So!  A few decades ago - if the history books Keltham has read are not all fake - Governance, in whatever form it existed in that time, said that it needed to do something incredibly suspicious-looking and not explain why.  Whatever Civilization then existed said, roughly, 'okay, fine, but we're going to go to some extreme lengths to try to make sure you can't benefit from doing that for bad reasons'.  The entire current Government got fired and barred from politics permanently.  Then literally everyone old enough to do correct extended arithmetic, participated in the equivalent of an enormous public coinspin, using calculations carried out by hand on paper and transmitted from person to person by in-person handoff, carrying out a mathematical process whose mathematical properties any adult could verify.  No machines were used, no instant-communication devices, because you couldn't trust the machine-makers to not be in the Dark Conspiracy, any such machines would be a single vulnerable point for the Dark Conspiracy to attack.

This algorithm selected new random leaders from among everybody who wanted to be eligible for the new project in charge of rebooting Governance from scratch.  Any nonrandom or popularity-based election process might be something a pre-existing Conspiracy could get control of and exploit - not by faking the results, but by steering people to vote for Conspiracy candidates.

In a 'paper-cryptographic_protocol' like that, you and your trusted friends could theoretically be inside a bubble-surface formed of all of your friends' friends who are all in the Conspiracy and working together to fake all of your inputs and discard all of your outputs.  But from most people's perspective this should be unlikely; the Conspiracy would need to include all of your friends that you randomly selected, or all of your randomly selected friends would need to have all of their randomly-selected friends in the Conspiracy.

You can basically prove, using a protocol like this, that the only way for the Conspiracy to fake your results selecting the interim political leadership, is if you and all of your friends are inside an enclosed bubble that the Conspiracy runs.  And this is possible but not likely.

The only technology you need to run this process is paper, ink, writing, and math that 95% of dath ilani adults can understand.

A society should be able to do that long before it can build really powerful nonmagical weapons of the sort that a few people could use to threaten the rest of the world into submission, even in a Golarion-like world of people who submitted to threats.

So - when weapons like that are invented - a nonmagical society should already have a trustworthy Government in place to handle the possibilities implied by those weapons.  If they're not already very sure their Government isn't a Dark Conspiracy, they can reboot the government using a 'paper-cryptographic_protocol' before they let the government build any weapons like that.

And before scalable weapons are invented, the nonmagical citizens can directly outfight a nonmagical military, just by outnumbering it, because the military can't just use bigger and bigger weapons to fight back.

Keltham realizes they've grown up in Golarion where governments are terrible, but this is a phenomenon produced by the existence and misuse of magic that hugely concentrates military power into a few people, not something you should expect to see in nonmagical worlds like Keltham's.

Why would a nonmagical world put up with being openly ruled by grimdark criminal-sociopaths, if they could collectively outfight their rulers?

And if a nonmagical world couldn't arrive at justified confidence of its Governance not being a giant hidden Dark Conspiracy, why wouldn't it just reboot its Governance using randomly selected volunteers and a 'paper-cryptographic_protocol'?

This argument seems like it should be valid at every historical point up to the invention of scalable weapons.  And obviously you would, at that point, reboot Governance just to be sure!

Keltham does admit that the main hole in this entire argument is sort of obviously the Keepers, who can't clearly be rebooted in the same way as Governance, because you can't just appoint random people to be able to do the sort of things that Keepers do.  At least in theory Keepers aren't allowed live weapons, except under direct Government supervision checked by randomized volunteers, because, like, super obvious precautions yo.  But the Keepers have talk-control, and maybe the Meta-Keepers aren't being honest about training Governance upper echelons to resist talk-control.  If that's true, it's not something you can fix by rebooting Governance.

So, yeah, if Keltham's world is run by a secret Dark Conspiracy it's sort of obviously the Keepers, and they're doing it by repeatedly talk-controlling all the new leaders who get delegated.

Call it 2%.

Because if they were actually doing that, they wouldn't just WARN PEOPLE that talk-control was a THING.

YES even taking into account that maybe that's exactly what they want you to think.  They still wouldn't just TELL YOU.  It's like how, if the Chelish Dark Conspiracy orchestrated the whole weird thing with Asmodia to try to scare Keltham out of ever asking to try on an artifact headband, they would actually just not tell Keltham about intelligence headbands being a thing in the first place.

