SID MEIER’S ALPHA CENTUARI: REALISTIC SCI-FI, Part 6

Warning, It's Anti-Western Liberal Hate Speech ;)

Hello all! Thanks for sticking it out for this long. I should have this bundle and my concluding thoughts/comments in part 7. Whew! But seriously, this part is the most disruptive, harmful, hateful, offensive, blank-o-phobic, anti-theology article of this whole series, because I’m attacking the civic religion of the West.

Now, I love the West. I live in ‘the West’ and the last and greatest bastion of the West, the U.S. of A. I don’t want it to fall and I hope God Almighty Himself saves the USA from—whatever fate will happen to us in the 2020s and ‘30s and beyond.

Let’s talk about the Space U.N.!

Commissioner Pravin Lal and the Peacekeeping Forces: Lal* may very well be the only sane man on Planet Chiron, but his sanity is fragile and his peace is tenuous. Just like the Liberal Project!

[*Lal means ‘beloved’ in Hindi.]

Where to start? Well, as with Zakharov/Morgan/Deidre, Lal and his faction are a modern invention. Yang, Corazon, and Miriam, all lead projects that in one shape or another have existed for all of human history (autocracy, tribalism, and self-righteousness). Lal is, literally, the Space United Nations, circa 1999.

…A lot unfortunately changed in the intervening years of 1999 and 2023 that has shown that the Liberal Project and the United Nations Project are not all they’re cracked up to be. Highly idealized, sure, and reaching higher than humans ever have, sure, but they ain’t perfect. As Lal says in his most recognizable quote, his version of the Liberal Project (LP for short) is the complete and total freedom of information (see his quote on “The Planetary Datalinks”). This is also a caricature of Liberalism, because Lal only focuses on the ‘freedom of information’ part of the package, but he also supports, implicitly, all the assumptions that go into the United Nations.

Little did Lal/the game’s writers understand the danger of the Internet. If Lal had lived to 2001, he would have balked at the works of one Hideo Kojima* (or Kojima Hideo in his native Japanese). That work is the Metal Gear series, a collection of interactive novels and movies cleverly disguised as ‘stealth-action’ video games. In the second one, the 2001 Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty**, Kojima, IN A VIDEO GAME, correctly predicted what the rise of the public Internet would do to humanity. Namely, the opposite of Lal’s fear would happen. Instead of some police state controlling all information, and thus preventing freedom, we in real-life learned that the opposite problem can happen—that there is SO MUCH information that we can’t make sense of it all and that we humans would factionalize, not so much around biological identities, as we form new tribes around ‘narratives’ that we like best.

[*Kojima can firmly be planted somewhere between a modernist and post-modernist writer. On the one hand, he primarily deals with spy-dramas in a post-Cold War era, and thus the problems of being a ‘free’ individual in an era defined by top-down superpowers. The other hand, he loves breaking the fourth wall to mock his fanbase, a post-modernist trait; the intent is to knock the fans out of the story in order to get them to be more self-reflective. …Most fans don’t get it.]

[**The overall plot of the Metal Gear Solid series entails a group of rogue AI, and paranormal secret operatives, attempting to control the modern world via information technologies as well as control via language, ideas, and ‘memes’—all post-modernist themes.]

Nonetheless, I can agree with Lal that the freedom of information is key to keeping a liberal society afloat, despite the other extreme problem of ‘too much information, too many voices to understand’. Why? What’s freedom? Never mind the United Nations project, why is freedom so important? Why is the Liberal Project so important, and where did it come from?

Turn back! Turn back if you don’t want to know the answer. Ignorance is more pleasant. It will probably kill you to, but it will be a pleasant death. (Maybe?)

Perhaps we can start with the United Nations and work backwards. What is the UN (and thus Lal’s Space UN) supposed to do? Ostensibly, to be a forum for the great powers and smaller powers of the world to air out their differences and make peace between members. The ideal, peace by politics. World peace by speech and by collective action, all under the purview of one empowered charter. All right. Why one charter, one law for the world? Why a universal peace that is, of all things, an agreed-upon peace?

