"Green, grey. Purple in some places with a plantation-y setup."

Nod.

"Saniah doesn't find Earth's politicians very competent but I doubt it's the lack of a caste system."

"What is it?"

"Uh, lower stakes, possibly the having a real democracy - it has other merits but I do expect that it means it's less important to have impressed highly experienced people in the government you intend to run - our political track really does teach good habits, aggressively so, from a very young age..."

"What habits?"

"Never ever going to a meeting or a situation unprepared, for a fairly high bar of preparedness - having an excellent staff who can catch your mistakes and will speak up about them - changing your mind when you're wrong, doing the math when you make decisions, meticulously documenting everything..."

"Those are good."

"I have no complaints about the education Anitam gave me. Ethics I may have had to pick up in my spare time but that's asking a bit much of our schools."

"Just a bit."

"Maybe I should've made Telkam be blue, he could've been a military liaison or something. It just seemed likely to make him unhappy and involve putting out a lot of fires."

"Could you have made him?"

"Legally no, but I could probably have caused it to happen if I thought it were a good idea."

"And green was better?"

"Green involved less interaction between him and people he disliked but green doesn't teach you how to be careful with power or legible about what you want to do with it. - greens can come up with all kinds of radical notions about how power should work, doesn't matter, they don't have any, see..."

"Unless someone listens to them and you learn how to pick people to listen to..."

"Yes, exactly. If someone here had come up with, say, Communism, every blue they took it to would have said 'can this be done in a small-scale reversible pilot program somewhere, and for how much money'."

Giggle.

"It doesn't get you the best results. But when you have six hundred million citizens who cannot leave -"

"Then you'd better avoid proletariat revolution, yeah."

"And every other kind of recklessness. They teach us in school the force you should expect to deploy and the expenses you should expect to incur and the progress you should expect to result from occupying a country - not 'don't do it' just 'this is how much money you're setting on fire, this is how many disabled veterans' - and I think we're statistically less adventurous than Earth governments pre-Revelation."

"Of course the idea with a communist revolution is that it would involve angry purples swarming you and calling each other comrade, more than that it'd be something an existing government would try."

"Yes but if it turned out that purples are in fact happier and more productive if you give them shares of a factory we could set up wage incentives so that factory employees ended up owning shares. If someone philosophized that no matter what the conditions of labor eventually you'd get angry purples swarming then we'd probably just check that had not happened anywhere and go about our lives as normal, but if the end-state looks desireable and the swarming can be skipped..."

Chuckle.

"Don't get me wrong, they'd be horrible putting down an actual revolution, but given a way to get good things without a civil war they'd take it. It's a - conservative system rather than a reactionary one. Just conserving some silly things."