Cant live without books and they aren't included on your supply list for those of us living in the valley.

Does the castle send regular raids into the valley taking the best (plus more) of what the valley people have managed to accumulate?

Do the castle dwellers use the infrastructure built by those in the valley to:
a: travel between castles?
b: communicate between castles?
c: tranfer goods between castles or from the valley to the castle?
all while refusing to share in the cost of upgrading/repairing said infrastructure?

Does the castle send the valleys youth to distant wars to protect the interests of the castle?

I dunno...sounds to me like a few trebuchets need to be built. Fill the moat with sewage and destroy the drawbridge.

to get the stuff they need.

Unless they have a nanoforge attached to a parallel universe, they're going to need to acquire stuff from the surrounding area.

convince half the people in the valley that the other half doesn't deserve what they already have.

then the two sides in the valley will fight among themselves while the castleers steal everything in the valley and

ride off into the sunset singing, "SO long suckers"

Share or die in my fantasy. Fuck that castle. Don't need castles. We need to learn how to share.

you have all (most) of what you need to live life.

I'm just like that. I see how castles turn kind people into deranged, power hungry, idiots. They start thinking they are better than the little people in th valley, use their money to turn them aginst each other, then use their influence to force the not so rich under their protection. Thn we have feudalism. People are animals. We always have done this. You cannot stop the rich from thinking they are better than the poor and that the poor are disposible. Show me a time in history where the rich did not rule over the poor and oppress them and I might amend my position.

"Share or die in my fantasy. Fuck that castle."

Looks to me like it's you became deranged and power hungry in the shadow of the castle.

The author of the post set up a situation where "we live over here", and "they live over there". But the "they gots more than we gots" type of envy that always sets in when humans are in close proximity rules. In your case your anger over them that gots goes to the point of taking lives ("share or die&quot .

No common ground, no negotiation, no finding out if there is something beneficial to both parties that can be traded. It's simply "Share or die...". They will give me what I want or I will take it without regard to whether they live or die and I will not be happy until I get mine.

Seems like the mere existence of "The Castle" in the thought experiment outlined above made you deranged and power hungry. I'll call it "Castle Envy".

Nope. Fear of the rich.

Rather, it smacks of envy. You see someone whom you perceive as having more than you, and you're ready to storm their walls to get it under penalty of their lives.

That doesn't sound like fear to me.

Castles have soldiers. Castles are for war. Castles are not self sufficient. The inhabitants exist off of raiding villiages and collecting taxes and fighting other castles and raiding them. If a group of folks set up a castle near your villiage, my advice is to tear the fucker down before Lord Lannister comes for his tribute. With 'The Mountain' in tow. Before you end up like the Reynes of Castemere.

you can't invade a country with a castle, like you can with a tank

but you can run into a castle if a maurading army comes along.

From his enemies that he probably raided in the past. Then they rape the peasantry, the lords are prone to that sort of thing. Then his enemies raid your villiage. The reason you need the protection in the first place is because somebody wants the castle. Tear it down. Castles attract armies, cutthroats, bankers, monestaries and churches. And guess who pays for the castle and maintenance to allow the inhabitants to live good lives? Th people in the villiages. The get poorer and poorer to pay for that 'protection'. And they're the first ones sacrificed in battle.

a comic book view of history. Maybe a Marxist comic book.

We sort of have done okay in this country without castles, although we do have forts, and in early New England settlements they had garrison houses.

And the history of Fort Huachuca mentions what happened when the fort was established.

"With the permanent character assumed by Camp Huachuca, settlers began to pour into the area, bringing stockmen, miners, and adventurers of various persuasion. Silver was discovered in the Tombstone area and soon the place was a boom town with over 1,200 residents. " p 32

Now we have nation states with borders and armies instead of castles.

They fill them with the property of the peasants. They always have done so.

for the native peoples, though.

"All" means you can survive, "most" means you lack something necessary to survival so you won't survive.

everything you need to live life ... though it pales in comparison to what those in the castle have.

Where do the inhabitants of the castle get the vast treasure they evidently enjoy?

Usually castles were inhabited by those who took their treasure from the surrounding countryside, castles in and of themselves are not very productive, they are more about defense than they are about producing anything.

stronghold are overlords of the agricultural people of the valley. Twice a year the inhabitants of the valley must pay tribute to the High Chieftan
in the way of grains and goods they produce to the elites of the mountain who are warriors and hunters but do not grow stuff or make much in the way of goods. In exchange the mountain warriors protect the valley dwellers from invaders and provide them with lumber and other products of the forest.

If the valley dwellers decide to go it alone, and not pay tribute, the mountain warriors just raid and kill them until they come to their senses. Well, it takes place in the Bronze Age so I don't know how it work out in modern times.

or something similar.