But let’s get to brass tacks here—the UN would have never worked in a world that did not experience the World Wars, nor would have anyone accepted it without a handsome nation being its face. If the world was not a broken mess from the World Wars, no one would have pushed for the UN to exist. All its potential members would say ‘Screw off! We have everything we need and want to remain independent.’ And what of the handsome nation, the charismatic face for the UN? Why, the US of A, which pushed for a similar (and disastrous) organization, the League of Nations, established by post-WWI and demolished by WWII. It was Woodrow Wilson, USA President 1913-1921, who pushed for the League, and it was Franklin D. Roosevelt, USA President 1933-1945, who pushed for the creation of the United Nations.

And who were these men? Privately, tyrants, but that’s a personal attack; politically they were liberals, who shared a common vision—that Liberal Democracies would come to define the world, as a world of peace and prosperity. Crassly, you can call their vision ‘liberal hegemony’, or the domination by democracies. (So yes, the monarchies and the communists and the like would lose out in their system.) What the hell does that mean? Primarily, you can understand their view as the ultimate conflict-resolution system. Conflict happens all the time, and that’s bad, and violence is (supposedly) the worst way to resolve conflict. In liberal hegemony/domination by democracies, the idea is, just, MAKE everyone follow the same rules—democratic rules. Force—ahem, CONVINCE everyone to become a kind of democracy and thus share the same values as democracy. Everyone follows the same rules, everyone has the same values, everyone can use the same conflict-resolutions methods so that everyone can get on with their lives—to do whatever is in their best, rational interest. At the end of the day, if the nations are happy, so too will the individual citizens of those nations be happy.

…You do realize this is just the same as communism’s goals, but by different methods, right? This eerie overlap is why, at first, democracies of the early 20th century (including D. Roosevelt) were so favorable to good ole’ Joe Stalin and jolly Mao Zedong, until all the murder was discovered.

But, why is conflict bad? Why is the Liberal Project the best way to resolve conflict? Where did the conflict come from? You see, by this kind of liberal thinking, the reason why conflict occurs is because humans cannot agree on first principles. Humans are incapable of agreeing on shared, most basic fundamentals, or axioms, and so the first step is to ‘agree to disagree’. What are examples of first principles and/or axioms? A sample list:

“A human being is [insert a set of attributes here].”

“God does exist.”

“God does not exist.”

“[Insert thing here] is the most important thing for doing this given action the right way.”

“[Blank] is the best way of doing a moral action.”

“Cheese is best served with ham.”

“Cheese is not best served with ham.”

And so on. You can even take this to the opposite end, that in addition to humans not agreeing on first principles, humans also cannot agree on last principles—“Where do we go when we die?”; “What is the most fulfilling life?”; … “What is the most perfect form of government?” Hmm? As you can tell, first principles are dangerous to say the least, because a First Principle is as high and far as human Language and Thinking can go, before it escapes into…magic, effectively. You take a first principle as an undeniable fact, and build upon it from there. Philosophers, Intellectuals, and Theologians, if they are honest, all agree that one cannot escape from First Principles. To do that, you have to escape—being human?

So you can see a legitimate problem in the very real reality that human don’t agree on first principles, or last principles by extension. But then, that gets to the quantum conundrum of ‘how the hell do we agree on anything?’ We’ll get to that much later, if at all, because then we’ll have to dive into philosophy so abstract that it all starts and ends with the same question “How the hell does anything exists?!”

So we won’t get into that, we’ll just stick to simpler history. But all-righty, the history of the Liberal Project is that people don’t agree on the fundamentals and that leads to conflict. You have to then understand world history to understand why this is so strange an insight. Outside the Christian Western cultures, people just—DID things. They didn’t care about silly things like ‘why do we all agree on this?’ or ‘why do those people disagree with us?’ Most of world history is murder, murder made as simple as arithmetic, with perhaps an epic theatre drama lamenting on ‘yeah, we’re all human and we all suffer, sure does suck.’

That’s the closest most cultures get to a universal humanity or universal human values—a literary epic that comments on the nature of suffering. Oh, boy! And then each culture retreats unto like a sleepy dream to recover, if they ever wake up again.

And then those damn-fool Christians come onto the world stage with their freakish, alien ideas! “Oh, there’s an all-loving God who wants to rescue us from the suffering, even though He also permits suffering anyway,” or “Oh, we should love each other because the most perfect God-Man loved all of us and we killed him for being too Nice,” or ‘All humans are made in the image of that Perfect God and we’re all His adopted Children and thus we ALL have basic human dignity!”

UGH.

