This is dath ilan; and a few generations before Thellim's time, the highest of the Keepers called together the Nine Legislators in a secret meeting.  Shortly after, the highest Keeper and the Nine called an emergency closed assembly of the 324 Representatives.

And the highest Keeper said, with the nine Legislators at the peak of dath ilan standing beside her, that the universe had proven to be a harsher and colder and more dangerous place than had been hoped.

And that all Civilization needed to turn much of its effort away from thriving, and toward surviving.  There needed to be controls and slowdowns and halts instituted on multiple major technologies.  Which would need to be backed up by much more pervasive electronic surveillance than anybody had ever even considered allowing before.  Roughly a fifth of all the present and future smart people in the world ought to publicly appear to burn out or retire, and privately work on a new secret project under maximum-security conditions.  Also more of the smartest people needed to be nudged more strongly into mating with each other, worrying less about the speciation dangers of assortative mating, and more about producing the smartest possible future researchers as early as possible.

And so long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well also carry out the less important but still useful operation of putting all of Civilization's past behind the most complete possible causal screen.  That part wasn't as important, but still legitimately helpful; and doing it would help to overshadow the other changes, and lead to less attention going to the more dangerous places.

The reasoning behind this policy could, in principle, be laid out to the 324 Representatives.  But that would represent a noticeable additional risk, if it happened now, while mechanisms to prevent information propagation hadn't been set up yet.  Another 324 not-fully-filtered people knowing, now, would be too many.  So the Representatives would need to trust the Keeper and Legislators on this.

The Representatives were not too frightened.  They had all individually deduced that this was almost certainly some kind of experiment or systemic test.  None of them said so out loud, of course, because they didn't want to invalidate whatever-was-being-tested by giving some answer different than they would have given in real life.  So the Representatives debated among themselves, all trying to act and even think exactly the same way they would in real life; and not for long, because in real life, this obviously would reflect some kind of massive emergency.

And the Representatives finally replied that, in this case, they did not think that the trust placed in them by all Civilization permitted them to assent to this massive policy change without further explanation.  They would not have predicted in advance that the Nine Legislators and the highest Keeper would come before them with a massive lie for purposes of personal gain, particularly not a lie as strange as this one.  But even less would they have advance-predicted some mysterious emergency like that to be real; and to assent to the proposed change, under that protocol, would be setting up the wrong system incentives in the world that was most probably the case.

The highest Keeper nodded and said that was very sensible of them.

Then she took out a microgrenade and blew apart her own brain.

The meaning of this act is approximately impossible to convey across the cultural gap between Earth and dath ilan.  An Earthling will not feel what a dath ilani feels, hearing that, no matter how much of the context gets explained.

On Earth, committing suicide might be seen as an important statement and an indicator of real seriousness; at least if treated with cues of seriousness by the media, like a Thai monk setting themselves on fire.  It would work to convey that a real emergency was going on, and that this wasn't a test.  It wouldn't suffice to push through a revolution in the basic forms of government and civilization.  Just setting yourself on fire can't overcome a credibility gap that large, and an Earthling would feel incredulous at the idea that it might.  People sometimes do strange things, after all, and sometimes sacrifice their lives for less than perfect reasons.

In dath ilan, it was interpreted differently.  There is nobody who an Earthling expects to make sense in the way that a smart dath ilani expects a high-ranked Keeper to make sense.  Very few Earthlings have an inkling of what that kind of sense is, let alone expect anyone to make it.

If the Keeper had committed ordinary suicide - retired to cryonic suspension - that might have made sense.  It would have made the point, to start with, that it was in fact a real emergency; and that one of two non-advance-predicted things had actually happened in real life, meaning that one's sense of prior probabilities needed to be discarded as having already failed to serve.  An ordinary suicide would have made some progress on showing the honesty of the emergency measures, too.  It's not inconceivable to a dath ilani that the head Keeper might betray her oaths and the Algorithm in pursuit of some selfish benefit.  They try to avoid defections in reality, but they have a single-syllable word for 'game-theoretic defection' because of how often it comes up in counterfactuals.  It's not even inconceivable that the Keeper could persuade all Nine Legislators to go along with her, though the Nine had come from many walks of life. 

Retiring to cryonic suspension would have been a way for the Keeper to prove, or rather strongly argue, that she had not been hoping to benefit selfishly from her extraordinary request; to show that she was submitting herself to the judgment of future Civilization regarding it.  Though even then, it wouldn't be inconceivable that the Keeper would betray her oaths in order to act nonselfishly towards some other person or faction, while defecting against all the rest of Civilization, counting on the future's impersonal forgiveness.  But it would be less likely.  And for all of the Nine Legislators, from their many walks of life, to also go along with it - that would not be likely at all.

