Around a seemingly identical sun spins a planet with seemingly identical continents to Earth, and very different social forms: this is dath ilan.

You're curious about this planet's history, which the dath ilani themselves are permitted to guess, but not remember?  You wonder how their society ended up so supposedly well-coordinated?  You wonder if there were secret police or drugs in the water, at least at first?

Or maybe you're not so curious about its history.  In that case you can skip to the end.  But if you're curious -

You could find little moments, here and there in dath ilan's history.  What if another world's equivalent of the Ashkenazi merchant network had been studying a Pythagorean mystery-cult focused on alchemy, in their off-hours, instead of putting their cultural efforts into the minutia of Torah?  What if some of those alternate-world Ashkenazis had invented gunpowder?  Or what if some grand Pharoah-Emperor of the South American continent had recruited a harem of nubile mathematicians, and been blindly imitated by nobles for centuries after?  What if, in some alternate Indo-European religious empire with a caste system that put an increasingly wealthy and powerful merchant caste underneath an increasingly decrepit warrior caste, Martin Luther and Adam Smith had been the same person, nailing a set of theses to a church door that included the praises of trade over war?

But history is not made up of striking unusual moments that resonate with grand themes.  Earth itself would contain its own share of fortunate coincidences, if you went hunting.  Do you think every timeline contains a version of Francis Bacon who systematizes science and happens to praise the decentralization of epistemic authority while he's writing?  Do you think every timeline that sees the conceptualization of races and racial strife will also experience a Gandhi and a Martin Luther King?  In most timelines, conquerors don't just happen to discover a new-to-them continent, don't manage to wipe out all the local advanced civilizations with plagues; and then just happen to devise a novel democracy (for only their race's males, of course) in the emptied territories, and have that democracy work unprecedently well for a century or two.  None of that happened in dath ilan's history, just like Jews didn't invent gunpowder in yours.

So all of the striking anecdotes are meaningless, in the end, and convey only an illusion of history.

This is dath ilan, and from Earth's perspective, the very different social forms seem very uniform across their whole planet.  The term "monoculture" springs to mind, if you are an Earthling.

An average dath ilani might protest in reply that, from their own perspective, all of Earth's governments make weirdly similar mistakes.  This average dath ilani might (after learning more of Earth's culture) give the example of an American tourist who thinks that India has a monoculture, in that they all have weird food and the people all speak Foreign.  Earthlings seem diverse to Earthlings, the dath ilani would claim, and dath ilani seem diverse to dath ilani.

A smarter dath ilani would concede the point after ten minutes of reading Wikipedia.  Dath ilani are in nearly uniform agreement that too much uniformity is bad, and that individual diversity needs to be protected.  This is more agreement than you could get out of Earth people on the physical shape of their planet.

How did this cultural uniformity come about, in dath ilan's hidden history?  Isabella suspected a great deal of genocide, and there was in fact some of that, though not as much as Isabella was thinking.  The doctrine of that early Adam-Smith-Martin-Luther religion made it technically sinful to go around declaring war on other countries.  That didn't stop the Empire any more than it would have stopped Catholics or Jews; their priests, too, had skill with technicalities.  The Imperators at the time tended to find some other plausible-sounding reason to set up a trade center just outside a barbarian state, full of tempting goods and fat-looking merchants just begging to be robbed.  When the inevitable happened, the Empire would descend in all righteous retaliation and exterminate the barbarian nobility, with their priesthood's full blessing.

The Empire made some effort to preserve the lives of barbarian civilians, but no effort to preserve barbarian cultures.  For it was the doctrine of their state religion and elite philosophers that individual people had life and worth, and groups did not.  (The priesthood that Adam-Smith-Martin-Luther had rebelled against had said quite the opposite.)

