This is dath ilan; and a few generations before Thellim's time, when people were stupider than in her time but smarter than in Earth, laws and legislation were passed by Nine Legislators, with power flowing to them from 324 Representatives of Civilization who negotiated with those Legislators for influence on the points their factions cared about.  In turn, those 324 Representatives represented roughly forty thousand Electors, elected by five million Delegates, delegated-to by six hundred and fifty million voting dath ilani.

The notion, they might have explained, was that in Civilization there is always a particular person you've personally chosen to wield your political power, who knows you personally, who you can talk to when you have political concerns.  In that age, people chose Delegates; who then chose Electors, who could talk to them personally, when the sum of a Delegate's voters were getting worried; the Electors could talk to Representatives, who could talk to Legislators.  (And it was forbidden for somebody who'd ever served as a Delegate to become an Elector or Representative; the Delegates were meant to be people who actually wanted to be Delegates, people who actually want to spend their lives working with the ordinary other people, not frustrated ambitious would-be Electors.  Electors were well-paid people of greater ambitions, but those ambitions could not include becoming Representatives; for the Electors were meant to be working for their Delegates, and not for some larger political machine that had the power to dole out Representative seats.  And you could not become a Legislator if you had previously been a Representative or Elector; it was a job reserved for people who had excelled at some other art than politics.)

Then and now, the Very Serious People in dath ilan would not call Earth's institutions by the term that translates to them as "democracy".  The dath ilani would consider it disqualifying that many Earthlings feel like they don't really get much of a choice in their supposed political representation, and feel helpless to negotiate with political powers at any scale.  The dath ilani would also consider Earth's parliaments to be undemocratically large, because nobody could actually keep track of what was going on inside of them.  A couple of generation before Thellim's time, the limit was Nine legislators publicly negotiating with each other, at the top and final level of political representation.  9 * 8 / 2 = 36 pairwise interactions was the most that a dath ilani of moderately below-average intelligence for that epoch could reasonably be asked to track.

Citizens can't control processes they can't see.  For that clever-reason it was then illegal for any of the Nine Legislators to meet with each other, or speak with any Representative, except as a matter of public record.  An Earthling instinctively flinches away from this idea; they know instinctively that a majority of Earth voters are not grownups and would be outraged at the tiny fragments of sanity that still exist in Earth's politics at all and prevent the nukes from being launched.  But dath ilan was already grown past that stage.  For them, the rule was wise, or at least not obviously stupid.

But Civilization was also grownup enough to understand that well-intentioned rules could have unforeseen consequences.  They considered their institutions trustworthy enough to grant them exceptions and exception-handlers, rather than trying to chain them down absolutely.  So the Nine Legislators could lawfully meet in private, or even in secret, if the highest Keeper was there to listen.

The Keepers were an order older than Civilization, with an immense momentum behind them of promise-keeping, of abiding in the Algorithm that underlies all trust.  Their name, to the extent it translates, was the Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know.  Among other tasks they hosted practitioners of the sort of methods of rationality that can make life less fun to live, but which Civilization might suddenly need at some point.  They deliberately went further into some cognitive attractors than you would if you were just trying to live a human life well-lived; they embedded bounded shards of coldly perfect structures into their cognition, and did their best to maintain their mental integrity in the face of that.  They invented Confessors, swore Confessors to secrecy, and monitored them.  Above all else, the Keepers kept their oaths, tried to make themselves into people who would keep their oaths, and had done nontrivial amounts of assortative mating to that end.  The Keepers had no official powers of violence under law, back then, but their social power was great enough to be considered a counterbalance to the government itself.  When the Leo Szilard of dath ilan first realized that fission chain reactions were possible, she eventually told the government, but she talked it over with the Keepers first.

This is dath ilan; and a few generations before Thellim's time, when people were stupider than in her time but smarter than in Earth, laws and legislation were passed by Nine Legislators, with power flowing to them from 324 Representatives of Civilization who negotiated with those Legislators for influence on the points their factions cared about.  In turn, those 324 Representatives represented roughly forty thousand Electors, elected by five million Delegates, delegated-to by six hundred and fifty million voting dath ilani.

The notion, they might have explained, was that in Civilization there is always a particular person you've personally chosen to wield your political power, who knows you personally, who you can talk to when you have political concerns.  In that age, people chose Delegates; who then chose Electors, who could talk to them personally, when the sum of a Delegate's voters were getting worried; the Electors could talk to Representatives, who could talk to Legislators.  (And it was forbidden for somebody who'd ever served as a Delegate to become an Elector or Representative; the Delegates were meant to be people who actually wanted to be Delegates, people who actually want to spend their lives working with the ordinary other people, not frustrated ambitious would-be Electors.  Electors were well-paid people of greater ambitions, but those ambitions could not include becoming Representatives; for the Electors were meant to be working for their Delegates, and not for some larger political machine that had the power to dole out Representative seats.  And you could not become a Legislator if you had previously been a Representative or Elector; it was a job reserved for people who had excelled at some other art than politics.)

