Could "The Anti-Christ" possibly be all those sociopaths in high positions in corporations & gov't?

[Deep13]

44. No, that is the old understanding of "feudalism."

That is close to how it was in the late medieval/renaissance era, except there were no serfs then, but the Middle Ages were a thousand years long and things were not that regimented during most of it. Kings were simply not sufficiently powerful to tax willy-nilly. The noblity did suffer often as there was no guaranteed harvest and illness affected them the same as everyone else. Even though their high-protein diet tasted better than what the peasants and monks ate, it was probably not as nutritious as their whole-grain, mostly vegetarian diets. And to the degree nobles had serfs--without central records it was hard to prove that someone was a serf--those nobles relied on them for their sustainable and income, so they could not be too callous about their well-being. Serfs were not slaves. They were more like share-croppers. By the 12th century most peasants were either lessees to a lord or monastery or else alloidial freeholders. Freeholders, whether by alloid or fief, were immune from taxation. Serfdom was gone by then and slavery had been gone since Carolingian times.

We now know that the term "feudalism" has no real meaning as it means different, even contradictory things in different contexts. We also know that the rigid top-down system was really unique to post-conquest England, and even then it only lasted a few generations.