In time there was an Empire that had only a single great rival left, in the Pharoahdom of the American continents.  And if you were an Earthling you might expect that would not end well.  But the Empire had their Adam-Smith-Martin-Luther and a voluntarist ideology, and the Pharoahdom's mandarins were descended from nobles that had long bred themselves with mathematicians.  Both States had already become wealthy enough to experiment with rich-country features like democracy or having a conscience.  Each State had imitated successful aspects of the other.  There was some of the grand rivalry you might have expected; but for reasons that historical anecdotes would only give an illusion of explaining, the Empire and Pharaohdom were already far beyond mercantilism in their understanding of economics.  For those same strange reasons, the citizens channeled their patriotic rivalry into offering easier business licenses and competing to host more of the international economy.  Trade agreements were signed, borders opened, citizens exchanged and intermarried, essays published about possible voting systems, and in time an agreement was signed that merged Empire and Pharoahdom into a new democracy that called itself Civilization.

The last holdouts against Civilization were agricultural tribes scattered across the far South Americas and New Zealand.  By then Civilization had grown enough of a conscience that those cultures were left in place.  Those who elected to leave entirely were given all the gifts of civilization; those who stayed did not have strange things forced into their presence by way of gifts offered to their neighbors.  The voters of Civilization insisted on sending in occasional armored missionaries, to advertise that technology existed, for the sake of offering their children the choice.  There were dath ilani who agonized about how few children did take that choice, in those remaining cultures where math was never studied.  But it was argued that there was also a danger in uniformity, in taking choices away; and it was not as if the fate of all human beings was not the same, in the end.

Then cryonics was invented, and that was the end.  The arithmetic of Civilization's moral calculations changed drastically; it was said that any mistake could be made up to someone in time, but for the mistake of letting their brain be destroyed.  Scrupulous people agonized over the choice but they could not suggest a better one.  So the missionaries of Civilization took up tasers, and imposed enough presence on the tribes to make sure they collected the souls of every corpse, whenever their time came.  Inevitably the children became curious, the impressively invincible outsiders told the truth as they saw it and offered options to individuals, and soon there was no culture anywhere in dath ilan except the one that called itself Civilization.

And all of that is just another meaningless historical anecdote.  It doesn't explain why dath ilan is more of a monoculture than India or the United States, which also have central governments.

This is dath ilan, and you wonder how it ended up the way it did, if it wasn't a matter of striking anecdotes.  The dath ilani themselves would give you puzzled looks, if you asked how they ended up so unusual.  It's not just that they don't remember their past.  You remember the past, and you'd still give an alien a look of Requesting Further Clarification if they asked you how Earth ended up so weird.  The dath ilani don't have observations telling them they're special among timelines; they don't know what unusual fact you think needs to be explained.

And there's a wisdom in that puzzled reply, though knowing it may not help you; there's a sense in which dath ilan is ordinary.  Travel outside the volume that your telescopes can see, and you will find sapient aliens who use the same numbers you do, zero-one-two-three.  If they've developed to the point of axiomatizing their mathematics, they may not use the first-order Peano axioms to formalize arithmetic, but that doesn't mean they'll believe different truths about numbers.  Set theory using the negation of the axiom of infinity will give you precisely the same theorems as Peano arithmetic.

And long before humans formalized anything, they counted none-one-two-three, as can crows if you don't ask them to count much higher.  It's not a strange guess that distant aliens would count the same.  You wouldn't expect to find a different 'two' around most other stars, on average; there isn't that much room to make up actually-different variations on the numbers that maintain usefulness.  If natural selection builds an organism that can grasp numbers at all, that organism will probably grasp the universal (and indeed transuniversal) form of 'two'.

When it comes to the science-and-technology attractor itself, the central structures are more complicated.  Probability and Utility are very simple in an absolute sense, to be sure, but more complicated in their metaphysics than Numbers.  Even among the Earthlings who've heard of such mathematical structures at all, very few know the theorems spotlighting their central or unique properties.  But long before humans learn any of that stuff, they can intuitively grasp that theories which made wrong predictions last time are less likely to make good predictions next time.  That is a large-enough fragment of Probability to power what Earthlings call 'science'.

And science feeds on itself, and feeds technology and is fed by technology.  So it's no coincidence that a timeline which builds advanced microprocessors is also likely to possess airplanes.  When you see aliens that have stainless steel, your first thought is not that they are specially adept with metals, but that they have wandered some little way into the science-technology attractor.