An ordinary suicide might possibly have made sense, given the absolutely extraordinary circumstances.

You wouldn't do it anyways, because you wouldn't want to set up an incentive for political leaders to be people willing to commit suicide.  That's putting your government into a weird and dangerous shape.

And in dath ilan you would not set up an incentive where a leader needed to commit true suicide and destroy her own brain in order to get her political proposal taken seriously.  That would be trading off a sacred thing against an unsacred thing.  It would mean that only true-suicidal people became leaders.  It would be terrible terrible system design.

And so if anybody did deliberately destroy their own brain in attempt to increase their credibility - then obviously, the only sensible response would be to ignore that, so as not create hideous system incentives.  Any sensible person would reason out that sensible response, expect it, and not try the true-suicide tactic.

If, ignoring that, somehow your true suicide could get people to take an otherwise incredible proposal seriously - even then, no child of dath ilan would do that.  It would be too sad.  That's the dath ilani reaction that an Earthling wouldn't really feel inside, that it would be just way too sad.  Even if Civilization followed your proposal and was saved, you wouldn't be there to see it.  People in the future would want to thank you, if you'd turned out to be right after all, and they'd look around for you and not be able to find you.  It would be contrary to utilitarianism (for the one less soul alive), contrary to deontology (for having destroyed a soul, as must never be done even if it seems like a good idea), contrary to personal virtue (for the desire to live is also part of a healthy mind), contrary to aesthetics (for all the bright sentiments it would contradict), contrary to good design for aggregative systems (for you wouldn't want to set up an incentive like that), contrary to reason, contrary to the Light itself.  It would go against the theme and song of Civilization that nobody gets left behind, not ultimately left behind, that everyone in dath ilan is joining hands together against outcomes that are bitter in the very end.

The Keeper destroyed her own brain before the assembled Representatives.  That was an act that any sane person could judge as wrong whatever the hidden backstory - if your prior reasoning, and expectations, and the whole system and world you thought you were living inside, had the meaning you thought it did.

It was an act of desperation and shattered assumptions and horror.

The Representatives did not scream and run around, for they were also the peak of dath ilan.  They did not fight to retain their old assumptions, or maintain a pretense of calm, for that too is childish.  They noticed and updated and started taking the matter actually seriously, and the world changed.

This is dath ilan; and a few generations before Thellim's time, the highest of the Keepers called together the Nine Legislators in a secret meeting.  Shortly after, the highest Keeper and the Nine called an emergency closed assembly of the 324 Representatives.

And the highest Keeper said, with the Nine Legislators at the peak of dath ilan standing beside her, that the universe had proven to be a harsher and colder and more dangerous place than had been hoped.

And that all Civilization needed to turn much of its effort away from thriving, and toward surviving.  There needed to be controls and slowdowns and halts instituted on multiple major technologies.  Which would need to be backed up by much more pervasive electronic surveillance than anybody had ever even considered allowing before.  Roughly a fifth of all the present and future smart people in the world ought to publicly appear to burn out or retire, and privately work on a new secret project under maximum-security conditions.  Also more of the smartest people needed to be nudged more strongly into mating with each other, worrying less about the speciation dangers of assortative mating, and more about producing the smartest possible future researchers as early as possible.

And so long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well also carry out the less important but still useful operation of putting all of Civilization's past behind the most complete possible causal screen.  That part wasn't as important, but still legitimately helpful; and doing it would help to overshadow the other changes, and lead to less attention going to the more dangerous places.

The reasoning behind this policy could, in principle, be laid out to the 324 Representatives.  But that would represent a noticeable additional risk, if it happened now, while mechanisms to prevent information propagation hadn't been set up yet.  Another 324 not-fully-filtered people knowing, now, would be too many.  So the Representatives would need to trust the Keeper and Legislators on this.

The Representatives were not too frightened.  They had all individually deduced that this was almost certainly some kind of experiment or systemic test.  None of them said so out loud, of course, because they didn't want to invalidate whatever-was-being-tested by giving some answer different than they would have given in real life.  So the Representatives debated among themselves, all trying to act and even think exactly the same way they would in real life; and not for long, because in real life, this obviously would reflect some kind of massive emergency.

And the Representatives finally replied that, in this case, they did not think that the trust placed in them by all Civilization permitted them to assent to this massive policy change without further explanation.  They would not have predicted in advance that the Nine Legislators and the highest Keeper would come before them with a massive lie for purposes of personal gain, particularly not a lie as strange as this one.  But even less would they have advance-predicted some mysterious emergency like that to be real; and to assent to the proposed change, under that protocol, would be setting up the wrong system incentives in the world that was most probably the case.

