You seem to misunderstand Elayne's plan for the Kin... - Edit 1
Before modification by fionwe1987 at 19/02/2012 11:52:11 AM
I was not remotely talking about how it benefits ELAYNE, but how her unilateral decision will affect the people who live there and who will be handed over to the rule of the Sea Folk like chattel or furniture. Good land near a river tends to get populated, so it is pretty hard to imagine she can find an unpopulated stretch of land that meets Zaida's criteria. And while she can sit back in revel in the tax dollars, Andoran sailors and river-boatmen and longshoremen will lose out when trade starts shifting to the new Sea Folk port. Aringail, the second largest town in Andor, and according to the books, the core of her support, is going to be hurt the most by the diversion of trade to the Sea Folk enclave. So this is another potential way she is giving the shaft to her own loyalists. I never once complained that Elayne is making short-sighted or foolish moves that will hurt HER, rather the substance of my complaint was that she is doing things that ONLY benefit herself, at the cost of screwing over other people.
First of all, there's tons of land by the Erinin with no people in it. If you think there isn't one square mile of open land in this area with no people in it, you're not paying attention. Egwene, Elayne and Nynaeve saw huge swathes of such land when they were going to Tear.
For another, you seem to assume Elayne is going to give them land conducive for extensive docks to be built. She can find a square mile by stretches that won't support docking, or ones totally disconnected from the rest of Andor by land, or one that is surrounded by deep forests, or any number of other ways by which the Sea Folk can be screwed. The only conditions Zaida put in was that the land cannot be marshy or boggy. That's hardly restrictive.
In what way are they remotely a questionable alliance? In fact, that was a brilliant AND a good move on her part. She has ties to a channeling organization, which gives her alternatives to the White and Black Tower, the former of which wields so much power because of their monopoly on the Power, which Elayne has just broken.
She has NOT. The Kin still remain part of the White Tower. They still accept the authority of the Amyrlin and the Hall and their Knitting Circle. And once older Aes Sedai start retiring into the Kin, its going to become even more strongly associated with the Tower.
What is more, because of the commercial implications of her agreement with the Kin, they now have financial incentives, which means they will soon outstrip the Tower in capabilities and general usefulness, even if they are not the scholars and theorists the best Aes Sedai might be. This is excellent for her, because it gives her someone to turn to for supernatural solutions to problems without having to go to the Tower begging, and it is a great deal for the Kin, because it frees them from the stultifying influence and restrictions of the Tower-inspired Rule.
This would be true if the Tower hasn't changed greatly. With Traveling, the Tower is everywhere, and those Aes Sedai who went around helping in the world but were restricted due to the normal modes of transport now have Traveling.
And with the great increase in its store of knowledge, and the new penchant for experimentation, the true competition for the Tower won't be the Kin but the Sea Folk and the Wise Ones.
It is also a great deal for the world, because it frees up the Tower's monopoly on channeling by setting a precedent to allow other rulers to raise their own channeling groups.
Great deal of good THAT will do. The Tower as it stands is too restrictive and stultifying. But that Tower is going away, and with the active contest between the Tower, the Sea Folk and the Wise Ones to attract talented channelers, the Tower's monopoly is already greatly threatened. I fail to see the point of giving channelers who can only be used in more destructive wars to rulers who have a 3000 year track record of fighting silly wars over empty lands. There are better ways of ending the Tower's monopoly, and those ways have already been explored and given official sanction.
This will benefit the nations by giving them alternatives to the Tower monopoly, and it will benefit the world by giving the various groups of female channelers incentives to compete.
These incentives already exist, as of ToM.
If the Tower wants to maintain their reputation as the best channelers, they are now going to have to earn it, and meanwhile the underdog associations will be scrambling to try to beat or match the Tower to prove their own worthiness.
What underdog associations? The Kin are very clearly part of the Tower. Sure, other rulers will get access to them soon enough, but I don't see where you're getting that each ruler will be able to find enough channelers who can help her/him. Where will they find such channelers, with the Tower in heavy recruitment mode, and Traveling allowing them to search far and wide?
And once Egwene gets her wish to allow even the weakest woman to become Aes Sedai, and once the utter uselessness of the Oaths is demonstrated, the need for the Kin goes away. You can bet your ass everyone from Alise to Gariena will jump at the chance to be Aes Sedai, instead of Healing and Traveling under the command of a Queen.
Every major channeling discovery, innovation or rediscovery to come to the wetlander channelers has come from outside cultures, and women who have never sent foot in the Tower, or else invented or recovered by the most independent and self-taught and least-Tower-influenced initiates among the sisters. The only thing the pre-split Aes Sedai have discovered was the male-detecting weave, and that was almost certainly spurred on by the existence of an male channeling organization, and a male channeler terrorizing her faction.
