"If you don't want to tell me anything that's fine," Xiomara says as soon as they're behind closed doors, "But I'd appreciate you staying the whole half hour even if so, and not telling anyone what we did or didn't discuss. That said, I think something is troubling you and I'd like to know what, if you can and wish to say."

…she likes these people. She really really likes these people, and trusts them, they make sense to her, it's not impossible to believe it's the civilization she'd have built if she didn't know that it was possible to make democracy work. That's why it keeps hurting every time she needs reminding that, in fact, they run a military dictatorship - "I got a caller on the radio who wanted to make the case that the real problem with the Church of Iomedae is that they executed his son, for not reporting his cousin for being in some kind of cult. I don't know if that's what happened, I don't have a good way to check if that's what happened, not all the callers thought it was a problem even if that's exactly what happened, but it saddened me. America was so stupidly rich they hardly ever put anyone to death and I don't expect that but -"

"Did he say where this happened? Was it in Mendev?"

"Yes. Kenabres." She looked up what country Kenabres was in after the broadcast.

"Then… I would not be surprised to learn that that's what really happened. The Church in Mendev is a mess, the nobility of Mendev fervently resists every attempt we make to clean it up or even just explain theology to them - and they do genuinely have a serious problem with demonic cults. I don't know if I would manage to do better if it was me, there. I suspect I would but it's very easy to look from afar and judge a task far easier than it is when you're actually up close and doing it."

'ah, yes, that's the badly behaved cousin who executes people at the drop of a hat, awkward about him' - she's being unfair. She has insufficient context to be fair in either direction, here.

"That's not the law here?"

"No! I don't think it would even work, here, to get people to report their cultist neighbors more than they already would."

"What does Lastwall put people to death for, mostly?"

"Murder, rape, espionage - being a demon cultist, or a diabolist, or part of the Whispering Way or Skinsaw cult or any number of similarly sinister groups -"

"And what - counts - like, in a sense criticizing the government serves your enemies, it's probably some evidence of sympathy for your enemies-"

"Well, generically 'serving our enemies' isn't a crime, it's much too vague - if someone can say under a truth spell that they don't worship Asmodeus or any devils, that they've never called a devil or made a pact with one, and that they don't plan to do any of those things - maybe with some more similar clauses depending on the particular case - they won't be convicted of diabolism."

"And they get a truth spell, if they insist it'd clear them?"

"Yes. Well - they say what they'd want to say under a truth spell, and work out with the court a set of things they can say that would clear them if true, and then they get a truth spell. The court pays for it, unless they can't - or refuse to - actually say the things they worked out ahead of time."

"The man on the radio said that no one got a fair trial, but they might be let go if they could say under a truth spell they'd never done any wrong."

"That does sound like a way this system could be misinterpreted on the ground in Mendev."

"Would you be willing to explain on the radio how it's supposed to work? Because - I don't want to drop it, if the man isn't lying, but I also don't want people to think that's how the Church of Iomedae does things, if it's not."

"Ask your secretary to find you a magistrate. I'm really not an expert."

"I'll do that. Does it make sense to you that I was upset or does it seem like a way I have unreasonable expectations given the magnitude of everybody's problems around here."

"It makes sense to me to be upset about that but I was at least a little surprised at how upset, once I learned what it was about."

"...I really am trying not to bother busy important people with my half-formed political opinions but I can attempt to explain if you want, if we have committed ourselves to half an hour anyway."

"Please do."

"The government in America was very powerful. They had more than a million prisoners. They intervened whenever parents hit their children hard enough to leave a mark. The person assigned to mind Alfirin and I was required to send summaries about how we were adapting to being Americans every week to her minder, along with records of what kind of blood we had and whether we were angry, and they considered us poor illiterate farmworkers of no significance whatsoever to anyone. America is not really trying to have an obedient population, that's the kind of control they had without trying. In some ways they were trying not to. They made a lot of rules that protect the right to - dissent against the government, to protest its processes, to refuse to be complicit in it - you can say anything true, in America, and you can peacefully assemble with any number of other people for any reason including to protest the government, and you cannot be compelled to testify if by truthfully doing so you would incriminate yourself. And it's not just the laws, there's also a matter of - what the culture valorizes - if a man leaks military secrets to prove that the country went to war unnecessarily for evil reasons, is he a traitor or a hero?

