"Okay, but... what makes a country Lawful Good if... the people running it without asking anyone else's opinion are neither Lawful nor Good?"

"- maybe it would be useful to compare a specific single Lawful Good country to a specific single country of the other alignments? Pick one of Mendev or Lastwall so Conspiracy Carissa would've had to prepare two different sets of lies, and one other country I've mentioned for the same reason?"

"I've decided I'm not actually doing Conspiracy reasoning while in bed with you, I mean, I'll be processing your own statements offline while I'm playing this with Asmodia or Maillol, but not right now."

"This isn't Conspiracy checking, it's consistency checking.  All the - words and definitions are still not matching up with each other.  But, uh, Lastwall versus Absalom?"

"Lastwall is a former province of Taldor. It was founded in the war against the necromancer Tar-Baphon, a thousand years ago, the war in which Iomedae ascended. It was founded as a military outpost of Taldor to hold back the surrounding monsters and threats to civilization in Ustalav and the Hold of Belkzen. At first, people were only sent there if they were committed to joining and serving in the military orders that would risk their own lives to hold that land for Civilization. So, Lawful Good. The churches established there doing - functions like healing - were the churches of the Lawful Good gods, mostly. 

Of course, that was a thousand years ago, and people had children in Lastwall, and Taldor went through a bunch of internal reorganizations and isn't very friendly to Lastwall anymore, and Lastwall's not getting money from elsewhere and its people can't easily go settle elsewhere but they bravely solder on with universal conscription for the greater Good, and gradually a class of elites entrenches itself because that's - how things happen, rich people who have ways to get away with things, and whose support is needed to keep paying for Civilization, get exceptions, because otherwise who would keep the troops armored and armed? And then the Worldwound opened, and Lastwall got more extreme, because the whole future of life on Golarion was under threat, and conscripted more people for longer, and needed more money and was willing to negotiate exceptions for more people who had money. 

I don't know which if any of those might've been the missing piece, or if it's something else that's confusing?"

"Where does the earning power of the nobles come from - why do they have the money that the country needs to arm its soldiers?  Why are people being universally conscripted if most of the military power is focused in the most powerful wizards and Lawful Good clerics?"

Asmodia is trying to predict Keltham's questions before he asks them, and she's failing, and only the fact that Carissa Sevar has assumed full command, steering, and responsibility is preventing Asmodia from going into a complete state of panic.  Well.  A more complete state of panic.

Keltham is - she can only get part of it, the process he's using, they should have gotten in an eighth-circle for this, Detect Thoughts would be so useful right now - or not, if his thoughts are just leaping directly there, Law become intuition without words - but Keltham is - he's asking questions of 'why is it like that' and he thinks in, concentrations of money?  Concentrations of power?  Any time you point out a concentration to him, he asks why, because it's not concentrated like that in Civilization, or maybe he just expects concentrated anything to be concentrated for a reason?  Or he notices and remembers when you tell him that power is concentrated in clerics and wizards, and then he expects conscription to be concentrated too.  Like the clouds of probability she's been visualizing, but - clouds of money, power, distributed over a country, arranged by different Laws -

"I know a lot more about the second question than the first one. Firstly, you need a number of people doing military operations for every one directly stabbing demons with sharp sticks or hitting them with spells. You need people providing healing, armor, weapons, communications, bringing food and water to the front lines, digging fortifications, guarding the camps. You can have very small strike forces of four or five powerful spellcasters with no logistics network behind them, doing a single day of operations and then teleporting to safety at the end of it, but if you're moving any real numbers of troops or if you want to hold a position you generally want ten people who do all that work for every one who is directly fighting. Secondly, the way you get a few powerful casters is by having lots and lots of weak casters try to fight. Some of them die, some of them stall out, some of them make it; Cheliax does that too, though without conscription. Lastwall doesn't care if people die, except insofar as they are weaker for it; Heaven is understood to be nicer than this world anyway. So sending off a hundred conscripts one of which will return as a powerful spellcaster and the rest of whom will die is a perfectly good deal.

For earning power - foreign connections, mostly? The younger son of a noble in Taldor has lots of money but no title, so he decides to go to Lastwall and lead a little soirée into Ustalav, and if it succeeds, then he's got some land, and can rent it to people, and can buy respectability and exemptions from the laws. And if it fails then his money is inherited by his younger brother who can have his own try."

"Illegal to address a noble with insufficient - deference - I'm not really able to visualize what that is, but - it does sound like it'd have to be an explicit regulation?  Again, how does that square up with a country being Lawful Good?"

"Well, they're structured as a military, and everyone is in the military, and the nobles are officers, and in any military it's against regulations to address a superior officer in an insubordinate manner, that's true in modern Cheliax also, the difference in modern Cheliax is that not everyone is in the military and if you're not then obviously military regulations don't apply to you.

