LogFAQs > #882526678

Mario_VS_DK posted...

but I still believe that... ...the city as a whole functions very lawfully to anyone who doesn't look too closely.

In Ankh-Morpork's case, the usual assumption is that the city looks chaotic as hell, and an outsider will see a dozen or a hundred different smaller groups all pulling in different directions for their own personal interests, but somehow, the interweaving pattern of self-interest manages to produce something resembling a functional city. Very few people outside of the Patrician himself are entirely aware of how the city doesn't pull itself apart almost constantly (and the stories themselves imply that's at least partly because the Patrician has people to step in and "fix" things whenever someone particularly chaotic wants to throw a wrench into the workings - in later books, this almost always involves either the City Guard or Moist von Lipwig).

Ankh-Morpork originally started out as something of a parody version of Lankhmar (from the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories), but it basically evolved into a fantasy version of what a medieval city would actually tend to be like. As Pratchett once put it, when you're building a fake city, you should start by figuring out how they get rid of the sewage and then work your way up from there, rather than starting with the king and working your way down.

Here's probably the best quote from the books as to how (and why) the city wound up with an officially recognized Thieves' Guild:

"One of the Patrician’s greatest contributions to the reliable operation of Ankh-Morpork had been, very early in his administration, the legalising of the ancient Guild of Thieves. Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, it at least should be organised crime.

And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets, and set up their training college with day-release courses and City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life.

And then, a little while later, the Patrician summoned the leading thieves again and said, oh, by the way, there was something else. What was it, now? Oh, yes…

I know who you are, he said. I know where you live. I know what kind of horse you ride. I know where your wife has her hair done. I know where your lovely children, how old are they now, my, doesn’t time fly, I know where they play. So you won’t forget about what we agreed, will you? And he smiled."

So basically, the major crime lords of the city agreed to organize, after a fashion, because they assumed they were duping the Patrician, but ultimately, they didn't realize the trap they were stepping into until it was too late. But also, after the Guild had been running for a while, they realized they were all making far more profit working together and relatively organized than they had ever made working alone, so most of them settled down and got fat and generally grew satisfied with the arrangement (and then went out of their way to murder the ever-living fuck out of any freelancers or would-be rebels who rocked the boat).

In some ways, it fits the pattern of how organized crime groups tend to form and establish territory in the real world, albeit with the official civil government actually recognizing them as a valid entity with permission to operate "outside the law" (not entirely dissimilar to the Mafia's offer to work for the US government during WWII, or implied Mafia/CIA ties afterwards).


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