Look across the superclusters, and most entities either don't do natural-number arithmetic at all, like stars and rocks; or they do it perfectly up to the limits of bounded cognition, like galaxy-spanning superintelligences.  If there's anything odd about humans, it's the way that humans are only halfway finished being sucked into attractors like that.

Though Earth has done very little of its homework on the subject, as yet, there are central mathematical structures for aggregating beliefs, utilities, and strategies across multiple agents.  They speak of multi-agent arrangements which incentivize behaviors from all individual agents such that the collective strategy ends up on the Pareto frontier of outcomes that cannot be made simultaneously better for all agents.  They speak of the aggregate acting with non-dominated strategies, meaning that the aggregate itself can be seen as behaving coherently with respect to some probability function and utility function.  They speak of symmetrical divisions of the gains from coordination, and response functions to mildly asymmetrical arrangements, such that no agent expects to gain by demanding a different arrangement.  Shards of that structure are embedded in humans in traits like honor and fairness; though, alas, the human versions of those traits don't scale up too well, when extended from tribes to countries.

Dath ilan has a slightly bigger shard of Coordination - within many messy dimensions, that are imperfect reflections of higher structures, that in their unbounded forms would mesh together as perfectly as numbers; which is the ultimate explanation for why the messy bounded reflections manage to reinforce each other and form an attractor.  That's all there is to it, in a sufficiently abstract sense: dath ilan has wandered a little further into the attractor for coordination.  Dath ilan has even invented some bits of math that Earth did not discover independently, to know what it is that they know; they are doing it on purpose, now.  But of course they haven't nearly gone all the way, and most entities in the universe that coordinate at all are doing it much better.

You're not satisfied with that?  Well, fine, you can be told about some of the actual mechanisms; but in the end you may not see why they work, or work that well.  Take somebody from an earlier stage of Earth's history, from before Earth wandered as far into the science-technology attractor; try telling them about the fragment of Probability called science.  That child of an earlier Earth might be skeptical that the ritual of running experiments could produce that much difference in the average truthfulness of what future specially-clothed anointed priests would believe, compared to current specially-clothed anointed priests.  A credulous early-Earthling might say that surely God does a better job of advice than fallible humans staring at Nature with their own eyes.  A cynical early-Earthling might ask if these future priests might experience their own interests about what to say to people; or have their own ways of profiting from lying; or if they could placate powerful patrons by a clever choice of which experiments to perform.  And those cynics wouldn't be wrong.  But the ritual of experiment-performance still turns out to make a large difference in practice, even as performed by imperfect people.  That's not a law of human societies an earlier Earthling would see in advance, if they didn't start out knowing everything you take for granted.  Neither faith or cynicism would find it self-image-congruent to say that science works, if they were looking for faithful or cynical things to say.  You'd need to know about the shard of Probability, or have dimly glimpsed it at least.

In Earth people think up ideas for what groups should do, argue for them on moral grounds, and sometimes do them, usually to catastrophic effect.  The wiser Earthlings learn that attempts at improvement are usually counterproductive; they learn that lofty-sounding ideas usually fail; they learn that they are helpless.

On dath ilan they do small-scale experiments, they actually use their shard of Probability; that is something an Earthling might understand.  But Earth also has history, and history books, in fact they have more history books than dath ilan; even some experiments get done; the problem is that Earth doesn't learn from them.  It's the more important step that dath ilan uses prediction markets, a shard of Coordination, to aggregate what its people know into a collective-belief-function; and uses that to predict the result of policy proposals, thereby actually learning when somebody does an experiment.  It does, in fact, make a difference.  And on the meta-level also, the dath ilani have learned (as a people and not just isolated individuals) which electoral processes and which institutional structures will have which consequences.

So many of dath ilan's institutions became mostly more-or-less effective, and they could focus more of their attention on the parts that were still going wrong.  The system reflected on itself and optimized itself, and went further into the attractor.

