"And - if there is a wrong you cannot right, and should not really spend much effort towards righting, it is a difficult virtue to go around feeling it anyway, and checking routinely if it's in fact true that you cannot right it."

"I think it's - wise, in a sense - for people to not routinely check things like that, but a mistake, and a common one, to not check when one's circumstances change significantly."

"I wonder if you could set up a holiday or something for the purpose of reflection on that."

"Seems like a good idea, if by 'you' you mean yourself. I don't think I'm well-positioned to found holidays."

"I am sure if you set your mind to it you could found holidays. Possibly not while obeying your sensibilities about religions being suspect."

"I could take over a country and declare some civic festivals, which is a little bit similar. But I'd have to take over a country first, and I assume you don't want to encourage me in that."

"Well, I don't know, how do you propose to know and abide by the will of its people?"

"Some would tell you I'd use entirely too much mindreading to learn the people's will and then disregard it entirely. As for what I'd actually do -" Élie would probably know better than she does. "I suppose following this conversation I might have them elect a council of advisors. Or maybe I would send agents into the cities and the countryside to do altogether too much mindreading, if the people don't seem to believe in their elected councilors conveying all their concerns... Though I might disregard the will of the people I was ruling if it seemed like they wanted bad things. Whether this is a virtue or a vice seems to still be up for debate."

"I mean, I assume Elie too disregards the will of the people if the people are Asmodeans."

"Vanishingly few people want to be Asmodeans when they have any choice in the matter, which I think is really a rather significant point."

Élie can with some effort conceal his emotions, though probably not from Iomedae, and in any case he's not trying to. He's irritated. 

"Perhaps the Asmodean state doesn't function as I imagined it. We've considered, though, taking Nidal, if we have the resources. As far as I can tell, many of the people of Nidal are through thousands of years of work on Zon-Kuthon's part persuaded that torment and suffering are the highest forms of art and meaning. Do you actually think that, given that, it's wrong to try to engineer a different sort of society in Nidal, if one could pull it off?"

"I'm very curious how you did imagine it functioning. Of course Cheliax is no Nidal, but almost everyone in it has lived their whole lives under Asmodean rule, and none of them are clamoring to have it back. Wary of the new regime, certainly; jealous of their privileges under the old, sometimes. But suppressing the church itself – which we did, if you want to call me a hypocrite – was remarkably easy, in the end."

"I would have expected Asmodeus to try to accomplish something more like Nidal, but it wouldn't be surprising if that takes longer to achieve than He had, or is more expensive than He was willing to pay for. Was it in fact decisive for you that people didn't want the church back? If they had, would you have considered that - a preference they had every right to have their government fulfill?"

"That's a good question! I'd consider it essential that they, and their children, and their children's children so on in perpetuity have access to accurate information about the nature of Hell and Asmodeus's plans for them, which is itself of course incompatible with an Asmodeanism. As it is, I don't think the church should be legal – but that's largely because no sane person with full knowledge would choose it, so they've no choice but to use force where they can and lies where they can't. We needn't imagine that people left to their own devices make arbitrarily terrible decisions. In my experience, they tend to know their own interests better than anyone else."

Iomedae is, at this point, exasperated with Elie. She spent a while thinking about how to do an offensive against Nidal. It has been in Zon-Kuthon's grip for ten thousand years. Through mundane means, magical means, probably some outright breeding of the population for compliance and a tolerance for pain, and selective immortality for those favored of regime, Zon-Kuthon achieved a regime that seems genuinely in many cases in favor of suffering. It is a hard case if you believe that peoples' stated preferences should be the basis for government, but it's not a maliciously engineered one; Nidal is really right there and really poses the puzzle. One can be fundamentally an optimist about human nature and still find oneself in a situation where gods have successfully pruned it in their desired directions. 

It would be very stupid to argue this point with an ally she needs. She leans back and lets Alfirin do it instead.

"I think it does matter to me that Asmodeus did not achieve what Zon-Kuthon did. It seems to me as though ending the current state in Nidal would, in a fashion, be wronging the people who live there now and prefer the way it is now. I think it is justified, to prevent greater wrongs to future generations of Nidalese, and maybe even to the ultimate benefit of the present Nidalese, but that doesn't mean it's not doing wrong by them."

Élie is very, very tired of "what about Nidal" as an argument against democracy. He's perfectly aware that given ten thousand years a God can twist the preferences of his subjects and it's never been a compelling reason to deny self-rule to anyone else. 

"I don't presume to know what the Nidalese want. I've never been to Nidal. I've never spoken to one who wasn't an escapee. I don't know how they would react if they knew what the rest of the world was like. If we assume the worst – that they really do prefer suffering and would with the full exercise of knowledge and reason retain this preference – then of course overthrowing Nidal  would be wronging them, and of course given the means one should do it anyway. Remind me what point you were trying to make?"

She's going to change the subject away from how to handle Nidal because Elie obviously feels incredibly strongly about it from an angle she doesn't quite see the significance of. It feels like they're not exactly having the same conversation about Nidal. "We were discussing whether Alfirin would do a good job of running a country. I don't know of any countries I'd encourage her to go off and run but she could pull an Aroden, raise one from the sea."

Élie would very much like to change the subject away from Alfirin running a country, he's much too likely to slip. 

"Before that. I believe we were talking about the feasibility of self-government."

"Yes, tell us more about constitutions. I'm still a little confused about what one can in a principled fashion set in stone in the country's founding laws if one is a republican."

This is surer footing. Élie can talk about the finer point of constitutional design as long as they like. 

" – so, as you see, it's really not entirely principled, is it? Whatever rules for amendment you choose, you're still holding future generations hostage to their mothers and fathers. It's a compromise – but still, I think, a necessary one. In the first place, without restrictions on their power which they can't simply repeal, a few corrupt legislators would be enough to destroy a Republic entirely. And then – I don't mean to return to a difficult subject, but as we've been discussing, it's not as though children emerge from the womb with their character fully formed. Zon Kuthon wants his people to suffer. Asmodeus wants them to be obedient slaves or cruel masters. Fine. All else being equal, we'd prefer them to be free-minded, rational, compassionate, and public-spirited. We can't get away from having values or passing those values down to our children, and so we want some way to codify them." 

"It seems to me that any serious attempt to have a government follow the will of the governed people is going to involve a lot of messy compromise, but that even the messily compromised versions are likely better, all else being equal, for giving people a particular sort of freedom than rule by kings or by gods. Though the 'all else being equal' is important, there; I suspect that a republic would be more responsive to the will of all the people if it is a small one, the size of a city state maybe, but a small monarchy also seems more likely to be responsive to the desires of its subjects than a large one, and it's not inconceivable that a small monarchy might reliably serve its subjects' will more faithfully than a very large republic."

"Perhaps if they're very lucky in their monarch."

"I worry that they also have to be very lucky to keep being a republic for very long."

"Oh, I meant consistently, across monarchs, though this does require being lucky with - not necessarily all the monarchs, but with being in a safe place with few monsters so that the monarch and aristocracy aren't very powerful, and the aristocracy is not large, so the monarch has no ability to enforce their will if it's very unpopular."