"Shit."

" - confusion resolved now?"

"Just Osirion, or entire planet outside Cheliax?  No, it's at least also Nidal."

"Everywhere has people in charge who do things you wouldn't like and stay in charge because it's illegal to overthrow them and the laws are enforced. Exactly how bad the things they do are varies - the pharaoh of Osirion is actually not considered bad at all - and exactly how the laws against overthrowing the government are enforced varies but - probably even in Cheliax the government has done something dath ilan thinks would merit overthrowing it."

But for that to be true in Cheliax - that makes no sense, in terms of dath ilani common wisdom about how evil aliens would enforce that equilibrium, they'd require non-dissidents to kill dissidents immediately before the timing info NOW! can spread at the speed of local speech  - maybe they're too dumb here to realize that?

"If you were supposed to have killed me a few seconds ago," Keltham says in a casual tone, not any kind of obvious whisper, "and are putting your own life in danger not to do that, this would be a great time to casually nod your head and then I'll censor a lot of my curriculum from here on out."

Carissa is, completely insanely, tempted to casually nod her head, even though that's not even at all - lots of countries do still have governments and don't enforce heresy laws and it's clearly one of those they're pretending at being -

"I think you are imagining that this equilibrium is extremely fragile and that admitting we're in it is also disallowed? But actually it's extremely sticky. Overthrowing governments is really really hard and usually the thing that results when you overthrow a government is much worse. The consequences of overthrowing the Chelish government would be bad ones. So you don't have to - pretend the government is perfect - you just have to have a critical mass of people who don't believe that overthrowing it would produce something better, especially not since the Chelish government is possible to improve in normal ways by, like, suggesting improvements."

"I see," Keltham says.  "Because if you toss out the current equilibrium, it could disrupt a lot of stuff, especially in a place like Golarion where people who lose a year's income just starve, no safety margin for anything... and if the current equilibrium is also doing some good things..."

But it should be REALLY REALLY OBVIOUS that there's an alternative to Osirion which looks like Osirion WITHOUT THE PHARAOH RAPING PEOPLE and that you could just...

Well, the people here don't have any training in noticing better equilibria and figuring out how to move to them -

NO!  THAT'S JUST OBJECTIVELY OBVIOUS!

Keltham manages not to yell this out loud, and having now finished internally yelling insults at reality, continues looking externally thoughtful, grateful for his recent practice with Eagle's Splendour.

He is not going to say anything along those lines, however obvious, until he has picked up from books whether Cheliax has a pharaoh.  Or rather, what kind of pharaoh it has.

He is specifically not going to mention that, given a dath ilani training regimen, ten-year-olds are too smart to get stuck in traps like this; and would wait until the next solar eclipse or earthquake, at which point 10% of them would yell "NOW!", followed moments later by the other 90%, as is the classic strategy that children spontaneously and independently invent as soon as prompted by this scenario, so long as they have been previously taught about Schelling points.

Has he at any point mentioned out loud dath ilan's annual Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival?  He doesn't think so.

" - because... okay, so, there are lots of people who benefit from the current system, right? The pharaoh has personal bodyguards who he personally raised from the dead after they died in his service. The pharaoh has people who he elevated to high-ranking positions. All of those people would be worse off if the government were overthrown, so for practical reasons they are going to oppose it. So in order to overthrow the government, you have to kill all those people, and also any people who are seeking out positions of importance in the government as a reward for their loyalty in putting down the rebellion, and also any people who have sworn oaths of loyalty to the current regime..."

"I see.  In dath ilan we'd think that it's hard to get over half of the military power on your side by bribing it, in a pre-metallic equilibrium where almost all fighters have about the same military power.  And that once you start gaining more knowledge and get more powerful tech, it's your important duty to also use that knowledge to propagate certain kinds of stable equilibria to future generations and not others."

"But with wizards and clerics and whatever else you have here, if they're - extraordinary economics, you don't have the word, if they let individuals do big things without large support networks - you could get half-plus of the military power by appealing to fewer people.  Even while your society's knowledge was much too primitive to produce the kind of advanced weapons that would make these issues initially appear in nonmagical societies that have started figuring things out."

That does make it seem less like the whole thing is just an Intelligence 10 Phenomenon.

" - yeah, the pharaoh and a hundred high-level personal bodyguards could probably kill practically the entire rest of the country put together, commoners are pretty useless against high-level wizards and clerics. Certainly more than fifty percent of a country's military power is less than a thousand people."

"Well, I think I'm starting to understand some of the ways that Golarion diverged from a human baseline because of the presence of magic.  Or I have the illusion of starting to understand at least one of those divergences.  It is not, by our standards, pretty, but it sure beats having no idea why nothing here is making any sense."

...if you introduce technology into a Punish-Non-Punishers society with magic, the situation is no longer stable, it has a possibility of transitioning to the kind of pharaoh-free Civilization that Keltham is familiar with, if very large supply networks (and only those) can build weapons powerful enough to kill high-level wizards and clerics.  But, yeah, Keltham is going to have to think about how to do that with a minimum of fuss, and maybe not say a whole lot while he's thinking.

Carissa can, in fact, follow the way Keltham might be reasoning, and she's pretty sure that she screwed up, even though claiming that every single country except Cheliax was like this would have been ridiculous and even though she's actually pretty sure that Keltham isn't going to change the calculus of whether it's a good idea to overthrow the government. 

