"Oh, no, we have that more or less handled."

"Well! That's good. I didn't pay that much attention in Verbal so I don't know much about the history of the Teaching and when we developed what. And I guess you could have a high level of the Teaching without having much technology."

"Functional governments that follow the will of Heaven are useful for everyone."

"Maybe," Fortitude hazards, "when I say 'monk' it's translating as something different and what we think of as monks are... something else...?"

"Possibly. We have scholar officials running the government,  does that translate as anything meaningful to you."

"You have... civil servants who read a lot of books?"

"--That's a fair description of us. We are experts on the Classics and on the knowledge of good governance is how we would describe it."

"Good governance? Statistical analysis, accounting, legal precedents, ethical philosophy, that sort of thing?"

"Ethical philosophy, mostly."

"...Statistical analysis seems more important," Fortitude says dubiously. 

"You can't rule rightly unless you know what is right."

"Yes, that's what the statistics are for."

"I'm not saying the maths doesn't help,  but you can't really use it without an ethical foundation."

"I don't think civil servants get any more ethical training than any other monk...? I think they get less, in order to make time for all the statistics. Being a judge is complicated but if the people have given you a mandate to make the trains run properly you don't need any great ethical insight to know what you're supposed to be doing. You just need to be able to interpret ridership statistics."

"If you have a mandate to run the salt mines, you need maths for that, I wouldn't deny that. But you wouldn't want someone who knew less about ethics to do that."

"Well, you'd want to make sure they are ethical, but that doesn't mean you'd need them to study philosophy, because all their ethical decisions would be very obvious. I think. I don't know anything about salt mining."

"I'd be able to make my point better if I also knew anything about the salt mines.  Other than that they're why I work in a building and not a shed."

"Judges know a lot of ethical philosophy because they have to rule on novel or unusual situations, or on cases that don't come up very often. But most people just need to know whatever ethical philosophy is relevant to their lives." 

"You never know when someone is going to have to deal with a novel situation!  --I meant that as a joke, but I do think it is a little bit true."

"Here we are in an interdimensional bar."

"And aren't you glad to be with a trained member of the civil service!"

"Well, I don't know how good the testing is," Fortitude says.

"You wound me. -- The testing is quite selective. I would not worry about it."

Fortitude grew up in a society where all politicians are inherently trustworthy people and thus feels extremely reassured. 

"Time is stopped while we're here. Do you want to fuck?"

...? What?

It's not that he can't see the connection between "time has stopped" to "so, why don't we fill it in." But also, ow, his neck, that was quite the whiplash!

"I'm flattered, but no thank you." What is a good polite reason that a purple haired barbarian would agree with? "My wife would kill me."