You get the picture. …You don’t? Good-****in’-damn, people, don’t you know your world history? What the hell are they teaching you these days?! All right, run through it all—Jesus Came and Conquered and kipped off to Heaven; Rome happened and fell apart; Christians lived in the ruins of West Rome and maintained East Rome; a bunch of heresies surrounding Jesus happened; eventually the barbarians who destroyed Rome were all converted into Christianity after many centuries—NOW the Middle Ages! Popes and Kings argued over who had more power than the other; the Church invents Universities (no, I’m not making that up, the Church was pro-science) who then go onto teach philosophy and OOPS! The Universities make more and more dangerous heretics.

You see in the history of the Church, all the great, earth-shaking heretics—those who teach a divergence of the core faith—all the great heretics were either Priests of Bishops. No, not making that up, all the great heretics (by Church standards) were former holy men. Coming in close second were men who had strenuous philosophic training or men who were professional philosophers (such as Peter Abelard or William of Ockham, the Nominalist). Our Reformation poster-boy, Martin Luther (1483-1546), was a Catholic priest who had Augustinian* philosophic training. And he wasn’t even the first. Jan Huss (1370-1415) SHOULD HAVE been the spearhead for the Protestant Reformation, but he had the unfortunate fate of being burned at the stake as a heretic. Luther and the other Reformers just copied the notes of Huss, and Huss in turn was inspired by a number of other ‘proto-reformers’ who failed before him.

[*The philosophy of St. Augustine of Hippo, 354-430; Augustine had views on humanity that many would consider incredibly harsh; Luther, an Augustinian priest, was unfortunately a very neurotic, high-strung man, so Augustine’s harsh views on humanity probably didn’t help Luther’s nerves.]

So what happens then? Protestant Reformation happens, the Catholic Church and Popes have gone off their rockers with corruption scandals, the Hundred Years’ War was just over and now France and Germany are invading Italy (1494-1559), Constantinople just exploded in 1453 and HOLY COW, COLUMBUS DISCOVERED A NEW CONTINENT in 1492; France and England and Germany and Spain are all figuring out if they’re Catholic or Protestant (France and Spain for former and Germany and England for latter), and now the four of them are each a powerful empire in their own right; oops, now Spain invaded England and failed and then Germany had a civil war (the first one) between Protestants and Catholics that ended in 1555…

God, there’s a lot. Anyway, one of the important things that happened with the (first) Germany/Holy Roman Empire civil war was the formation of ‘Cuius regio, eius religio’, at the Peace of Augsberg in 1555. What ‘Cuius regio, eius religio’ means, literally, is ‘Whose rule, his religion.’ It was not, yet, a ‘let’s agree to disagree’. Rather it reflected a political reality of the time, that the person/prince/emperor/king was the guy who actually forced people into a given religion. Hence, at the time, you, dumb peasant, you would follow the religion, Protestant or Catholic, of whatever prince rules you*.

[*And the ugly, complicated side of this is that princes and kings became Protestant or Catholic if they thought it would give them power, and some princes and kings converted because they really believed that the Protestant or Catholic faith was true.]

Again, not a universal peace, especially since the Peace of 1555 was between Holy Roman Empire/German princes; it was not a peace across all of Christian Europe. England was killing its Catholics just as France was killing its Protestants. This new shift in power set the pattern of the European wars of religion that culminated in the biggest war, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). In Europe, most of the land fighting was done in Germany, while on the high seas, pirates were hired to attack shipping lanes and even the early colonies of enemy empires! Now, the whole of the Thirty Years’ War is a long topic to cover, but it lasted long enough for a young boy to be born in the early years and then be killed by it when he was an adult man in the later years.

One-third to one-half of the German population died over the course of the 30 years.

It frankly was the culmination of darkness, and thank God it ended. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) was two separate treaties in two separate cities, Münster and Onasbrück, as a compromise between Catholics and Protestants, sure, but also between the different kings and emperors who ruled Europe, who politicked with each other regardless of faith.

And what was the fight over, then? Between Protestants and Catholics? Surely, it wasn’t silly words over doctrine and dogma? There had to be economic, or political reasons? Why would people kill each other for—spiritual reasons? They’re just words in some book.

They killed each other over divine mysteries. Protestants and Catholics killed each other because they were trying to define who God is and what God is. All those philosophers? Those holy men that became heretics? I’ve read them. I understand most of them. The Protestant Reformation was the first period of history I was interested in, followed by the Vietnam War. What all those holy men and philosophers found was a God that they did not understand. They found a God that was puzzling, who just didn’t fit together right! Why was the all-loving God so confusing? Why didn’t He make sense? Surely, someone got something wrong about God, and I’m going to find out what.

