New Reality Seeds

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Having them waste time on every half-functional democracy they meet looking for the Secret Masters just makes them look stupid. Unless of course they’re right, and any really successful “democracy” really is being run by Illuminati, and it’s Homeline, with their sentimental attachment to dysfunctional populism, who are stupid.

I think they could reasonably conclude they are half right, because I actually think they are.

There are really two parts to government:
the tactics and implementation part, which in any really effective government is in the hands of subject matter expert bureaucrats, who are more or less the people Centrum thinks should run everything;

and a policy and goal setting part, which can work OK regardless of how it is done, provided whatever mechanism is in place sets policies more or less in line with the beliefs of the population. Centrum lets the bureaucrats decide this too, and ensures that alignment by indoctrinating everybody believe the same things. Democracies just indoctrinate belief in democracy and then poll everybody to see what they want, which clearly has extra failure modes, but has the advantage of still working when your indoctrination abilities are more limited. Other successful systems basically work the same way, they only have to convince people to agree the *system* is the right way to do things, not to agree on everything. You can work with any of them really, gradually improving their indoctrination processes until everybody does agree on the goals, at which point it really no longer matters how the policy decision makers selected, since they'll know what decisions need to be left to the bureaucracy and have the "right" policy goals regardless of how they get into office.

In a lot of ways, it is a parallel to the theoretical route to ideal communism. Once everybody has the right beliefs, the state isn't really important anymore, since everybody will behave correctly without need to be told to, and it can "wither away", except Centrum doesn't think it particularly needs to.