Of course, since they're still only human, dath ilan now has other issues which an Earthling might naturally blame on "too much coordination".  (The science-technology attractor is not without its issues either.)  The dath ilani have happened across the group-aggregation equivalent of a helpful genie in a bottle, and now go around wishing for more and more nice-seeming final observables.  They've noticed the tendency, and they're trying to fight it, but the wishes are so attractive and they end up doing it anyways.

As for dath ilan's monoculture, that's what happens if you wish upon your genie for policies that are predicted to end up with more children learning math; as a side effect, everybody ends up agreeing on the shape of the planet.  That's what happens, when you collectively determine which aspects of society have critically important optima that matter more than diversity and variance; and then encourage doing things the optimal way in those dimensions, while encouraging diversity and variance everywhere else; and carefully building side-paths and exception-handlers in case the clever rules don't work for somebody.  You end up with, as Earth would see it, an enormous flaming monoculture.

This is dath ilan; and a few generations before Thellim's time, when people were stupider than in her time but smarter than in Earth, laws and legislation were passed by Nine Legislators, with power flowing to them from 324 Representatives of Civilization who negotiated with those Legislators for influence on the points their factions cared about.  In turn, those 324 Representatives represented roughly forty thousand Electors, elected by five million Delegates, delegated-to by six hundred and fifty million voting dath ilani.

The notion, they might have explained, was that in Civilization there is always a particular person you've personally chosen to wield your political power, who knows you personally, who you can talk to when you have political concerns.  In that age, people chose Delegates; who then chose Electors, who could talk to them personally, when the sum of a Delegate's voters were getting worried; the Electors could talk to Representatives, who could talk to Legislators.  (And it was forbidden for somebody who'd ever served as a Delegate to become an Elector or Representative; the Delegates were meant to be people who actually wanted to be Delegates, people who actually wanted to spend their lives working with the ordinary other people, not frustrated ambitious would-be Electors.  Electors were well-paid people of greater ambitions, but those ambitions could not include becoming Representatives; for the Electors were meant to be working for their Delegates, and not for some larger political machine that had the power to dole out Representative seats.  And you could not become a Legislator if you had previously been a Representative or Elector; it was a job reserved for people who had excelled at some other art than politics.)

Then and now, the Very Serious People in dath ilan would not call Earth's institutions by the term that translates to them as "democracy".  The dath ilani would consider it disqualifying that many Earthlings feel like they don't really get much of a choice in their supposed political representation, and feel helpless to negotiate with political powers at any scale.  The dath ilani would also consider Earth's parliaments to be undemocratically large, because nobody could actually keep track of what was going on inside of them.  A few generations before Thellim's time, the limit was 9 legislators publicly negotiating with each other, at the top and final level of political representation.  9 * 8 / 2 = 36 pairwise interactions was the most that a dath ilani of moderately below-average intelligence for that epoch could reasonably be asked to track.

Citizens can't control processes they can't see.  For that clever-reason it was then illegal for any of the Nine Legislators to meet with each other, or speak with any Representative, except as a matter of public record.  An Earthling instinctively flinches away from this idea; they know instinctively that a majority of Earth voters are not grownups, and would be outraged at the tiny fragments of sanity that still exist in Earth's politics at all and prevent the nukes from being launched.  But dath ilan was already grown past that stage.  For them, the rule was wise, or at least not obviously stupid.

But Civilization was also grownup enough to understand that well-intentioned rules could have unforeseen consequences.  They considered their institutions trustworthy enough to grant them exceptions and exception-handlers, rather than trying to chain them down absolutely.  So the Nine Legislators could lawfully meet in private, or even in secret, if the highest Keeper was there to listen.

The Keepers were an order older than Civilization, with an immense momentum behind them of promise-keeping, of abiding in the Algorithm that underlies all trust.  Their name, to the extent it translates, was the Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know.  Among other tasks they hosted practitioners of the sort of methods of rationality that can make life less fun to live, but which Civilization might suddenly need at some point.  They deliberately went further into some cognitive attractors than you would if you were just trying to live a human life well-lived; they embedded bounded shards of coldly perfect structures into their cognition, and did their best to maintain their mental integrity in the face of that.  They invented Confessors, swore Confessors to secrecy, and monitored them.  Above all else, the Keepers kept their oaths, tried to make themselves into people who would keep their oaths, and had done nontrivial amounts of assortative mating to that end.  The Keepers had no official powers of violence under law, back then, but their social power was great enough to be considered a counterbalance to the government itself.  When the Leo Szilard of dath ilan first realized that fission chain reactions were possible, she eventually told the government, but she talked it over with the Keepers first.

