As a peasant you didn't have much choice but to be "loyal", as an employee today you often have little choice but to be "loyal" or risk losing your livelihood. You might also buy into the ideology, propagated by the rich through their control of media, that says that the rich deserve their wealth and that such great inequalities are natural, like the divine right of kings.

Feudalism is Alive and Well

Summary of What a Feudal System is

In each of these examples, one group of person has power over others and the groups with power are willing to use any means to ensure their own gain.  They enforce their power in harsh ways. They also propagate a form of paternalism that states that those at the bottom of the hierarchy benefit from unequal power relations.  In some cases, the disempowered accommodate and show gratitude.  Some accommodators become enforcers; that is, they enforce the rules that the aristocrats have set up, while not acknowledging that they too serve at the whim of their masters.

The economic system in the United States and perhaps world-wide is another variation on the peasant-aristocrat system.  The aristocrats are bankers, financiers, and politicians who created the system and benefited from it.  To maintain the system, the aristocrats co-opted those who were supposed to be supervising them and enforcing the laws. They also co-opted millions and perhaps billions of people who thought they were benefiting from the systems, such as persons who saw the value of their stocks rising, home owners who saw the values of their houses increasing, and individuals who bought homes for little or no money down and who did not have the income to pay the mortgages.

... The peasants who are losing their jobs, homes, and retirement savings are not benefiting in any way close to how the aristocrats are.

http://socyberty.com/society/feudalism-is-alive-and-well/3/

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

It was a system of fealty -- mutual obligations with a definite asymmetry in power relationships. There was formal loyalty, but it was usually very calculated. That aspect has been taken over by lawyers and employment contracts in our societies but the asymmetric power relationships remain. The real change is from one in which everyone had presumed universal rights under the laws of one's state to one in which one's rights are contingent on the contract and one in which one's loyalty was to the state has been superseded by loyalty to the corporation - often transnational in nature. There are no longer a large number of potential employers and they all have access to far more information about the individual than was previously the case.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

instead of the current system of state and individual.

The state is just a front office of the relation to individuals. Then, of course, the question is: What is behind the state? Who controls the state, or what the governments are really working for?

If you look at Eastern European governments, their serious work appears to be taking care of international investors: monitoring post-bubble private debt payments, assuming new public obligations. Things may not be very different in free-er worlds. Sure, not every investment banker is a winner, but that does not mean that a banking oligarchy has rather safely us all working for them. If you look historically, the Medici controlled Italian princes and their ministers, and the Rothschilds supervised 19th century European governemnts, rather less openly. Why the trend would change?

Yesterday I leafed through a "Newsweek" issue. One subheadline read: "Banking is politics by other means". Or can we say: politics is banking by other means? Ha ha. An other headline is: "Retiring In The Red". That's the pension reform you deserve?! Other article claims that Europeans (particulaly Germans) are fed up with government as well. So we know what's coming. And a jewel joke I found there (but no web link to a short article) was a bank analyst anticipating European Tea Parties...

It is also based on having an excess population. The plague in Europe had a huge impact on the feudal system, because suddenly there was a worker shortage. Malthus and all that...