You see, the English word ‘mystery’ comes from the Greek word ‘mysterion’, which means ‘that which is beyond what I can see and beyond what I can say.’ For the Christian, this means that the mysterious God cannot be understood by human means, but God can reveal Himself by talking about Himself, or by what He does or what His Son and Spirit do. It is perfectly reasonable for humans to fear God—mainly because we can’t see Him, but also what He can do, and that He in no way, shape, or form, will ever be ‘convenient’ for us. If you have a Convenient Christ, you don’t have the real deal. He’ll never be within our control or understanding—and yet He talks to us and we can talk back to Him! Strangest thing, ain’t it?

The Protestants said that God was one thing, and the Catholics said God was another. And it went from there. It spilled out, and out, and out, until a whole world died, and another took its place. So now let us spring into the new world, one where Catholics and Protestants, on pain of death, will never really agree on anything God-related ever again. So in that new world, the ‘Early Modern Period’ of the 1600s, they simply agree to—never mention God ever again. Can’t fight over Him if we just politely ignore Him, hmm? Oh! But all Praise to the Almighty! But, alas! That makes another, related problem. After all, if the Christians of that era (and perhaps today) agree that ‘Humans are made in the image of God’—well now if we can’t mention Him, how do we talk about humans then? For previously, it was agreed that humans are indeed, living, rational—that is, ‘thinking’ beings with bodies and souls, and similar to how the body has different parts, so too does the soul. In general, the Christian soul has the Reason, the Will, and the Desires.

The first, Reason, lets a human discern one thing from another, discern lies from truths, and is the part that is most capable (to human degree) of understanding God. The Will is the power to choose, put simply, and the Desires (or ‘appetites’) drive a man forward, give him a direction, gives him possible actions that he can choose or refuse—and the best of the Desires is the Desire for God.

All of this gets thrown out post-Westphalia. Well, okay, the Catholics still teach this as what humans are—the ‘anthropology’ or ‘understanding and knowledge of human’. The Protestants have to think of a new anthropology, a new understanding of humans, based on their new understanding of God—for each branch of Protestantism. It gets bug-nuts pretty quick. In fact, while the Catholics have to keep their anthropology in the closet, both Catholic and Protestant alike on the new world stage now have to find a ‘public anthropology’ that both can say in public discourse without fear of getting their heads removed.

Enter the Englishman, John Locke (1632-1704)*.

[*Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648, and the Peace in ’48. Locke was 16 when the war ended, but England was still in huge turmoil. They beheaded their king, Charles the First, in 1647, and the king was executed half a mile away from Locke’s high school, while he was attending class.]

Now, I’m just learning about Locke myself. (There are so many damn fools you have to learn, you miss some of them.) In a children’s history book, he’s just the guy who says ‘Humans are tabula rasa—blank slates that have stuff written on them’. That is the educational lies-told-to- children. I went off of that for decades. I thought Thomas Hobbes (‘life is nasty brutish and short’) was the more important man, because I thought he was straightforwardly honest. Plus, I grew up on Star Trek re-runs, and Star Trek is a strange mixture of early-era Enlightenment views plus ‘morality plays in space.’ A little bit of Hobbes, J.J. Rousseau, a little bit of Voltaire (Q, anyone? Micromegás?) mixed together—and then Deep Space Nine ruined it by forcing Starfleet to face actual political realities.

No, Locke, as I am finding, is something like a maverick genius, akin to Peter Abelard (1079-1142 Medieval France) or Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527 Renaissance Italy). He’s unlike Voltaire in that Voltaire* is premier smart aleck. No, Locke is the quiet genius who is the most dangerous because (like the other mavericks) he ‘merely provides alternate suggestions’.

[*And David Hume, 1711-1776, Scotsman-turned-Englishman and atheistic Empiricist; just noticed he died in the same year the USA was born. Weird.]