Then and now, the Very Serious People in dath ilan would not call Earth's institutions by the term that translates to them as "democracy".  The dath ilani would consider it disqualifying that many Earthlings feel like they don't really get much of a choice in their supposed political representation, and feel helpless to negotiate with political powers at any scale.  The dath ilani would also consider Earth's parliaments to be undemocratically large, because nobody could actually keep track of what was going on inside of them.  A couple of generations before Thellim's time, the limit was Nine legislators publicly negotiating with each other, at the top and final level of political representation.  9 * 8 / 2 = 36 pairwise interactions was the most that a dath ilani of moderately below-average intelligence for that epoch could reasonably be asked to track.

Citizens can't control processes they can't see.  For that clever-reason it was then illegal for any of the Nine Legislators to meet with each other, or speak with any Representative, except as a matter of public record.  An Earthling instinctively flinches away from this idea; they know instinctively that a majority of Earth voters are not grownups and would be outraged at the tiny fragments of sanity that still exist in Earth's politics at all and prevent the nukes from being launched.  But dath ilan was already grown past that stage.  For them, the rule was wise, or at least not obviously stupid.

But Civilization was also grownup enough to understand that well-intentioned rules could have unforeseen consequences.  They considered their institutions trustworthy enough to grant them exceptions and exception-handlers, rather than trying to chain them down absolutely.  So the Nine Legislators could lawfully meet in private, or even in secret, if the highest Keeper was there to listen.

The Keepers were an order older than Civilization, with an immense momentum behind them of promise-keeping, of abiding in the Algorithm that underlies all trust.  Their name, to the extent it translates, was the Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know.  Among other tasks they hosted practitioners of the sort of methods of rationality that can make life less fun to live, but which Civilization might suddenly need at some point.  They deliberately went further into some cognitive attractors than you would if you were just trying to live a human life well-lived; they embedded bounded shards of coldly perfect structures into their cognition, and did their best to maintain their mental integrity in the face of that.  They invented Confessors, swore Confessors to secrecy, and monitored them.  Above all else, the Keepers kept their oaths, tried to make themselves into people who would keep their oaths, and had done nontrivial amounts of assortative mating to that end.  The Keepers had no official powers of violence under law, back then, but their social power was great enough to be considered a counterbalance to the government itself.  When the Leo Szilard of dath ilan first realized that fission chain reactions were possible, she eventually told the government, but she talked it over with the Keepers first.

This is dath ilan; and a few generations before Thellim's time, when people were stupider than in her time but smarter than in Earth, laws and legislation were passed by Nine Legislators, with power flowing to them from 324 Representatives of Civilization who negotiated with those Legislators for influence on the points their factions cared about.  In turn, those 324 Representatives represented roughly forty thousand Electors, elected by five million Delegates, delegated-to by six hundred and fifty million voting dath ilani.

The notion, they might have explained, was that in Civilization there is always a particular person you've personally chosen to wield your political power, who knows you personally, who you can talk to when you have political concerns.  In that age, people chose Delegates; who then chose Electors, who could talk to them personally, when the sum of a Delegate's voters were getting worried; the Electors could talk to Representatives, who could talk to Legislators.  (And it was forbidden for somebody who'd ever served as a Delegate to become an Elector or Representative; the Delegates were meant to be people who actually wanted to be Delegates, people who actually want to spend their lives working with the ordinary other people, not frustrated ambitious would-be Electors.  Electors were well-paid people of greater ambitions, but those ambitions could not include becoming Representatives; for the Electors were meant to be working for their Delegates, and not for some larger political machine that had the power to dole out Representative seats.  And you could not become a Legislator if you had previously been a Representative or Elector; it was a job reserved for people who had excelled at some other art than politics.)

Then and now, the Very Serious People in dath ilan would not call Earth's institutions by the term that translates to them as "democracy".  The dath ilani would consider it disqualifying that many Earthlings feel like they don't really get much of a choice in their supposed political representation, and feel helpless to negotiate with political powers at any scale.  The dath ilani would also consider Earth's parliaments to be undemocratically large, because nobody could actually keep track of what was going on inside of them.  A couple of generations before Thellim's time, the limit was Nine legislators publicly negotiating with each other, at the top and final level of political representation.  9 * 8 / 2 = 36 pairwise interactions was the most that a dath ilani of moderately below-average intelligence for that epoch could reasonably be asked to track.