But if, while I was in the army, my superior had walked by and I'd said 'hey, Alex, looks like you had too much to drink last night', I'd have been whipped, because there is a regulation about that which I agreed to when I joined in the first place."

"...why, though?  I assume it's not - a sex thing, this isn't something that applies to masochists only?"

" - no? It's a discipline thing, people break regulations less if you whip people when they break regulations."

"I suppose this would also be true in Civilization, in the sense that thirty seconds later there would be no more regulations and everybody would be gathering around trying to reconstruct the principles of Governance from scratch."

"Why is there a regulation against telling your manager they've had... too much to drink?  You're going to have to parse that line too."

"- had too much to drink is, consumed a lot of mind-altering substances recreationally, and is still affected by them. The regulation is against addressing your superior in a not-deferential tone, and by their name, and on a matter you have not been asked to provide commentary on."

"I think I'm basically going to fall back on the three-year-old strategy of learning, here, which seems right and proper to somebody at my current level of competence and confusion."

"Why?"

"People have tried lots of different ways to run militaries. It is one of the areas where I think Golarion is actually most - uh, the reasons for things will be better with militaries than with most places? Because armies that have bad policies lose and so having better ones is easy to check and highly motivated. And one of the things that is understood to be important for running a military is discipline, the strong expectation that your soldiers will obey orders, even orders that they don't understand, even orders that will get them killed. A lot of maneuvers only work if all the soldiers do exactly what they're told. And part of having a disciplined military is having rules about how you address superior officers and how you raise complaints when you have them, and about discouraging - a failure mode where your soldiers are constantly complaining about and mocking their superiors and as a result arrive at mutual knowledge that they won't necessarily listen to orders.

I assume that dath ilan if they had this problem would just say, well your soldiers will only arrive at mutual knowledge if it's good that they do that because their commander is genuinely bad, but in Golarion, they will arrive in that state approximately no matter what, and then you'll lose the war, and the commander probably was bad but the demons are literally going to eat us all."

"Well, you're getting better at anticipating some dath ilan perspectives, at least."

"Why do Golarion soldiers arrive in that state no matter what?"

" - because complaining is lots easier than noticing whether the complaining is justified, and no one wants to say to their complaining friend 'actually I think the thing you're complaining about is fine' so you only hear the complaining and then everyone changes their minds off the fact everyone else believes the orders are unreasonable, even if they haven't themselves seen direct reason to think that. You're going to say dath ilani don't do that and that's good for them, Golarion people do do that."

"Hypothetically, what happens if we take a room full of Golarion soldiers, diagram out for them exactly how they're going to arrive in this erroneous state of mind, and ask them to do something else which is not that."

"They'd maybe try for a week and then they'd fall into the normal failure mode. And maybe accuse people they don't like of it."

"And the soldiers don't reason that, if they're being told they're not allowed to communicate with each other about how their manager is on mind-altering substances and that's a bad idea, probably everybody else is thinking it, but not able to say it.  Everybody thinks it's just themselves thinking that.  They're Intelligence 10 and that's too low to imagine what somebody else is thinking if they haven't said it out loud."

" - not quite that far? But they don't know for sure if anyone else is thinking it and they do know everyone else is still following orders."

"And anybody who says out loud, 'Hey, I bet all of us are thinking what each of us are thinking' is - sent on to Heaven?  Yanked out of the regular army and sent off to wizard lessons so they can be one of the better-paid military elite?"

"I don't know how Lastwall does it. In modern Cheliax your superiors would ask you what you meant by that and you would say 'I was trying to cause there to be mutual knowledge that we don't think highly of our commander without technically violating the regulation against saying that' and they would rewrite the regulation to include that, if it somehow didn't already. And maybe put you somewhere where that kind of cleverness is an asset, it depends."

"...my understanding of this remains at the level where everything seems to be put together entirely out of reasoning errors, and I don't know which reasoning errors people are supposed to make or not make.  If you told me that Lawful Good countries incinerated anybody wearing a blue hat, that would be around as compatible with my current state of knowledge as anything else you're saying."

"I guess you might as well go on describing that world and give up on describing why."

"Okay. Sorry. Back to Cheliax. It's a place where merchants who are good at what they do can lead prosperous lives, as long as they are respectful of people who have more legal importance than them, and don't get themselves embroiled in government scheming. There is a lot of government scheming. Cheliax changed Kings four times in my mother's life. Everyone who was King was terrified of being assassinated in a fashion that didn't leave them resurrectable, and so they'd do harsh and arbitrary things that seemed to them to make it less likely they'd be assassinated. It was rumored they used mind control a lot. It was impossible to know if that was true, or really what was true in general about the people in power, but people didn't mind, because it was possible to know - that the ports were growing, that foreign invasions weren't likely. There being lots of scheming for power only really matters to most people when two contestants go to a proper war about it, in which cities are destroyed and tens of thousands of people die."