This is dath ilan; and a few generations before Thellim's time, the highest of the Keepers called together the Nine Legislators in a secret meeting.  Shortly after, the highest Keeper and the Nine called an emergency closed assembly of the 324 Representatives.

And the highest Keeper said, with the Nine Legislators at the peak of dath ilan standing beside her, that the universe had proven to be a harsher and colder and more dangerous place than had been hoped.

And that all Civilization needed to turn much of its effort away from thriving, and toward surviving.  There needed to be controls and slowdowns and halts instituted on multiple major technologies.  Which would need to be backed up by much more pervasive electronic surveillance than anybody had ever even considered allowing before.  Roughly a fifth of all the present and future smart people in the world ought to publicly appear to burn out or retire, and privately work on a new secret project under maximum-security conditions.  Also more of the smartest people needed to be nudged more strongly into mating with each other, worrying less about the speciation dangers of assortative mating, and more about producing the smartest possible future researchers as early as possible.

And so long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well also carry out the less important but still useful operation of putting all of Civilization's past behind the most complete possible causal screen.  That part wasn't as important, but still legitimately helpful; and doing it would help to overshadow the other changes, and lead to less attention going to the more dangerous places.

The reasoning behind this policy could, in principle, be laid out to the 324 Representatives.  But that would represent a noticeable additional risk, if it happened now, while mechanisms to prevent information propagation hadn't been set up yet.  Another 324 not-fully-filtered people knowing, now, would be too many.  So the Representatives would need to trust the Keeper and Legislators on this.

The Representatives were not too frightened.  They had all individually deduced that this was almost certainly some kind of experiment or systemic test.  None of them said so out loud, of course, because they didn't want to invalidate whatever-was-being-tested by giving some answer different than they would have given in real life.  So the Representatives debated among themselves, all trying to act and even think exactly the same way they would in real life; and not for long, because in real life, this obviously would reflect some kind of massive emergency.

And the Representatives finally replied that, in this case, they did not think that the trust placed in them by all Civilization permitted them to assent to this massive policy change without further explanation.  They would not have predicted in advance that the Nine Legislators and the highest Keeper would come before them with a massive lie for purposes of personal gain, particularly not a lie as strange as this one.  But even less would they have advance-predicted some mysterious emergency like that to be real; and to assent to the proposed change, under that protocol, would be setting up the wrong system incentives in the world that was most probably the case.

The highest Keeper nodded and said that was very sensible of them.

Then she took out a microgrenade and blew apart her own brain.

The meaning of this act is approximately impossible to convey across the cultural gap between Earth and dath ilan.  An Earthling will not feel what a dath ilani feels, hearing that, no matter how much of the context gets explained.

On Earth, committing suicide might be seen as an important statement and an indicator of real seriousness; at least if treated with cues of seriousness by the media, like a Thai monk setting themselves on fire.  It would work to convey that a real emergency was going on, and that this wasn't a test.  It wouldn't suffice to push through a revolution in the basic forms of government and civilization.  Just setting yourself on fire can't overcome a credibility gap that large, and an Earthling would feel incredulous at the idea that it might.  People sometimes do strange things, after all, and sometimes sacrifice their lives for less than perfect reasons.

In dath ilan, it was interpreted differently.  There is nobody who an Earthling expects to make sense in the way that a smart dath ilani expects a high-ranked Keeper to make sense.  Very few Earthlings have an inkling of what that kind of sense is, let alone expect anyone to make it.

If the Keeper had committed ordinary suicide - retired to cryonic suspension - that might have made sense.  It would have made the point, to start with, that it was in fact a real emergency; and that one of two non-advance-predicted things had actually happened in real life, meaning that one's sense of prior probabilities needed to be discarded as having already failed to serve.