See, to deal with the various problems of his time, John Locke offered something very curious to the antagonistic Catholic and Protestant and Protestant-other factions: He offered a human-agnostic anthropology. See, if ‘Agnosticism’ is the view ‘We do not know if God exists or not’, Locke’s new view of humanity blurs what humans are in order to make all the fighting Christians happy. I am not sure who Locke, the person, is. It may be in bad taste today, but one has to find out the personality of each major philosopher. Most are cads or disreputable men, with intense personalities that combined with their high intelligence makes them unbearable to be around. Just as many are also men who think they can change the world for the better and get frustrated when it doesn’t get better. Anyway, I don’t know who Locke as a person is yet, but he is notable for being quietly dismissive of Christ, in a time when saying so would get your head chopped off.

Locke, effectively, offered an easier, watered-down version of Christianity that many would be familiar with today. His human-agnostic anthropology can be summed up as ‘well we don’t know how the human soul exists or how a person’s interior being is made up’. The soul, the human person, is there, but as we can’t observe souls, we can’t prove them or disprove them. We can make educated guesses that the soul, the human person, does exist, but for everyone’s fair and just safety, we’re going to assume a collection of protections—rights for every human being that protects their nebulous person. Freedom of religion, because we don’t know man’s minds; freedom of speech, because no one can irrefutably deny a person or how they express themselves; protection of property, because we don’t know if they will use that property for good or bad.

(This is a gross but subtle repudiation of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, FYI, who say that a human person consists of definite parts-of-being, and Aquinas went further by saying that (to paraphrase) ‘a human person is many parts—take but one part away and he unravels.’)

And then, Locke went on to dabble more in English political theory and law, working on social contract theory, and his tabula rasa theory growing out of his anthropology, and talking extensively about property rights. Eventually, Locke’s views would dramatically influence how the Founding Fathers of the USA saw government. Effectively, the USA is built on English political theory/common-law, Locke’s liberalism, and Old Testament Christianity—the Founding Fathers drew on the Biblical book of Deuteronomy* for inspiration; they referred to it constantly in their letters.

[*One of the really boring books of the Bible; Genesis and Exodus are fun, but Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers are all those books of oddball laws regarding worship and daily living. Much theology has been has been drawn from the laws—‘why are these strange laws the way they are?’]

Now, I’m not giving John Locke sole credit here. One Curtis Yarvin/Mencious Moldbug* (alive today) has suggested the Crypto-Calvinist Hypothesis—that John Calvin, Protestant theologian, and his personal rule over the city of Geneva laid the template, the groundwork for how all Western liberal democracies developed. On the other hand, one Protestant pastor, who I greatly respect, says that it was not Locke or the Calvinists, but it was the Polish Unitarians who created the secular liberal political theory.

Quick summary: Unitarians reject the Triune nature of God for something else (so, a heretical movement); the movement lived in Poland from about 1560-1650, where they were a tiny minority compared to the other Christian sects and factions. They in turn become popular, first by having an ‘agree-to-disagree’ attitude, and then later by making ‘Cuius regio, eius religio’ unpopular—so that means the princes of Poland couldn’t force their religion on their subjects. The Unitarians then came to positions of power and quietly ruled the scene until they were chased out—to England, where they had a foothold for 200+ years, and they also immigrated over to America.

[*I respect his efforts at analyzing modern bureaucratic culture, but I think Yarvin is a well-meaning man who is well over his head; like other thinkers he gets things wrong and has his own pet political theory, neocameralism—think a monarchy with a king, but the king gets elected and dismissed like a corporation’s CEO. A convenient monarchy, you can say.]

At the end of the day, the modern liberal West was made by Protestants and intelligent opportunists. Post-Locke in the 1600s, all the different strands of Protestantism, and how they adapted to a contentious world, all matured over the centuries. And then those matured Western nations, with their strange, never-before-seen ideas end up conquering the world. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve learned from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) and from Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien, the mainline Protestants gradually compromised themselves out of existence, making way for a more and more human-agnostic Christianity, or creating a secular liberal society that (say Lewis) has all the fruits of Christianity but has none of the sacrifices needed to maintain them. So says my respected Protestant pastor, Liberalism is Unitarian political theology. The cruel joke is that, now that Protestantism compromised so much to make way for an agreeable secularism, the secularism is now pushing back, hard, against its Protestant roots.

It’s a common phrase today that ‘politics is downstream from culture.’ Sure, I can see that. Nasty, unpleasant people on the Left and Right then add ‘but culture is downstream from law.’ And, yeah, I can see that, too, and why the extremes of Left and Right try to seize the law in order to act like mad social scientists and social engineer their populace. BUT. I insist, then, that there is another level to this—that ‘law is downstream from theology.’ But where then do we get theology? It’s a mystery, hmm?

