"Society wouldn't work if most people weren't basically goodwilled."

"That can be true without people being goodwilled enough."

"I guess it'd depend on what you need them to be goodwilled for?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean we mostly just need to trust each other to be reasonable and fair-minded and intelligent and predictable in a specific way. And that's - a lot. Some people aren't reasonable in that way, and it creates huge problems. But most people are capable of being reasonable in that way, and can see the benefits."

"Maybe."

"But it's easy to underrate everyone being reasonable and fair-minded and intelligent and predictable, I think."

"I mean, I'm living here. It's not nothing."

"My son says he thinks your magic system runs up enormous debts when it's employed here, for some reason, but the lights clearly don't."

"Huh, I wonder why he thinks that. It's not true as far as I know."

"I'm not sure. You could ask him. I was complaining to him that if he ran the court differently probably you'd teach me magic and that's what he said he thought."

"I'm not sure there are actually any changes that - given the operative constraints - would do the trick. Maybe there are, but I don't have a high confidence map of the whole problem and it's definitely making it harder to figure it out that I don't have whatever sense you have for the debt coming and going."

"Well I noticed that you were all alarmed, when I mentioned the prisoners, so I told him that maybe if we hadn't had any you'd be less afraid."

"There being some did admittedly not help."

"See! And there are probably a couple things like that even if I don't know what they are."

"The thing I'd be most comforted to see is less happening not to have prisoners but being on the same wavelength about why that is objectionable."

"Everything about the way courts work is objectionable, it just turns out that every other way of trying to configure a society is also objectionable. You can either go up, or down, right? You could either say that there should be more consolidation - larger groups in which it's acceptable to carry substantial debt internally, larger territory claims, larger administrative groupings - or you could say that there should be less, and in places where there's more I think people have a worse time of being in a court because it's easy to have no personal avenues of recourse with anyone important in the court, and in places where there's less fortunes swing more wildly and people die more often."

"I mean, yes, I think the reason you are this way is this debt system you have. I've met worse people with less excuse, that just didn't inform my threshold of trust much."

"If I were trying to figure out how good some people were at building bridges, and some of them had built the best possible bridge out of the materials available in their area but their area contained only straw, I guess I wouldn't want to rely on the bridge but I'd be fine relying on the builders, if I gave them anything better and some practice with it."

"Unfortunately I don't know how to improve your access to metaphorical bridge materials."

"Teach me the lights."

"...if I'm currently in your debt or something and that's actually a threat you have to actually say so since I can't tell but I don't recommend doing that."

"It's the building materials. Magic items are expensive and hard to make and that makes it hard to go off where no one else is and start your own court. But it could be easier. Communications across any significant distance are hard and that means if you leave a court you can't easily talk to any of your friends. That could be easier too. Most people aren't in that much debt, because it's not good for them. If all of them could start out alone but well-resourced then some of them would, and then courts would be better, along any given metric you care about, the same way anything competitive is better."

"Aren't you all born in debt?"

"See, that's another thing fast magic would help with, if it was easy to do all the things necessary to make life pleasant then no one would have a child to have a servant, and people'd only have children if they liked them. If one of mine wanted to set out and start their own court and that wasn't ridiculously difficult I'd let them."