The highest Keeper nodded and said that was very sensible of them.

Then she took out a microgrenade and blew apart her own brain.

The meaning of this act is approximately impossible to convey across the cultural gap between Earth and dath ilan.  An Earthling will not feel what a dath ilani feels, hearing that, no matter how much of the context gets explained.

On Earth, committing suicide might be seen as an important statement and an indicator of real seriousness; at least if treated with cues of seriousness by the media, like a Thai monk setting themselves on fire.  It would work to convey that a real emergency was going on, and that this wasn't a test.  It wouldn't suffice to push through a revolution in the basic forms of government and civilization.  Just setting yourself on fire can't overcome a credibility gap that large, and an Earthling would feel incredulous at the idea that it might.  People sometimes do strange things, after all, and sometimes sacrifice their lives for less than perfect reasons.

In dath ilan, it was interpreted differently.  There is nobody who an Earthling expects to make sense in the way that a smart dath ilani expects a high-ranked Keeper to make sense.  Very few Earthlings have an inkling of what that kind of sense is, let alone expect anyone to make it.

If the Keeper had committed ordinary suicide - retired to cryonic suspension - that might have made sense.  It would have made the point, to start with, that it was in fact a real emergency; and that one of two non-advance-predicted things had actually happened in real life, meaning that one's sense of prior probabilities needed to be discarded as having already failed to serve.

An ordinary suicide would have made some progress on showing the honesty of the emergency measures, too.  It's not inconceivable to a dath ilani that the head Keeper might betray her oaths and the Algorithm in pursuit of some selfish benefit.  They try to avoid defections in reality, but they have a single-syllable word for 'game-theoretic defection' because of how often it comes up in counterfactuals.  It's not even inconceivable that the Keeper could persuade all Nine Legislators to go along with her, though the Nine had come from many walks of life.  So retiring to cryonic suspension would have been a way for the Keeper to prove, or rather strongly argue, that she had not been hoping to benefit selfishly from her extraordinary request; to show that she was submitting herself to the judgment of future Civilization regarding it.  Though even then, it wouldn't be inconceivable that the Keeper would betray her oaths in order to act nonselfishly towards some other person or faction, while defecting against all the rest of Civilization, counting on the future's impersonal forgiveness.  But it would be less likely.  And for all of the Nine Legislators, from their many walks of life, to also go along with it - that would not be likely at all.

An ordinary suicide might possibly have made sense, given the absolutely extraordinary circumstances.

You wouldn't do it anyways, because you wouldn't want to set up an incentive for political leaders to be people willing to commit suicide.  That's putting your government into a weird and dangerous shape.

And in dath ilan you would not set up an incentive where a leader needed to commit true suicide and destroy her own brain in order to get her political proposal taken seriously.  That would be trading off a sacred thing against an unsacred thing.  It would mean that only true-suicidal people became leaders.  It would be terrible terrible system design.

So if anybody did deliberately destroy their own brain in attempt to increase their credibility - then obviously, the only sensible response would be to ignore that, so as not create hideous system incentives.  Any sensible person would reason out that sensible response, expect it, and not try the true-suicide tactic.

If, ignoring that, somehow your true suicide could get people to take an otherwise incredible proposal seriously - even then, no child of dath ilan would do that.  It would be too sad.  That's the dath ilani reaction that an Earthling wouldn't really feel inside, that it would be just way too sad.  Even if Civilization followed your proposal and was saved, you wouldn't be there to see it.  People in the future would want to thank you, if you'd turned out to be right after all, and they'd look around for you and not be able to find you.  It would be contrary to utilitarianism (for the one less soul alive), contrary to deontology (for having destroyed a soul, as must never be done even if it seems like a good idea), contrary to personal virtue (for the desire to live is also part of a healthy mind), contrary to aesthetics (for all the bright sentiments it would contradict), contrary to good design for aggregative systems (for you wouldn't want to set up an incentive like that), contrary to reason, contrary to the Light itself.  It would go against the theme and song of Civilization that nobody gets left behind, not ultimately left behind, that everyone in dath ilan is joining hands together against outcomes that are bitter in the very end.

The Keeper destroyed her own brain before the assembled Representatives.  That was an act that any sane person could judge as wrong whatever the hidden backstory - if your prior reasoning, and expectations, and the whole system and world you thought you were living inside, had the meaning you thought it did.

It was an act of desperation and shattered assumptions and horror.

The Representatives did not scream and run around, for they were also the peak of dath ilan.  They did not fight to retain their old assumptions, or maintain a pretense of calm, for that too is childish.  They noticed and updated and started taking the matter actually seriously, and the world changed.