An ordinary suicide would have made some progress on showing the honesty of the emergency measures, too.  It's not inconceivable to a dath ilani that the head Keeper might betray her oaths and the Algorithm in pursuit of some selfish benefit.  They try to avoid defections in reality, but they have a single-syllable word for 'game-theoretic defection' because of how often it comes up in counterfactuals.  It's not even inconceivable that the Keeper could persuade all Nine Legislators to go along with her, though the Nine had come from many walks of life.  So retiring to cryonic suspension would have been a way for the Keeper to prove, or rather strongly argue, that she had not been hoping to benefit selfishly from her extraordinary request; to show that she was submitting herself to the judgment of future Civilization regarding it.  Though even then, it wouldn't be inconceivable that the Keeper would betray her oaths in order to act nonselfishly towards some other person or faction, while defecting against all the rest of Civilization, counting on the future's impersonal forgiveness.  But it would be less likely.  And for all of the Nine Legislators, from their many walks of life, to also go along with it - that would not be likely at all.

An ordinary suicide might possibly have made sense, given the absolutely extraordinary circumstances.

You wouldn't do it anyways, because you wouldn't want to set up an incentive for political leaders to be people willing to commit suicide.  That's putting your government into a weird and dangerous shape.

And in dath ilan you would not set up an incentive where a leader needed to commit true suicide and destroy her own brain in order to get her political proposal taken seriously.  That would be trading off a sacred thing against an unsacred thing.  It would mean that only true-suicidal people became leaders.  It would be terrible terrible system design.

So if anybody did deliberately destroy their own brain in attempt to increase their credibility - then obviously, the only sensible response would be to ignore that, so as not create hideous system incentives.  Any sensible person would reason out that sensible response, expect it, and not try the true-suicide tactic.

If, ignoring that, somehow your true suicide could get people to take an otherwise incredible proposal seriously - even then, no child of dath ilan would do that.  It would be too sad.  That's the dath ilani reaction that an Earthling wouldn't really feel inside, that it would be just way too sad.  Even if Civilization followed your proposal and was saved, you wouldn't be there to see it.  People in the future would want to thank you, if you'd turned out to be right after all, and they'd look around for you and not be able to find you.  It would be contrary to utilitarianism (for the one less soul alive), contrary to deontology (for having destroyed a soul, as must never be done even if it seems like a good idea), contrary to personal virtue (for the desire to live is also part of a healthy mind), contrary to aesthetics (for all the bright sentiments it would contradict), contrary to good design for aggregative systems (for you wouldn't want to set up an incentive like that), contrary to reason, contrary to the Light itself.  It would go against the theme and song of Civilization that nobody gets left behind, not ultimately left behind, that everyone in dath ilan is joining hands together against outcomes that are bitter in the very end.

The Keeper destroyed her own brain before the assembled Representatives.  That was an act that any sane person could judge as wrong whatever the hidden backstory - if your prior reasoning, and expectations, and the whole system and world you thought you were living inside, had the meaning you thought it did.

It was an act of desperation and shattered assumptions and horror.

The Representatives did not scream and run around, for they were also the peak of dath ilan.  They did not fight to retain their old assumptions, or maintain a pretense of calm, for that too is childish.  They noticed and updated and started taking the matter actually seriously, and the world changed.

This is dath ilan, and stories written for Earthlings cannot be set here, because everything takes way way way too long to explain.  Dath ilan diverged from Earth too long ago.  You think you know how a high-tech human civilization is supposed to work, and you're around as correct as Thellim was about Earth during her first few days.  There are underground car tunnels hivecombing dath ilan, and you want to know how dath ilan builds underground car tunnels so much more cheaply than Earth builds subways; and the dath ilani would give you a puzzled look, and say that the energy and raw materials just don't cost that much and aren't that complex to transform at scale; and that won't seem like an answer to you either.  Your brain knows how a human society ought to work; and any description of Civilization will insult you with endless claims that you were confidently wrong; if you step back and ask "Why?" the answers will just insult you again.