…Hmm? Damn. Space United Nations. Well okay, like with Morgan, Zakharov, and Deidre’s entries, this became more of a history lesson (oh boy) than, you know, talking about the faction. But why should I? We see what those three and Lal’s vision of humanity is like, because we are already living them to a degree!

Hmm? Lal’s personality? Right, uh, have to get to that too. He’s a swell guy. It says something that despite his haggard brown face and short, salt-and-pepper beard, he still has a serene smile.

Like most other protagonists in gritty, down-to-earth Political Fantasies*, he’s seen as the idealist who suffers greatly for his ideals. He lost his wife, and it’s implied he wouldn’t mind cloning her back to life (gross as it is) (see his quote in ‘Biomachinery’). He is also well aware of how every faction is going to hell in a handbasket, and is just behind Miriam in criticizing technologies if they threaten human rights (see his quotes in ‘Neural Grafting’, ‘Mind/Machine Interface’, and ‘Recreation Commons’ for examples). As is the eternal dilemma with the Liberal Project, Lal wants to play nice with people who can’t play nice. Lal will always be walking a knife’s edge between his ideals and his practical needs. Sound familiar?

And yet, because of his circumstances on the Planet Chiron, Lal wants to make the Space UN, but he’s also, you know, a supreme leader for life of his faction. He’s the one man holding it all together—who will follow after him? He is one responsible man. Will there be others like him?

[*You know, instead of High Fantasy or the like? We have Political Fantasy, such as with House Atreides with Herbert’s Dune or House Stark/Jon Snow in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones. You know, Political Fantasy, for grumpy old men who want more out of life but who are too practical, too pragmatic for high-falutin’ fairy-tall-tales? How the hell do the fairies do their taxes? Gimme something concrete to chew on as I write about space wizards and dragons.]

Peacekeeping Forces Playstyle: Freestyle the game until you win. Okay, there’s more to it than that. You need a direction to work towards or an opportunity to exploit with your faction’s flexibility. Lal was my most played faction.

The Peacekeeper’s main advantages aren’t necessarily in hard, numerical mechanical advantages. They have bonuses to talents, population, and voting with their only real penalty being towards efficiency.

It says something that the advantages of the Liberal Project do translate well into a video game. The Peacekeepers can grow their cities larger than normal—more people allowed in, more workers who can work. Their bonus to talent means that they can reach Golden Ages easier. (A Golden Age is a mechanic where if you manage a given city well, and its populace well, it will enter into a temporary golden age where it will get large bonuses). This reflects that, yes, in a well-made Liberal polity, the best do rise up to the top with little obstacles. It is merits that matter most, and if that merited person shines, so do the rest (‘meritocracy’ is the word). A large population that is allowed to hone their talents, their merits to the peak? A method of human flourishing? And people are flabbergasted on how the West won.

Now, the penalty to efficiency is supposed to reflect the costs of, something. ‘Efficiency’ as a mechanic is supposed to force you, the player, to plan your cities well. The equation that measures your faction’s efficiency score is complicated, but it is affected by number of cities, number of population, how spread out the cities are. A low efficiency score lowers the amount of money earned.

It makes sense as a game mechanic, but when translated to a story, the Peacekeepers’ penalty to efficiency has bizarre implications. It could be that the Peacekeepers’ have a really expensive bureaucracy; it could be that they do have a welfare state going on, but welfare is always expensive; no mention is made of bureaucratic cliques/factions of bureaucrats, which always happens with bureaucracies (see Byzantine Empire, Chinese Dynasties, Ottoman Empire). It could be that all those damned committees who plan meetings to plan more committee meetings eat up most of the money.

Anyway, the lowered efficiency score means the Peacekeepers have to do city planning very well. Otherwise, they have enough human capital to maximize whatever project they put their minds to. And, assuming Lal survives long enough for a Planetary Council to form, his larger population and innate bonuses to voting means he can ram through any planet-wide policy with ease, unless the remaining factions completely stack the deck against him. Like, for example, when Lal’s A.I. script goes wild and repeals the ban on nuclear weapons so that he can conquer the world, and nobody can get enough votes to shoot down the repeal…

…

Gawd, why’d I do this to myself? I’ll release my finishing thoughts on another post.

More to follow!