The symbiotic relationship works for them. The story is about when a third element is introduced, a shipload of strangers from a strange land who have heard of the wealth of that land and have come to raid, trade or colonize, whatever works. Then it's reaction, action and the consequences.

into the castle.

They will all either die from disease or just surrender, then you go take their stuff.

To get all their stuff?

Have the castle inhabitants defended me from those from other castles?

Those are important questions.

I did say it was not too well thought out.

fairly with respect? Do they buy the things they need from the valley people at a fair price? Do they pay for what they use? I think this is the basis of what we do to the castle people. As long as they do not upset our way of life then they are safe. If however they decrease our standard of living then we will eventually have to act.

Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago,
'Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley-folk below.

On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stone,
And the valley-people swore
They'd have it for their very own.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after....
One tin soldier rides away.

So the people of the valley
Sent a message up the hill,
Asking for the buried treasure,
Tons of gold for which they'd kill.

Came an answer from the kingdom,
"With our brothers we will share
All the secrets of our mountain,
All the riches buried there."

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after....
One tin soldier rides away.

Now the valley cried with anger,
"Mount your horses! Draw your sword!"
And they killed the mountain-people,
So they won their just reward.

Now they stood beside the treasure,
On the mountain, dark and red.
Turned the stone and looked beneath it...
"Peace on Earth" was all it said.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after....
One tin soldier rides away.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won't be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after....
One tin soldier rides away.

If they didn't get that 'far more' by exploiting the valley folk to accumulate it, who cares? If they're not dumping pollution into the valley, who cares? Etc, etc.

In short, if they're not doing something to harm us down in the valley, or didn't build their wealth by, for instance, enslaving valley folk in the past, or paying them poorly while scraping off vast amounts of wealth generated by the valley folk, I could care less. If they aren't currently hurting anyone in the valley, but did in the past, some reparations might be in order to readjust the balance.

Robots? Well, if your metaphor is -- well -- a metaphor, it must be that the people in the valley produce stuff for the people in the castle. No, don't raid them. Just stop sending them stuff. That is called the great proletarian general strike -- nonviolent revolution.

On the other hand, if the people in the castle have robots, they really ought to share. They wouldn't have to give anything up to share, since robots can be used to produce still more robots. So, if they should fail to share, they would show themselves not worthy of respect. In that case, I might try to smuggle out some robots to get started on us valley folks building our own castle.

If the rich would go live on a hill and leave us alone, that would be fine. But they can't. They can't eat their money and would starve.

And would not bother with the castle. It has to be extreme want for people to attack the castle.

I recall reading a Pearl Buck novel warning about when the rich get too rich and the poor get too poor. There's a tipping point. And the US is no where near it, thus we have posters lamenting there is not a riotous revolution with pitchforks. There could be, but it would have to be a lot worse.

one group has fortified and holds high ground. Why have they done those things? Castle suggests warfare and need for major defense. From what or from whom and why? What is the source of their wealth, how do they produce far more with far fewer hands? If they are a few people holed up in a castle, where is their food coming from, who is providing their labor?

There is so little here that I would suggest it might be better if you just clearly made the point you wish to make. This set up you offer is sketchier than the lyrics to One Tin Soldier.

But as it stands, I'd be off to negotiate with the people that the castle dwellers fear, for I have no castle, am not protected by those on the hill and thus can not afford enemies. Perhaps for lack of a castle, I must build my defenses upon alliances, it seems the hill people are indifferent to alliance and thus of no value to me at all. If assisting their enemies might serve me, then perhaps I would do that. They do seem short handed, paranoid and expecting trouble.

Why?

Because eventually the folks in the castle will attack us in the valley.

See the current war on the middle class in America.

Apparently, possession of a castle is not the variable that defines whether someone is likely to launch an aggressive, unprovoked war. If they built that castle out of fear and distrust of you, you just validated their decision.

...they won't be satisfied.

They will want what we have in the valley so launching an attack on the castle immediately is actually a matter of self defense.

Is the soil at the top of the hill that much more fertile than it is in the Valley? Are their crop yields that much greater? Or have they fenced off the best hunting land for themselves? How did they acquire the land for their castle? If it has the best soil and the best hunting grounds, who decided that the castle folks could own that land for themselves alone?

If it is not the case that the land around the castle somehow produces such bounty that they can harvest and hunt enough to accumulate more than what they need, then how did they manage to accumulate it?

There is no wealth without labor. If they did not accumulate their wealth through their own labor, from whose labor was it generated? Do they demand a share of the harvest and the hunt from those in the valley? By what right do they demand it?

I say, fuck the castle. Tear it down and set them to work in the fields and the forest laboring for their own bread and meat like everyone else.

There is none in what you wrote, so I see no reason to attack a bunch of rich people that are not affecting us in the valley.