Citizens can't control processes they can't see.  For that clever-reason it was then illegal for any of the Nine Legislators to meet with each other, or speak with any Representative, except as a matter of public record.  An Earthling instinctively flinches away from this idea; they know instinctively that a majority of Earth voters are not grownups, and would be outraged at the tiny fragments of sanity that still exist in Earth's politics at all and prevent the nukes from being launched.  But dath ilan was already grown past that stage.  For them, the rule was wise, or at least not obviously stupid.

But Civilization was also grownup enough to understand that well-intentioned rules could have unforeseen consequences.  They considered their institutions trustworthy enough to grant them exceptions and exception-handlers, rather than trying to chain them down absolutely.  So the Nine Legislators could lawfully meet in private, or even in secret, if the highest Keeper was there to listen.

The Keepers were an order older than Civilization, with an immense momentum behind them of promise-keeping, of abiding in the Algorithm that underlies all trust.  Their name, to the extent it translates, was the Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know.  Among other tasks they hosted practitioners of the sort of methods of rationality that can make life less fun to live, but which Civilization might suddenly need at some point.  They deliberately went further into some cognitive attractors than you would if you were just trying to live a human life well-lived; they embedded bounded shards of coldly perfect structures into their cognition, and did their best to maintain their mental integrity in the face of that.  They invented Confessors, swore Confessors to secrecy, and monitored them.  Above all else, the Keepers kept their oaths, tried to make themselves into people who would keep their oaths, and had done nontrivial amounts of assortative mating to that end.  The Keepers had no official powers of violence under law, back then, but their social power was great enough to be considered a counterbalance to the government itself.  When the Leo Szilard of dath ilan first realized that fission chain reactions were possible, she eventually told the government, but she talked it over with the Keepers first.

This is dath ilan; and a few generations before Thellim's time, when people were stupider than in her time but smarter than in Earth, laws and legislation were passed by Nine Legislators, with power flowing to them from 324 Representatives of Civilization who negotiated with those Legislators for influence on the points their factions cared about.  In turn, those 324 Representatives represented roughly forty thousand Electors, elected by five million Delegates, delegated-to by six hundred and fifty million voting dath ilani.

The notion, they might have explained, was that in Civilization there is always a particular person you've personally chosen to wield your political power, who knows you personally, who you can talk to when you have political concerns.  In that age, people chose Delegates; who then chose Electors, who could talk to them personally, when the sum of a Delegate's voters were getting worried; the Electors could talk to Representatives, who could talk to Legislators.  (And it was forbidden for somebody who'd ever served as a Delegate to become an Elector or Representative; the Delegates were meant to be people who actually wanted to be Delegates, people who actually want to spend their lives working with the ordinary other people, not frustrated ambitious would-be Electors.  Electors were well-paid people of greater ambitions, but those ambitions could not include becoming Representatives; for the Electors were meant to be working for their Delegates, and not for some larger political machine that had the power to dole out Representative seats.  And you could not become a Legislator if you had previously been a Representative or Elector; it was a job reserved for people who had excelled at some other art than politics.)

Then and now, the Very Serious People in dath ilan would not call Earth's institutions by the term that translates to them as "democracy".  The dath ilani would consider it disqualifying that many Earthlings feel like they don't really get much of a choice in their supposed political representation, and feel helpless to negotiate with political powers at any scale.  The dath ilani would also consider Earth's parliaments to be undemocratically large, because nobody could actually keep track of what was going on inside of them.  A few generations before Thellim's time, the limit was Nine legislators publicly negotiating with each other, at the top and final level of political representation.  9 * 8 / 2 = 36 pairwise interactions was the most that a dath ilani of moderately below-average intelligence for that epoch could reasonably be asked to track.

Citizens can't control processes they can't see.  For that clever-reason it was then illegal for any of the Nine Legislators to meet with each other, or speak with any Representative, except as a matter of public record.  An Earthling instinctively flinches away from this idea; they know instinctively that a majority of Earth voters are not grownups, and would be outraged at the tiny fragments of sanity that still exist in Earth's politics at all and prevent the nukes from being launched.  But dath ilan was already grown past that stage.  For them, the rule was wise, or at least not obviously stupid.

But Civilization was also grownup enough to understand that well-intentioned rules could have unforeseen consequences.  They considered their institutions trustworthy enough to grant them exceptions and exception-handlers, rather than trying to chain them down absolutely.  So the Nine Legislators could lawfully meet in private, or even in secret, if the highest Keeper was there to listen.