"Anyway, sometimes it does go wrong and someone's power base isn't secure enough. Like in Tian Xia, the Lung Wa empire which had endured for centuries collapsed after Aroden's death because there was a massive associated natural disaster and a famine, and the empire collapsed, and everything is much worse now. I've met Tian adventurers and they tell stories about - ghost cities where everyone just left or died because trade routes were disrupted and food stopped coming, an entire country that made a pact with a kraken to be its slaves, other areas where the civil war still hasn't ended even though there are very few people left to kill each other. I am sure that the Emperor of Imperial Lung Wa did some things you'd abhorr but - it'd be monstrous, to overthrow him, to throw cities and civilizations and twenty million lives into the chasm of Chaos just to stop a couple dozen people from getting raped -"

(She's doing such a bad job at being more Evil, she's going to have to set some time aside tomorrow to work on that.)

"I try not to be the stupid kind of Chaotic.  Even Chaos is made almost entirely of Law, remember.  If you're doing it correctly.  In fact, I'm beginning to think that the top 0.1% most Chaotic dath ilani on my planet, placed on a scale with one unit of distance between what you consider 'Lawful' and 'Chaotic', would be located one hundred and forty-four units further to the Lawful side of what you call Lawful."

"That seems probably right. I just - it sounds like you're thinking about goverments as things that mostly maintain their power by making it too hard for people to correctly overthrow them, when my impression is that actually most people correctly don't want to overthrow them, and I can name six countries where I think that's not true so I don't think I'm just incapable of recognizing it when I see it, and it's not how I see Cheliax. Or Osirion, for that matter. Though I do think stealing all their women would be incredibly satisfying and we should do it."

Stable governments make the expected benefit of overthrowing them look smaller than the expected friction costs of coordinating and changing the regime, yes.  Friction costs are not fixed independently of tech level.

"Where do gods fit into this?  There's a Lawful Neutral god that sponsors Osirion, the same god that took over the planetary banking system.  I imagine that god - doesn't care whether people benefit themselves, or benefit others, it's just completely indifferent to the effect of laws on citizen welfare, all it cares about is that there be laws - confirm or more likely deny my guess?"

She STILL hasn't been told whether to tell him he's Abadar's, "Abadar's not one of the more human gods but I think 'doesn't care whether people benefit themselves or benefit others' sounds right, and, uh, not exactly indifferent to whether laws affect human welfare and more ...deeply concerned with laws along a specific dimension which is not human welfare, but definitely isn't just 'laws exist' - I bet it matters that they're possible to consistently enforce and that they're consistently obeyed? And I bet there are other things that matter which I just don't happen to know."

The info he needs is to what extent gods, both including and excluding Asmodeus, are liable to get pissed if Keltham tries to make their afterlife-feeder be less of a shithole.  Keltham is aware he can't immediately ask about this, though it also occurs to him that Carissa may be similarly speculating about Keltham's intentions, and not saying what she speculates he's thinking.

Gosh, Keltham hopes they weren't supposed to be coordinating some kind of immensely meaningful implied side conversation, while they were talking about this, because if so, Keltham has absolutely no idea what they both sidespoke, and that would be embarrassing.  Well, not really his fault because of the enormous cultural gap and hypothetical Carissa should have known better, but still.

"Wanna go back to talking sex work in dath ilan?" Keltham offers.

"Sure. Do women pay for it? They don't, in Golarion; it's not hard to find someone who'll have sex with you for free."

"Some women do?  I should also mention that there's a difference between, like... slipping some normal man or woman a private note saying that you realize you've failed at flirting with them but you still want them enough that you'd pay thirty unskilled-labor-hours to fuck them anyways, versus paying much higher prices to extremely attractive people who are extremely good at sex.  The second thing is more of a case of - something you do when you're older, richer, can afford it on a regular basis if you don't want to go back to less expert sex, and aren't concerned about it messing up your regular relationships.  I've resorted to bribery six times and been bribed twice, but the total money flow ratio is more like, twenty to one, not three to one."

" - that with normal non-professionals is not a thing in Cheliax and I suppose it could be, I don't actually know why it isn't. I guess since no one does it, offering would be extremely weird and therefore a negative signal about the traits of the person who offered?" It'd read as a bizarre threat, is what it'd read as. "I'd be cautious about doing that here, not that I expect you'll need to."

"Thanks for the warning.  Anything else I shouldn't offer people money to do?"

"Huh, good question. I'm not immediately thinking of anything else." 

 "Normally I would say you shouldn't offer people money to overthrow the government, that actually is illegal, but what with it being you I think it's probably better if your controlling constraint isn't - believing yourself to have necessarily incomplete information about the merits of overthrowing governments."

" - and now we're back on serious topics, sorry. What sorts of things do you do in a whole city of sex workers - do you pretend to be the pharaoh of Osirion -"

"You mean, and then the women overthrow him and take sexual revenge on him?  Or played straight rather than subverted - I mean, I'm sure somebody has played Perverted Alien Dictator of Civilization and probably a hundred thousand variations on it - I don't know, myself, very much of what goes on in there.  There's a standard wisdom of, play the simple sex games first, wait to get bored naturally before you start making sex more complicated, don't rush ahead to the weirdest sex Civilization has developed."

"It's considered - the kind of info-hazard that isn't going to drive you insane, but can make you miss out on a lot of fun, by making you bored before you would've been bored?  Like telling somebody how a book ends when they just started reading it?  We have whole Civilizational structures around avoiding that class of lesser infohazards, spoilers they're called.  With, for example, simple codes you only memorize after you pass a competence check for a threshold level of sexual experience, so newspapers can print sentences that only sufficiently perverted people would be able to read without making a deliberate effort."