political gain, plague or sickness, etc., etc.
However, here is the disparity: I do indeed hold Zeal to be a nation state.
Just so that we’re not using different terms, when I say “nation-state,” I’m talking about a nation that exists in relation to other nations. That is, a nation-state has sharply defined borders and is internally homogenous with regard to the makeup of its neighbors. Zeal had no neighbors, and no borders.
I wish I could have debates like this in real life; most people are not willing to carry on such long debates with me.
Once again, you have been my most considerate and enjoyable counterpart in this thread. I only hope I have a chance of changing your mind to the winning side. =)
I referenced those as "Dalton's henchmen." I don't think of them as representatives of the crown and I don't particularly think of them as being all that sizeable in numbers. They would be more analogous to a small private guard.
You are just arguing semantics. You may as well say the Mystics are just "Ozzie's Henchman." There are more "soldiers" in Zeal than there are knights in Guardia.
I am not arguing semantics. I will reiterate would I said earlier. I don't think of Dalton’s henchmen as representatives of the crown and I don't particularly think of them as being all that sizeable in numbers. They would be more analogous to a small private guard.
Why do I not think of them as representatives of the crown? Because they are only ever shown to be in the service of Dalton, excepting their deployment in the Ocean Palace, which, for all we know, he might have ordered himself, or might have been imposed upon him by the Queen, who would have the right to appropriate his resources for her use.
Why do I not think of them as all that sizeable in numbers? Because they serve only Dalton, and the type of services they perform seem more related to his individual enterprises. Certainly it would be more than a reasonable stretch to say that Dalton’s private guards are vast in numbers and constitute a military for the whole darn Kingdom of Zeal.
GreenGannon above posted some references to the Blackbird, which include a piece of dialogue where one of Dalton’s henchmen is described as a “soldier.” This is what I’m trying to talk about. Henchman, soldier…the term doesn’t matter. I wonder what the original Japanese designation is. In any case, this purple guy is in the service of Dalton, not the Kingdom of Zeal. Ergo, no military.
Remember, the original purpose of my entrance in this topic was to point out that I do not think Dalton’s title is properly a military one, because there is no military for him to command. As an arm of the Queen, I would expect him to have staff of his own, “staff” in this case being a euphemism for people who do his dirty work, which itself is the Queen’s dirty work, seemingly.
So now you can appreciate where I am coming from, even if you don’t agree. But really, let’s not simply brush me off by saying that I’m trying to play the semantics card. I think we’re all responsible members of the community here, yes?
Zeal was building a huge, flying warship, the blackbird... Now, why would they make such a thing if they didnt have a military?
I don’t think the Blackbird was a warship at all. It had no weapons or armaments of any sort. Nor did it look configured as a troop transport. In the real world, its purpose was to wow players by showing off Zeal’s impressive technology. In-game, I suppose it would have served as either a liner or a freighter, and by the look of it I would go with the latter. Certainly an airborne realm so large could make good use of such a creation.
It is perfectly acceptable to superepose our culture and mind set into zeals. We made it(the game), so its only logical that our ideas would be transplanted into our creations.
You are missing a very fundamental concept of dramatic fiction. The whole point of fiction is to explore the “What if?” question in situations that have not really occurred in the real world. What you are saying is effectively that authors are incapable of imagination. That is obviously not true. In a way, all creative work is limited by the talents of its creator, but this does not necessitate that said work is
representative of the same.
It seems readily apparent to me that the Kingdom of Zeal not only does not have a military, but was specifically intended not to have a military by the game’s creators, who wanted to contrast the paradisiacal Zeal to the other time periods of the game. Militaries are for middle ages and modern times, they said; Zeal is
beyond that sort of thing. It is genuinely a different place.
Not everyone in Zeal was fanaticly loyal to the queen. In fact her 2 children werent even fanaticly loyal to her! schala and the gurus had compasion. why would these be the only 4 (or 5, if you count janus) people in zeal who are not loyal to the queen, and who share our mindset?
I think the idea was to show that the people as a whole of the Kingdom of Zeal were falling into decadence. Schala, Janus, and the Gurus provided contrast that illustrated what Zeal would be like if it were firing on all cylinders. These characters told of a “good” kingdom, a real paradise. It would have to have been people like them that made it possible for Zeal to ever exist in the first place, long ago. They are hard-working, powerful, intelligent, disciplined, dutiful people. They were also some of Zeal’s highest-ranking figures, which sets them apart from the people as a whole, who seemed to already be lost to the Queen’s machinations. Therefore, I think in this light it would have been unlikely that the reservations shown against the Queen by the Gurus and her children would have spread into the general Zealish population. These five were “make-a-difference” types, which sets them apart.
If everyone was fanatically loyal, then why even bother with guards, or "dalton henchmen"? If these arn't soldiers of the state, and are in fact under the employment of dalton, then he could have over thrown the queen, or at least tried to.
I think you are misrecognizing the true source of power in Zeal. Dalton’s henchmen would not have gone very far in a coup against the Queen, who enjoyed the support of her people, and their strength, who controlled the Sun Stone, the Mammon Machine, the elemental weapons, and the Ocean Palace, whose two children were the most powerful magic-wielders in the Kingdom of
Magic, and who herself was a very powerful magic-wielder too.
Indeed, you have given me the perfect opportunity to illustrate my point. Why does the Kingdom of Zeal not have a military? Because that’s not where the power lies! Dalton’s henchmen are little threat in a kingdom of magic. Dalton never appreciated what the Queen was after, and never appreciated what Zeal had accomplished. He was a real bad egg, and, ironically, was limited in his power because of that. So too would it be with a military…it would be so out of place that it would obviate itself, and destabilize the kingdom.
Phew! I’m done for now.
