Now, to return to the more somber topic:

There's a loophole in the logic saying that, in nonmagical societies, the rest of the world can outfight the world's military.

'Economically_scalable-weapons.'  The class of weaponry where you can just go on spending more money if you want the weapons to be even more destructive.

Once those kinds of weapons are invented, a handful of people could, in principle, cow all the rest, if those other people submitted to threats.

The last time Civilization underwent a major reorganization, a few decades ago, it was being reorganized out of something that already had scalable weapons, since there's no record since then of scalable weapons having been discovered for the first time.  You could imagine that this reorganization was a cover for a Dark Conspiracy that already ruled everything, to set up Keepers and Governance that it controlled, and then it burned all the history books suggesting that things had ever been different...

...And then, apparently, taught everybody not to submit to threats, once they were hiding?  This, by assumption, apparently, is totally the best course of action for them to hold on to power?  They should build a fake Civilization and hide behind that?  Great idea!  The best idea!  Even the smartest Dark Conspiracy can't think of any better ones!

But again one must ask, how did this Dark Conspiracy arise in the first place?  How likely is the most likely historical pathway for that, compared to historical pathways that lead to Governance Uncorrupted?  By the time a society is able to build complicated expensive powerful nonmagical weapons that a handful of people could use to outfight the rest, this society should have had, decades earlier, centuries earlier, far more than enough mathematical sophistication to run a 'paper-cryptographic_protocol'...

That probably didn't translate.

And Keltham should probably try to describe in any case some of the actual countermeasures that Civilization is known to have in its arsenal against Dark Conspiracies.

Now, to return to the more somber topic:

There's a loophole in the logic saying that, in nonmagical societies, the rest of the world can outfight the world's military.

'Economically_scalable-weapons.'  The class of weaponry where you can just go on spending more money if you want the weapons to be even more destructive.

Once those kinds of weapons are invented, a handful of people could, in principle, cow all the rest, if those other people submitted to threats.

The last time Civilization underwent a major reorganization, a few decades ago, it was being reorganized out of something that already had scalable weapons, since there's no record since then of scalable weapons having been discovered for the first time.  You could imagine that this reorganization was a cover for a Dark Conspiracy that already ruled everything, to set up Keepers and Governance that it controlled, and then it hid away all the history books suggesting that things had ever been different...

...And then, apparently, taught everybody not to submit to threats, once they were hiding?  This, by assumption, apparently, is totally the best course of action for them to hold on to power?  They should build a fake Civilization and hide behind that?  Great idea!  The best idea!  Even the smartest Dark Conspiracy can't think of any better ones!

But again one must ask, how did this Dark Conspiracy arise in the first place?  How likely is the most likely historical pathway for that, compared to historical pathways that lead to Governance Uncorrupted?  By the time a society is able to build complicated expensive powerful nonmagical weapons that a handful of people could use to outfight the rest, this society should have had, decades earlier, centuries earlier, far more than enough mathematical sophistication to run a 'paper-cryptographic_protocol'...

That probably didn't translate.

And Keltham should probably try to describe in any case some of the actual countermeasures that Civilization is known to have in its arsenal against Dark Conspiracies.