 America has - made up legendary heroes, since it doesn't have real ones, the most famous one called Captain America. They make big two-hour immersive-illusion-stories about him. In the one that came out shortly before we left America, Captain America learns that the U.S. military has developed a secret new weapons system that lets them watch every person in the country and calculate if they represent a threat, and kill them if they are. He objects immediately, they say that it's for the greater good and necessary given all the threats to the world out there, he continues objecting and ends up at war with his own country. Now, of course, it turns out that the Asmodeans - the Nazis, but it's basically the same thing - are behind this effort, and once Captain America defeats it his country embraces him again, but - it struck me, when I watched it, as a very American movie, a movie from a people with no external enemies, correctly identifying their greatest enemy as their own government's impulses towards trying to keep them in line, and correctly identifying the role of their greatest heroes as - hearing an elaborate justification for how this serves the good and then saying 'no'. 

There are countries on Earth that exercise far more control over their citizens than I think Cheliax possibly can. They watch them every waking moment. They know every purchase they make. It is a natural direction for places to move in, as they become wealthy and powerful. I strongly suspect it's evil, but it's a complicated kind of evil made out of parts that are many of them individually compelling. You can get crime rates very low, that way. 

I don't know if I have any real disagreements with the goddess Iomedae or if it's entirely just that She's smarter and better at prioritization and has very complex tradeoffs to manage and will start managing them in different directions as soon as the horrible emergencies are over. But the thing that - jumps out - and that seems like something She could be missing, because I sure didn't see it until I'd seen something else - is the ways in which you absolutely can, teach children to report their parents and their friends, build a state where everyone in it is loyal only to the state because the state will ultimately punish their loyalty to anything else, where it's easy to do, where it's made of trades which many of them seem like good trades, unless you cherish stubbornness and rebelliousness, themselves, quite a lot.

Earth has countries run by their armies and they are bad countries to live in, because armies cannot possibly cherish stubbornness and rebelliousness. Well, for a lot of reasons, but my best guess is legitimately that that's one of those reasons. 

I think if I learned about a priest of Iomedae doing some tragic and destructive thing that was unrelated to this - fear of mine, that She just prefers human society be organized into military dictatorships which will listen to Her - then I would be sad, but I wouldn't be afraid. But when I learn that she has empowered people who are doing this - very common thing, that works very well, and has this lovely orderly endpoint - it's hard to be sure, if She thinks it's bad and can't do better, or if She thinks it's fine. This is not really very fair to any of you. You are by far the most human freedom respecting military dictatorship I've ever encountered, and a lot moreso than an Earth military dictatorship could possibly have had, and She has to be part of the difference.

But - you said earlier that you don't think it'd work, executing people for not reporting their loved ones. I think it works, though mostly by making people who know they can't trust each other. I think it works well and I'd renounce a priest for trying it.

If I were a god, which I'm not.

There are two stories that make sense of everything I have seen, and in one of those stories people with an impossible task are working very diligently at it and being chided wherever they fail to meet the standards of a spoiled child from another world, and in the other I am repeatedly ignoring sign after sign that the Church is not actually Good as I understand the Good, doesn't cherish the things I cherish, and that Iomedae's purposes do not actually particularly resemble mine. I'd run off and wander around talking to peasants in random places and check, except Cheliax would find me very quickly, and also I don't even know if it'd be a good check, since half the question is about which things Iomedae will purchase when She's richer as She's soon to be. I'm sure all of this is much easier to be sure of if one is fairly confident no one's carefully managing one's access to information about Iomedae but -"

She's getting disorganized. She stills herself. "I am ill-equipped to straighten out any of this right now, and will be for a long time, and it hardly matters because you can't be worse than Cheliax, and I'm not planning to be difficult about it. But it did bother me quite a lot."

"I see how - coming from America as you describe it - hearing about the Mendevian inquisition would be pretty shocking."

But of those two possible lenses on the situation you laid out, it's definitely the 'spoiled child' one, Iomedae is inferring as the unspoken next sentence.

 Iomedae with deliberate effort doesn't feel annoyed. She isn't any good at diplomacy but she can avoid being difficult to satisfy. "And I see how with all of the problems that you have, some people in another country enforcing some ill-advised laws is not an emergency of particular note, even if they're priests of your god, unless it startles your badly acculturated engineering team."