But still - if you'd aspire to take into yourself a slightly larger shard of Coordination - you might find it useful to consider this question, and try to foresee dath ilan's answer:

How would a better-coordinated human civilization treat the case where somebody hears a voice inside their head, claiming to be from another world?

Note the first:  Dath ilani do sometimes go insane.  They have subjected their brains to sharp recent selection pressures.  On the scale of all Civilization, it happens with great statistical regularity every day that many dath ilani hear voices inside their heads.  Nor is it unusual for that voice to claim to be speaking on behalf of aliens or neighboring quantum branches of humanity.  By assumption, you know this.

Note the second:  By assumption, you know nothing about any worlds from outside Civilization.  You are living in a reality that has seemed extremely regular up until this point.  So you could justifiably reason out an extreme prior confidence that - even if aliens or parallel timelines could impinge on your planet - they would be extremely unlikely to first-contact your world as a voice inside some random person's head.

But also note:  If you approach this question by imagining the dath ilani acting like Earthlings and Earth governments would, when Earth people become confident that they know better than their lessers, you will not see through to the central structure.  If you imagine the use of force, or lies to avoid force, you will be imagining events that Civilization always spends at least five minutes thinking about how to avoid.

You might predict better, in the end, by asking yourself what is the right course, not "What would dath ilan do?"  Dath ilan itself is asking the former question, not the latter one.

The structure at the center of coordination is locally incentivizing actions that move multi-agent strategies closer to the Pareto frontier of outcomes that cannot be improved for all agents simultaneously.  In more advanced civilizations, the citizens may know more, but they do not thereby want what the larger civilization wants them to want.  The art of civilization, then, consists of shaping incentives.

Somebody in dath ilan has heard a voice in their head, claiming to speak from a previously unknown civilization in a parallel timeline of humanity.

Question:  What happens next?

A grandmother-aged woman sits quietly in an automatic car with fully blacked-out walls and doors, sweating into her clothes.  She has decided not to weep or have a breakdown, but she can't control the sweating.

She can't see where the car is going, though she knows the final destination very well.  It's taking a long time to make the trip, longer than anybody bothers to put on-screen in the movies where something like this happens.  It's... unpleasant.

(This is dath ilan, and several excellent movies - scripted by highly intelligent writers partially supported by the will of Civilization to help produce public goods - have started with somebody hearing a voice inside their head.  Everybody who sees a movie like that will know, as a matter of cliche, what you ought to do conditional on the voice inside your head being real.

And if the voice isn't real?  Then you ought to do the same thing for different reasons.  It may not end that way in the movies, or at least not nearly as often, but those positive incentives have also been arranged and publicized.

The blacked-out car isn't there as cruelty, to scare her, or to prevent her from seeing where she's going.  She knows where she's going.  And cruelty above all is something that dath ilani would never tolerate from their government, for hurting people is wrong.

The blacked-out surfaces are there to prevent other people from seeing her, if their own automatic cars pass her by.  After all, if the voice in her head was real, that would definitely be a gigantic unknown-magnitude infohazard situation.  People who hear voices in their heads and believe them real will do what they think they must, to act rightly and protect others.  Their path can and should be eased, especially in the direction Civilization wants them to take.)

The car slows to a halt, the blackened doors open, and the woman steps out.

An empty corridor takes her to a doorway, and a sign reminding her to leave behind all metals.  She had known that part was coming, from movies, and had believed she left all her metals at home already.  Just before she steps forward, she remembers an oathring that she hasn't taken off in thirty years.

With a sad twinge on a very sad day, the woman wrestles the oathring off her finger and drops it in a receptacle provided.

Then the woman steps through a high-powered metal detector, which passes her without complaint.

A doorway-opening slides firmly shut behind the woman, and locks her inside a room with cheerful rose-colored walls.

If everything works according to the movies - which it no doubt does, they wouldn't show it if it wasn't true - then the woman is almost but not quite inside a psychiatric hospital right now.

This sealed room is definitely not part of that hospital, however, nor has she yet been intaken.

On the far side of the room, a telescreen protected by high-grade cryptography lights up, showing the reassuringly neutral face of a middle-aged man.