The Keepers were an order older than Civilization, with an immense momentum behind them of promise-keeping, of abiding in the Algorithm that underlies all trust.  Their name, to the extent it translates, was the Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know.  Among other tasks they hosted practitioners of the sort of methods of rationality that can make life less fun to live, but which Civilization might suddenly need at some point.  They deliberately went further into some cognitive attractors than you would if you were just trying to live a human life well-lived; they embedded bounded shards of coldly perfect structures into their cognition, and did their best to maintain their mental integrity in the face of that.  They invented Confessors, swore Confessors to secrecy, and monitored them.  Above all else, the Keepers kept their oaths, tried to make themselves into people who would keep their oaths, and had done nontrivial amounts of assortative mating to that end.  The Keepers had no official powers of violence under law, back then, but their social power was great enough to be considered a counterbalance to the government itself.  When the Leo Szilard of dath ilan first realized that fission chain reactions were possible, she eventually told the government, but she talked it over with the Keepers first.

This is dath ilan; and a few generations before Thellim's time, when people were stupider than in her time but smarter than in Earth, laws and legislation were passed by Nine Legislators, with power flowing to them from 324 Representatives of Civilization who negotiated with those Legislators for influence on the points their factions cared about.  In turn, those 324 Representatives represented roughly forty thousand Electors, elected by five million Delegates, delegated-to by six hundred and fifty million voting dath ilani.

The notion, they might have explained, was that in Civilization there is always a particular person you've personally chosen to wield your political power, who knows you personally, who you can talk to when you have political concerns.  In that age, people chose Delegates; who then chose Electors, who could talk to them personally, when the sum of a Delegate's voters were getting worried; the Electors could talk to Representatives, who could talk to Legislators.  (And it was forbidden for somebody who'd ever served as a Delegate to become an Elector or Representative; the Delegates were meant to be people who actually wanted to be Delegates, people who actually wanted to spend their lives working with the ordinary other people, not frustrated ambitious would-be Electors.  Electors were well-paid people of greater ambitions, but those ambitions could not include becoming Representatives; for the Electors were meant to be working for their Delegates, and not for some larger political machine that had the power to dole out Representative seats.  And you could not become a Legislator if you had previously been a Representative or Elector; it was a job reserved for people who had excelled at some other art than politics.)

Then and now, the Very Serious People in dath ilan would not call Earth's institutions by the term that translates to them as "democracy".  The dath ilani would consider it disqualifying that many Earthlings feel like they don't really get much of a choice in their supposed political representation, and feel helpless to negotiate with political powers at any scale.  The dath ilani would also consider Earth's parliaments to be undemocratically large, because nobody could actually keep track of what was going on inside of them.  A few generations before Thellim's time, the limit was 9 legislators publicly negotiating with each other, at the top and final level of political representation.  9 * 8 / 2 = 36 pairwise interactions was the most that a dath ilani of moderately below-average intelligence for that epoch could reasonably be asked to track.

Citizens can't control processes they can't see.  For that clever-reason it was then illegal for any of the Nine Legislators to meet with each other, or speak with any Representative, except as a matter of public record.  An Earthling instinctively flinches away from this idea; they know instinctively that a majority of Earth voters are not grownups, and would be outraged at the tiny fragments of sanity that still exist in Earth's politics at all and prevent the nukes from being launched.  But dath ilan was already grown past that stage.  For them, the rule was wise, or at least not obviously stupid.

But Civilization was also grownup enough to understand that well-intentioned rules could have unforeseen consequences.  They considered their institutions trustworthy enough to grant them exceptions and exception-handlers, rather than trying to chain them down absolutely.  So the Nine Legislators could lawfully meet in private, or even in secret, if the highest Keeper was there to listen.

The Keepers were an order older than Civilization, with an immense momentum behind them of promise-keeping, of abiding in the Algorithm that underlies all trust.  Their name, to the extent it translates, was the Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know.  Among other tasks they hosted practitioners of the sort of methods of rationality that can make life less fun to live, but which Civilization might suddenly need at some point.  They deliberately went further into some cognitive attractors than you would if you were just trying to live a human life well-lived; they embedded bounded shards of coldly perfect structures into their cognition, and did their best to maintain their mental integrity in the face of that.  They invented Confessors, swore Confessors to secrecy, and monitored them.  Above all else, the Keepers kept their oaths, tried to make themselves into people who would keep their oaths, and had done nontrivial amounts of assortative mating to that end.  The Keepers had no official powers of violence under law, back then, but their social power was great enough to be considered a counterbalance to the government itself.  When the Leo Szilard of dath ilan first realized that fission chain reactions were possible, she eventually told the government, but she talked it over with the Keepers first.