You forget all the Healing weaves the Yellows came up with once Nynaeve demonstrated the possibility of using Fire and Earth in Healing. And while Tower tradition has been to experiment very little, that tradition is now (thankfully) in shambles. Add the pressure of wanting to attract initiates from among the Sea Folk and the Wise Ones and you can kiss the old Tower tradition goodbye.
In other words, she suddenly had to worry about the existence of other channelers, and was inspired to create something new. If the channeling industry advances and develops at all in the Fourth Age, it will be due to Elayne's agreement with the Kin, more than any other single development among female channelers.
Yeah... a bunch of mostly powerless women with no access to ter'angreal and angreal, who will all still continue to be trained by the Tower, are going to do better than the Wise Ones, Sea Folk and Aes Sedai determined to increase their ranks and outdo each other.
As it is, the Tower is soon going to have to change its rules about weaker women. Since strength plays no part in being made Wise One or Windfinder, the Tower either has to change its rules or sit and watch as a vast majority of its 1000+ current Novices choose to join those organizations rather than join a retirement home for old Aes Sedai. And the same contest is going to create enormous pressure on the AS to drop the Oaths too. Egwene seems to have no intention of making the WO and the SF swear on the Oath rods. Either this means she changed her mind on the Oaths, or is still foolish enough to subscribe to Siuan's thinking. Either way, she's going to have to climb down when Accepted live among the WO and SF and notice that they work so well with their respective societies but have absolutely no Oaths to make them "trustworthy".
Why not taunt the Tower and force them to take action when they are their weakest, and can best be defied and break their power for good?
Because, I assume, the Kin showed no signs of wanting to break with the Tower.
Actually, you could not be more wrong, since historically, what Elayne has done is EXACTLY the kind of thing that would bring the Tower down on her. The only reason she is likely to get away with it is playing on Egwene's culpability in the destruction being visited on Caemlyn. Egwene herself said that one of the reasons why the Tower had to be reunited was to prevent exactly what Elayne has done for coming to pass.
Again, you seem to ignore that the Kin are still under the Tower. And Egwene hasn't been opposed to commercializing channeling. She set up cuendillar production to finance the Rebellion. What's to say she'd have any opposition to the Kin, or even Aes Sedai, charging fees for their work?
WHY WOULD YOU WANT THAT TO HAPPEN?!?! I can't believe people give ME shit for tolerating the Seanchan's practice of slavery, when people like you think a tyrannical monopoly on an area of activity is a GOOD thing! Do you know why there are lawsuits to break up monopolies in the real world? Do you understand the reason why we have things like "anti-trust legislation"? Because a monopoly benefits ONLY those who control it and NO ONE else. Not the governments, not the customers, no one, except for the people at the top who control the monopoly. Oh, duh. You and your Egwene fetish. Screw the whole world, as long as Egwene is the one on top, right?
That's because you refuse to see that channeling is not regular trade. Having competition is great. Its even inevitable, as Egwene pointed out. But the kind of competition you want, with each country having its own channeling corps, inevitably means channelers fighting wars. The kind of environment you're asking for is exactly what existed in Seanchan before the Consolidation! Not because channelers are inherently evil but because given the flexibility of this resource, and the greater lifespan it confers, means channelers will soon not be "serving the rulers of other countries" but actually ruling them, and fighting for domination against other channelers. The Tower is not a corporation. It is a government. And governments have monopolies on all sorts of things from nukes to police forces to tax collection.
The Tower is not an inherently abhorrent concept that is bound to lead to tyranny. The problem with the Tower is not so much that it is monolithic as that it doesn't have clear definition. On the one hand, it is a world government for channelers (or thought it was). On the other hand, it also behaves like an extremely powerful city state. And it mixes these two. It brings in its exclusivity as a channeling organization, and the influence that ensures, into its politics. And it uses its political power to maintain exclusivity.
But a monolithic channeling organization among a people need NOT descend to this. The Wise Ones and the Sea Folk both haven't. Why the White Tower, but not them? Because the Tower and the lands it covered never ended up codifying their relationship. With no clear rules on their interaction, and only self-imposed strictures like those against maintaining loyalty to your native land, the Tower ended up exceeding its mandate.
The remedy isn't a large number of channeling organizations! The remedy is a restructuring of the Tower. They need to start by divesting themselves of the government of Tar Valon. The Tower Grounds are theirs, and that's it.
And that's where all this is headed, I think. Prophesy says the Tower will be broken. But Prophesy also says the Tower will emerge stronger than it ever was before. I don't think, especially given the connotation of strength in this series, that strength means more of the sort of power the Tower wielded in the past. I think it means a new Tower that accepts all channelers but only serves as an umberella organization, with rights to police channelers and restricted from direct meddling in political affairs.