In the dath ilan being run by Hypothetical Corrupted Keepers, the rest of the world wouldn't know that Law was a thing.  It would be run by a secret elite of Law-users.  Everybody else would just, like, not know any math.  Or only know about math as something you could use for engineering bridges, and not know that some kinds of math could be used to organize your thoughts better.  Or if they did have any concept of Law, they'd be introduced only to some corrupted version of decision theory which claimed that the Lawful thing to do was give in to threats and accept offers of 1 copper piece in the Ultimatum Game and not bother to vote in elections.  And preprogrammed with some sort of canned reply to anybody who presented them with better decision theory, about how getting higher payoffs in dilemmas was like totally not what decision theory was really about, and only selecting particular decisions a particular way was truly Lawful even if agents like that systematically and predictably-in-advance got lower payoffs... okay, maybe this part isn't so plausible as a consistent world.

"Talk-control could work better on people who know Keepers can do talk-control, somehow."

"The Keepers could have some form of mind-control that isn't like the one they're showing you, working by a totally different method.  Like magic.  And what they're showing you is so that, if anybody else discovers the real magic of dath ilan, people say 'oh that must be talk-control' and alert a Keeper."

"Or," Meritxell said, "there could be people in on the Conspiracy who'd be uncomfortable with hiding the entire concept of talk-control, but are willing to agree to various uses of it so long as they aren't lying about the fact Keepers can do that."

"Or the talk control thing could have been publicized before the Conspiracy took hold."

"It's definitely not that last one, the Keepers could just announce that knowing about talk-control had turned 'socially-infohazardous'* and have the knowledge not get passed down to the next generation."

(*)  Social-infohazard lit. 'exfohazard':  Information that conveys ordinary positive advantage to individuals who know it, but has net negative value to society because of how that knowledge affects people around them.  E.g., exact knowledge of how to construct scalable weaponry cheaply would be an ordinary advantage to an individual who knew it, but disadvantageous to everyone to have everyone know.  Strongly distinguished from the much weirder case of 'individual-infohazards', like spoilers for a movie you were eagerly anticipating and haven't watched yet.

How can you describe THAT MUCH POWER and be sure no one is misusing it!!!!!! The upsetting thing is that for all she knows maybe dath ilani really are like that!!

And if there are, per Meritxell, people within the Conspiracy who are only okay with talk-control being used for restricted purposes, so long as Civilization in general is told and warned about it existing... uh, that sounds exactly like how the Keepers are supposed to be?  Like, that's not even a hidden Non-Dark Conspiracy, that's... just what the Keepers are supposed to regularly do?  Hide dangerous knowledge and only use it for sufficiently important purposes?

Obviously there ought to be somebody whose job it is to do that!  Why would they need to hide in a sensible society that recognized the reason for their existence?  They could just go out in the open and be like 'yo we're the Keepers, anybody who would otherwise need to start a conspiracy to hide dangerous information for good reasons and only use it well and properly can just come to us instead, we'll handle it for you and probably give you a substantial reporting bonus'.  That's exactly what the Keepers are.  They're the Non-Dark Conspiracy.  A world only needs one of those; two of them would just get in each other's way.

...right but if they're also doing some things Keltham wouldn't approve of, but that they think is acceptable, that'd look exactly like this, right.

He's sure the Keepers are doing some things Keltham wouldn't approve of?  The question is whether they're knowingly doing things that Civilization in aggregate wouldn't approve of, or that practically nobody in Civilization at large would approve of, even if they knew everything else the Keepers knew and could reason as clearly as Keepers could.

And if the Keepers make a habit of doing that, and secretly run everything to cover that up, the rest of Civilization shouldn't be, like... teaching children how to coordinate against Dark Conspiracies and break out of false realities and fight the Hypothetical Corrupted Governance Military?

Yeah, that does seem like a weird thing for them to do.

So, 2%. 

The chance that Cheliax has some kind of Dark Conspiracy going on is a lot higher than that, Gregoria says dryly.

Ione and Carissa did have some persuasive arguments, though, about talk-control working better if people know it exists - that's already known to be true for a lesser case of talk-control called 'hypnosis', though that only works on very few people, which is sad because it's so fascinating and so useful for the few people who are 'hypnotizable' - or talk-control actually being a cover for some other form of magic.

Even taking that into account, though... basically Keltham's brain is reporting that it's not convinced here.  Dath ilan is too nice of a place to live, even for weird people like Keltham who disagree with it.  Civilization trains its children too thoroughly to be able to fight Dark Conspiracies and Hypothetical Corrupted Governance.  Maybe call it 2.5% instead of 2% pending consideration of some of the points raised here.