"Hi.  I'm Erler.  You reported a potential First Contact situation?"

"No," the woman says.  She's trying to keep as much of her dignity as possible, including not allowing her voice to crack.  "I reported the experience of hearing a voice inside my head, claiming to be from a human civilization in an alternate-possibility world.  I am, not unaware, of the extremely likely divergence between this experience and reality."

(In movies, of course, the actresses don't say that on-screen.  Some people who hear voices in their head do manage to be unaware of the probabilities.  You wouldn't want to emphasize to them, at this point in their thinking, that they were already diverging from the script.)

"Are you aware of any other cognitive distortions?  Such as might well occur even if the voices were real, if their method of contacting you imposed stress?  If the voices in your head agree that the situation is not time-critical, we usually prefer to take a general cognitive inventory first -"

"I am not aware of any other cognitive distortions, other than those associated with severe emotional stress, horror, dismay, sadness, disgust with myself.  Erler, I would - find it kinder - if you went ahead and performed the test.  The voice in my head says that it understands why I think I'm insane, but it wants me to hold myself together anyways.  It presented an argument about how important this scenario is, if it's real.  It's - stressful."

(It's not what standard intake procedure calls for.  But dath ilan has an un-Earthly attitude towards procedure, and towards kindness, and towards understanding that bureaucrats make exceptions in order to be kind.  Show most dath ilani a clever idea for a rule, and their first thought is of how that rule might go wrong, and what escape hatches need to be built around it for people it might not fit.)

"All right then.  Is the voice from a relatively advanced agency?  As seems implied from its ability to reach here and talk in your -"

"You do not need to walk me through the reasoning.  Yes, the voice claims to be from a technologically advanced human civilization, with better computers than ours, in fact, supposedly the person behind the voice is sitting in front of their version of a Network terminal right now, please just do the test."

Erler consults a sheet of paper to find the next question.  He asks it very carefully.  "To twelve decimal places, what is sin(214 + cos(177 + tan 98))?"

(It's easy to say out loud unambiguously in Baseline.)

The woman - who is not carrying any metal on herself, and accordingly should be free of any radio receivers, in her sealed room - starts to recite a number:  "Zero point one seven two two nine..."

(You might wonder, if you're from Earth, why Erler pronounced the question so carefully.  It's impossible for a mental patient to actually get the answer right, after all.  And - an Earthling might imagine - if Erler did claim a patient had gotten it right, wouldn't everyone promptly believe that he was lying or crazy?

This is why Erler does not know the correct answer himself, and is entering Helorm's answer into a numpad.

Erler is also tested with fake patients on a regular basis, to make sure he asks the question correctly.  And those fake patients sometimes give correct answers to the math question, to make sure the system is functioning correctly and would detect any correct answers given.

It's not that dath ilan thinks that any of their prospective mental patients are actually likely to be talking to powerful entities, when they hear voices inside their heads.

It's that Civilization has made representations to prospective mental patients that this test is fair.  So of course it's going to be fair.  It has not actually occurred to Helorm that this test might be faked.  If that thought did occur to her, she would correctly estimate that if the test was found to be faked, it would be a civilization-shaking scandal, and anyone who had anything to do with it any way would be fired, and the entire dath ilani Legislature and Keeper leadership would resign for bearing ultimate responsibility.  

The government is not supposed to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma.  Not even the Epistemic Prisoner's Dilemma.  It doesn't matter how sure you are that you're right and the other person is wrong.  When Civilization promises cooperation to somebody in exchange for their own cooperation, Civilization cooperates with them, full stop.)

Erler finishes entering the numbers that Helorm recites.

He's not surprised when the screen goes blank immediately after.  Erler already suspected that this case was a drill; it's not usually the case that a mental patient is both aware of the seeming insanity and reporting a total absence of other detectable cognitive distortions.  That's more like the start of a book where the First Contact is actually real.

Erler is extremely surprised when the door to his own sealed room fails to unlock a few seconds later.

(The system doesn't think Erler himself is insane, to be clear.  It is considering that he may have been in contact with an unknown-magnitude infohazard.)