"How will meeting people help with that?"

"Everyone likes different things. People have different lifestyles, in a lot of ways, and you can learn what other people's lives are like and decide what parts of those you want in your own life. Hobbies, what kind of place to live, how to spend your time, political causes, all sorts of things."

"Political causes?"

"Ideas about how society should be organized. Tax policy, education policy, what things should be decided at the city level versus the regional level versus the coalition level versus the continental level versus globally, what annual fishing limits should be, basically any opinion one can have about governments. And also opinions about social norms, like, oh, whether parrots get called 'it' or 'they'* or whether it's a good idea for three people to all date each other. Nobody is suggesting a legal requirement one way or the other, but some people want to persuade other people to do it their way. Also, you personally don't have to have any political opinions--it was just an example--but I don't see how an entire society could avoid having them."

*Translator's note: Convergentlanguage distinguishes between persons, animals, and {plants/inanimate objects/abstractions/etc}, and also by plural vs singular, but not by gender. It avoids the gay fanfiction problem by a lojban-esque temporary assignment of pronoun variants to antecedents. 

"People do have opinions."

"Oh good. What are the big things people disagree about there?"

"Why is that good?"

"Because if everyone agreed about everything, then either that would be because there was something stopping people from having different opinions, which is usually bad, or it would mean people in your timeline were very psychologically different from people here and that would make my job really hard in a way that would probably be unpleasant for you."

"Unpleasant?"

"If you're really different from everyone I know I might accidentally give you bad advice! And you would probably just ignore it if it was obviously stupid, but I might give you subtly bad advice and you might take it and end up wasting your time."

"...ah."

"What did you think was going to be the problem?"

Shrug.

"Anyway, that was a tangent, what sort of political arguments does Ibyabek have?"

"Do opinions always mean arguments, here?"

"No, not always. Some things everyone agrees on the facts and it's just a matter of what people would prefer. Other times people disagree on the facts and try to persuade each other. It needn't be acrimonious and often isn't."

Kyeo doesn't say anything.

"Am I bothering you in a way you don't want to explain again?"

"I'm fine."

"Oh, okay. So what's political discussion like on Ibyabek?"

"People talk about... the Glorious Leader's decisions, and who will succeed him, and - what the local governors are likely to do - and about foreign planets, sometimes -"

"Sounds like a similar set of things, yeah. How do you pick the leader and the governors?" they ask, climbing into a nearby tree and then jumping down.

"The Glorious Leader is elected by popular vote and then appoints people to all the lesser positions."

"How many people usually run? Can the winner usually fill all the other positions with the people who ran against them or do they have to go out and find more people?"

"The last election was before I was born," says Kyeo.