Cheliax obviously seems like it'd have some Dark Conspiracies.  Heck, dath ilan probably has some Dark Conspiracies.  The question is whether those Dark Conspiracies are running everything unbeknownst to Abrogail Thrune or Aspexia Rugatonn or Contessa Lrilatha.

...which would be a lot more likely if tropes, in fact.  So, good thing it's currently looking like no tropes.

No tropes seems really great. ...does saying that bring down the tropes.

Only if they exist.

Anyways Keltham should get back to his lecture on Governance.

Keltham was supposed to start by telling them all to use their presumably-Civilization-trained skill of 'perspective-taking-of-ignorance' to envision a hypothetical world where nothing resembling Coordination had started to happen yet.  Since, after all, you wouldn't want your thoughts about the best possible forms of Civilization to 'cognitively-anchor' on what already existed.

You can imagine starting in a world where all the same stuff and technology from present Civilization exists, since the question faced is what form of Governance is best-suited to a world like that one.  Alternatively, imagine an alternative form of the exercise involving people fresh-born into a fresh world where nothing has yet been built, and everybody's just wandering around over a grassy plain.

Either way, you should assume that everybody knows all about decision theory and cooperation-defection dilemmas.  The question being asked is not 'What form of Governance would we invent if we were stupid?'

Civilization could then begin - maybe it wouldn't actually happen exactly that way, but it is nonetheless said as though in stories - Civilization could then begin again, when people envisioned running out of stored food a couple of years later.  Standing around all these beautiful complicated machines that people remembered how to operate, but required multiple people working together to operate, which nobody was yet incentivized to operate.

Or Civilization could begin for the first time, when the Hypothetical Newly-Created Educated People imagined trying to build shelters for themselves, or sow food-plants to grow; and thought to themselves that there would be less point in doing that, if others would just move into the shelters as soon as they walked away, or eat the crops that they had sown.

And people then would say to themselves, "What if we tried something else which is not that?"

It begins with the idea of coordinating at all, co-operation, simultaneous action, that two people can work a machine that requires two people to operate.

It begins with the Hypothetical Newly-Created Educated People simultaneously hunting a large prey animal, a stag perhaps, that requires multiple hunters to bring it down relatively safely.

It begins with multiple individuals aggregating as if into a larger compound agent - a macroagent which can choose among all its available compound actions in the cross-product of the action space, instead of individuals choosing as if in isolation and expecting others to do the same.  There is then, of course, the problem of Lawfully dividing the gains, when the macro-agent dissolves back into individuals to individually consume those gains; but this is a matter of Law, and the people do remember Law.

It continues into a new problem, the problem of motivating such socially-useful actions as 'producing food', for if nobody does this, soon nobody will eat.

You can imagine lesser solutions, collective farming of collectively guarded fields, monitors on hard work and rewards of food access.  But these are simultaneously too 'simplistic' and 'overcomplicated', the very opposite of an 'elegant-solution'.  People can work harder, invest more effort, for a usually 'monotonically-increasing' reward, a function operated directly by the Environment, by 'physical-law'.  There just needs to be some system whereby, when people work, they are themselves the ones to benefit from it.

But this requires a far more complicated form of coordinated action, something that 'bounded-agents'  lack the computational power to consider as a giant macroaction of their 'collective-agent'.  The optimal macrostrategy must be lossily projected down into simplified mental rules for individuals, a notion of imaginary-ownership-tagging: if one person sows food-plants within a field, and waters them and protects them, everybody around them will behave as if the resulting food-crop is tagged with an imaginary pointer to that person, saying that the food may be consumed by them alone.  Or only consumed by those others the food's 'owner' designates, at their own decision... that seems like it should obviously be an option built into the system too...

And once you create an imaginary structure of coordinated action that elegantly-complicated, the consequences and further-required-features inevitably explode; the explosion that results is Civilization's basic form nearly in toto.

People could often benefit from other people doing various things for them, but they must of course do something for the other in exchange.  If things have socially-constructed tags pointing to people, who alone may use or consume those things, why not let people announce that the pointer now points to someone else?  That's one way of doing something in return, for somebody who did some task for you, that was easier for them than for you.

If fields can be owned and an owned field produces owned produce in the future, why not let people announce that some of the future produce can point to some other owner?

Often the announcements of changed imaginary ownership are meant to be traded, executed one in exchange for another.  Then a new version and feature-expansion of the system can eliminate the uncertainty about whether the other will announce their bargained ownership change, after you announce yours: imaginary contracts, that molecularize the atomic actions into a transaction that executes simultaneously on both sides, only after both sides announce the same contract.

