THIS IS NOT OBVIOUSLY A STABLE EQUILIBRIUM.

"...did this system possibly work better when Aroden was alive and now it's getting a bit worse every year, or something like that?"

"I mean, lots of things were better when Aroden was alive, but we're still holding our own at the Worldwound, and in no sense getting worse at that. I think perhaps your view of human nature is too pessimistic. Most people will do the right thing, given guidance and the opportunity."

"You're not guarding against randomly selected people, you're guarding against that fraction of people who have the greatest desire and the incentive to try to get promoted to management and then break your system for the rewards."

"If I asked what makes your system robust against bad actors attracted by the unguarded rewards of abuse of power, is there any chance that you'd have a neatly argued standard document explaining the system design, or that you could lecture on it from memory?"

"There are not rewards for command roles in Lastwall! People take them out of duty. If you were selfish you would not benefit from having one."

"I am... probably going to have to come back to that concept later."

"For the record, that's not even slightly how we do it in dath ilan.  Which, I am beginning to suspect, is not actually whatever weird thing is called here 'Lawful Good', and is instead well-structured according to a mathematical view of reality and full of altruistic people doing altruistic things."

"We would be very interested in learning what dath ilan does; if it might aid us in the battle against Abaddon and the Abyss, that would be worth a great deal of effort. But perhaps that is not an immediate concern."

"Your society sounds sufficiently alien that I cannot easily see how to reorganize it, and the same is true of Cheliax, really.  I will, for now, focus on such matters as scaling spellsilver production, and possibly when I know this place better we can see about lesser anti-demon weapons.  I would expect those to just work, in a way that our structures of governance might not, perhaps, just work."

"Should there be an urgent emergency or opportunity requiring a giant explosion, let me know.  If that sort of thing comes up in a way where it needs action on the scale of minutes, try to give me a week's notice that this is something that is true, so we can set up oaths and magitech and also I am not especially certain that my idea works at all."

"Aside from that, I think I should go on doing as I've been doing in Cheliax; the early steps of the technology ladder have a lot in common no matter where you're aiming for later.  If you wanted to create lesser anti-demon weapons, the first thing you would do, in fact, is figure out how to make a lot of acid, which happens to also be the thing you do for scaling spellsilver production."

"Were there things you wanted to say to me, or inquire about from me?  I've been doing a lot of questioning myself and not really giving you a turn, I notice."

"I am deeply curious about your world, but I do not expect that satisfying my curiosity uses your time well. We also think you should go on doing as you have been doing in Cheliax, though should you come to conclude that Chelish governance is not who you wish to contract with - because they're Evil or for any other reason - the Church of Iomedae would be happy to take you in. Our Church in Ostenso is inside the interdiction zone that protects you against direct divine interference, even."

"I have to say, neither Lastwall nor Cheliax have been asking me nearly as many questions as a visitor would be asked in dath ilan.  I wonder if I would've gotten more of those in the kind of country called here Chaotic.  I increasingly suspect that both 'Lawful' and 'Chaotic' are just different fragments of math-about-thinking, and dath ilan is neither of those things or both."

"You've answered some of my questions and I would trade you some answers in a friendly way that doesn't cancel out much informal political capital, if there's anything you're just curious about."

"What is dath ilan like? If a person is injured in an accident and can no longer work, what happens to them? If a child is orphaned, what happens to them?"

Serious injuries are rare in Civilization.  Serious injuries that eliminate your ability to work are even rarer; there's a lot of thinky work, and anything that damages your ability to think usually leads to the horrified victim electing to go straight into cryonic suspension.  Insuring against rare bad outcomes is cheap.  Keltham's annual insurance premium against that and a lot of other stuff was one four-hour workday's wages.

That said, five percent of the population ends up just... not fitting into Civilization.  They find the work that Civilization offers unpleasant enough and the standard rewards not really fun enough; they'd just as soon not work and not get those rewards.

