Re: New Reality Seeds
 

This leads to a campaign of hunting down nonentities like high degree Masons and whoever decides who gets into Skull and Bones or perhaps who controlls invites to the Bilderberg Meeting or Bohemian Grove.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

I can understand Centrum not thinking that democracy is all that and a bag of chips, the way some Homeliners are conditioned to — different political tradition, different assumptions. But they’ve been travelling cross-time for a while now, and they have a lot of bright people, so I’m not sure that those assumptions would remain unexamined. They must have seen enough reasonably functional democracies by now that they should accept that it’s possible, the same way that Homeliners can accept that efficient autocracies are possible.

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.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Honestly, I think Centrum will end up deciding the problem with democracy isn't that it doesn't work, full stop, but that it isn't a ultrastable like their system.

"Clearly our system's the best; it undid the apocalypse, smashed what was left of feudalism, and built a truly equal system it's place. What's democracy ever done? No, you don't get credit for solving problems you created. Why's it always with Nazis with you people? And that wasn't solved by democracy anyway! You had the help of a power tripping psychopath, that you did nothing about... Never argue with a Secundan, they never can look at things rationally."

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

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.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

I believe that Centrum would be considered a communistic bureaucratic meritocracy. It does seem to have a low level of discrimination and a high level of equality of opportunity for its citizens, which is an admirable accomplishment, though the lack of diversity of cultures, opinions, and outcomes prevent it from evolving into a utopian society. It is probably close to Star Trek's Federation while Homeline is more similar to Firefly's Alliance.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Centrum has no problem with believing democracy can "work" for various values of "work" in the source material. Their meritocracy just clearly works better as far as they're concerned. The mystery about Homeline that causes them to imagine a secret illuminated cabal is not that the democracies of Homeline haven't collapsed yet. It's how the world managed to survive so long with such mutually hostile nuclear-armed nations at such odds. Their own history and ideology inclines them to think that MAD could not possibly work for so many decades.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

... and to be fair to them, there are plenty of people in Real Life who are surprised that we made it, and in some cases are certain that a conspiracy exists that prevented it, rather than our merely surviving due to good planning and a lot of dumb luck - e.g. people with good self-preservation instincts being in the right places at the right times.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

The problem is that equality can be made two ways: raising everybody up to the level of the best, or bringing everybody down to the least.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Or bringing everyone to the middle. Lowering the top while raising the bottom tends to be more effective than the former because inflation occurs and more effective than the latter because deflation occurs.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

It occurs to me that Centrum - and for that matter Homeline - might sensibly ask when surveying a new timeline, "Okay, so we know what they say their system of government is - but who's really in charge?"

It's a rational question; I'm sure that we could all wheel out examples of democracies where the candidates on the ballot papers were mysteriously almost always elder sons of the wealthy oligarchy, theocracies where the College of Cardinals was largely made up of younger sons of the oligarchy, republics which were effectively run by self-sustaining bureaucracies, and monarchies where the monarch would have been very silly indeed to contradict certain powerful nobles. There's doubtless a bit of that in every government, and taking a nation's word for what their actual system is would be a mistake.

But equally, getting carried away with this is a rapid route into the dark heart of ugly, paranoid conspiracy theory, and bringing too many prior assumptions to the analysis will have the usual dangerous consequences.