Do people want to work on some larger endeavor - specialize in different aspects of farming, and collectively challenge a larger farm?  Let the tags, in the eyes of society, point to persistent imaginary constructs, specified in some contract specification language; a corporation is one such persistent contract.

Let this system expand, let people use it enough, and there will predictably come a point where there aren't lots of untagged resources nearby for somebody to tag in society's eyes.

Once there are not plenty of new plots of land to tag and farm, people may indeed begin to ask, 'Why should this land be owned by them and not me?'

Because they did some work on that land?  If that's the rule, then won't people who foresee the predictable scarcity later, run around trying to plow small shallow furrows through every potential field within the reach of running, trying to tag as much land as pointing to themselves as possible?

And when all that land has been used up, wouldn't the people who were slower runners and didn't end up with any land - wouldn't new children born into this world, for that matter - ask themselves and perhaps ask out loud:

"If this elaborate imaginary social construct doesn't offer me any benefits for going along with the pretense - if the system says that little or nothing has an imaginary tag pointing to me - then in what sense is this even coordination, from my perspective?  Why would I cooperate in the coordinated rule of not eating things tagged as pointing to others, if the result is that there's nothing for me to eat?  Where's my fair share of the rewards for playing along with this pretend game, for cooperating with what this imaginary tagging system says is my part and my action in it?"

This concept, incidentally, took some arguments to persuade into tiny Keltham, when he was first hearing about all this.  Tiny Keltham had a very strong instinctive sense that objects just were owned by people, and that what made a system fair and right was entirely that only the people who owned objects could do anything with them or transfer them to other people.

It was hard for tiny Keltham, at first, to see past his instinctive suspicion that people asking 'What's my reward for cooperating with this system?' were about to use that as an excuse to storm onto his hypothetical farm and eat his food that he'd worked to produce, and call that their share, without doing any work themselves.

Older children's attempted arguments about 'put yourself into that other person's shoes' repeatedly failed on Keltham, who kept replying that he wouldn't take anybody else's stuff period.

But tiny Keltham was eventually persuaded - by a Watcher, then, not by an older child - by the argument that it is an internally-consistent imaginary tagging system to say that some single person Elzbeth owns all the land in the world.  Everybody else has to work those lands and give Elzbeth a share of anything that grows there, since by default it would just end up tagged as hers, unless they agree to pay half their gains to her.

The question then becomes, why should anybody else except Elzbeth play along with this imaginary system, once it gets to that point?  Why shouldn't everyone who isn't Elzbeth, all just wake up out of this bad dream, and do something else which is not that?

Keltham asked if maybe the system had started out with everybody owning an equal amount of land, but Elzbeth had been a really clever asset-trader and ended up owning everything in the world after a series of voluntary transactions; in which case it seemed to him that fair was fair.

The Watcher told Keltham that, even if the last generation had gotten the world into that state through a series of voluntary transactions, the children born into it might look around and see that no land was tagged to them, that everything was tagged to Elzbeth.  They would ask what they were receiving in exchange for playing along with that particular delusion, and why they should not imagine some other tagging system instead, in which their coordinated action in playing along would actually receive any reciprocal benefit or reward.

And tiny Keltham growled and stomped around for a while, but finally conceded that, fine, the pointers were imaginary and yes it took more than just a consistent tagging system running on strictly voluntary transactions to make the whole thing be fair or right.  The elegant core structure was necessary-but-not-sufficient.

The unimproved land, the raw resources, these things must be tagged with ownership for the owners to have an incentive to improve them.  It doesn't mean that this tagging need be considered as free to the new owner.

Discard the obvious-first-solution-that-is-wrong of charging somebody an amount of food or other worked goods, to tag previously untagged land, and redistributing those payments equally among everyone in the world.  Even leaving aside the question of how that system initially starts farming anything at all, it inevitably arrives at a point where there's no untagged land left or it's impossibly expensive.  Whereupon the next generation of children, being born with no land tagged to them and no payments for newly bought land coming in, will again begin to ask, "Why should I play along with this imaginary arrangement at all; where's my payoff for coordinating my action with yours?"

More sensible then to regard people as renting land and other raw-resource sources, at their unimproved price of course, but still an unimproved price set by competitive bidding - albeit perhaps for long-term leases, etcetera.

When you are born, you conceptually acquire a share in this whole system -