The planet of dath ilan is something that nobody out of dath ilan created.  Land on which to put houses, land in which to mine metal ores - people who don't want to work have as much prior claim on those resources as people who do.  And if the rest of Civilization hasn't presented you with anything you really want to participate in, if your parents decided to marry some other person who was similarly weird to themselves and roll the dice on the dangers of assortative mating producing weird neurotypes, there is some logic by which you might hold yourself injured by having been brought into a world like that, being the person that you are.  The policy prediction markets, in fact, are targeting at most five percent people going to Quiet Cities, as was voted-upon; which means that the people who do end up going Quiet are persons that in some sense Civilization has elected to sacrifice in that way, as the cost of other people doing more what they want, and other policies not being more tightly constrained.  The Quiet Cities are cheap; someone's moral share of all the rents on all the lands is sufficient to insure against their possible lifelong need for food and shelter and clothing, there.

The gotcha is that you cannot have kids, and then go to a Quiet City; when you have children, the right to be supported by Civilization passes out of you and to them.  They can go to a Quiet City, you can't.  If you're not very confident in your ability to support yourself and explicitly pay insurance premiums, you're definitely not properly confident in your ability to support kids.

Anyone, always, no matter who they are, or what they have done, or what else has happened, has the absolute right to go into cryonic preservation and pick things up again in the Future.

If both parents die and didn't earlier find anyone who seemed like a great fit to take over their kid - and who actually wanted a Sudden Extra Child in that event - the right to raise that child goes up for sale to some fairly competitive bidding among people who want to raise a child but don't want the Moral Responsibility of Creating a Counterfactual Child.  Obviously a subsidized prediction market needs to forecast that the child will end up okay with those parents before they're allowed to bid.

Well, that doesn't seem very compassionate but it does seem like it might protect against many bad outcomes all the same.

Inquiring minds desire to know what is more compassionate than that.  Civilization thought it was going pretty hard on the compassion.

....well, if someone has children and also can't work, Lastwall would help as best it could to feed and shelter them, and if a child is without a home then even people who don't want children would do their best to ensure the child has one, because they are Good. 

Rogue actor has twenty kids that Lastwall has to support, with no personal consequences to them.  Turns out that's heritable, all their kids have twenty kids.  ?

Keltham can see the Lawful Good case for taking in children you didn't really want, in a world where there's too many kids like that, and not enough people who want kids to bid on them.  Civilization's compassion in this regard is that it got rich enough for that to stop happening.  Probably some of the people working on improving metal refining were like 'We must make our world richer, so that there will be fewer orphans, and more people with enough extra wealth that they could raise orphans if they wanted to!' and then that totally worked, good for them.  Keltham's going to do the same thing in order to get rich, but more as a moral point in favor of Evil than one against Good.  He can respect the Good thing.

It's true that some people recklessly go around impregnating and abandoning women. Lastwall might send them to prison for that, but wouldn't stop providing them with food. And the tendency turns out not to be that heritable, fortunately; most children created by such a father aspire to be different from him.

Maybe it's not that heritable on average if you only run the process for one generation.  Keep it up and you'll start to have difficulties; you'll come across cases that are heritable.  Some of the kids born that way will marry each other.

Keltham is confused about why you'd lock people up and provide them with food, instead of shrugging and telling them that if they're hungry Heaven is like right there.

Well, often young men are idiots, and if they spend ten years in prison doing hard labor then they grow out of it and can contribute to society, which seems much better than denying them the opportunity, though of course you kill them if they prefer that. 

It hadn't even occurred to Keltham that they wouldn't be allowed to die if they wanted, but good.

Young men aren't idiots in dath ilan because if they want to know which actions have which consequences they can always subsidize a prediction market about that.

...fascinating. Young men everywhere in Golarion are often idiots. But drunken brawling, or rape, or vandalism, are all crimes that practically vanish by middle age, so if you just keep people out of trouble until they're older they're entirely redeemable.

Right then.  Never mind.  Keltham apologizes for criticizing anything you've managed to build out of component parts like that.  Keltham is sure that Lastwall would be a lovely Lawful Good place if it had Lawful Good citizens to work with.

Shall they wrap up?