Today’s Quotations

We are, undeniably, tool-using creatures. Eldrae sómintár. More, we are undeniably creative creatures, builders and makers – eldrae mahavár – who build in order to have tools, and have tools in order to build. An endless cycle of creation. Observe, too, the lesser Flames: the problem-solving ingenuity of the bandal, the hunting tools fashioned by the vorac, the multifold creations of the cúlno.

Creation, then, is the nature of the Flame.

Is it not then clear that both the tools of creation and the fruits of creation, to such poor extent as they may be distinguished, are necessary parts of the inviolable self? These are the means by which it acts upon the world. One who does not control these means is reduced to the level of the naked savage, less than the lowest of animals, denied the ability to express or to better their inner nature.

Beware, O students mine, of he would would take, control, or deny you means, for in this way he would make himself your master…

Nephrite, student of the philosopher Sardonyx

Governance is, fundamentally and always, a technocratic art. The questions of how to deal with a recession, or a pandemic, how to manage the infrastructure of a city, how to regulate the value of a currency, how to keep the peace – these are no more matters of choice than the structure of an aqueduct, the foundations of a highway, the cure for the bloody flux, or the value of pi. They are technical problems with technical solutions, even when the solutions are known poorly, or not known at all. Even ethics – for those who do not confuse it with morality, into which realm we may not trespass – is a scientific field whose implementation is a technocratic matter, not subject to popular preference.

The wise man does not seek the agreement of his neighbors before shuttering his house against the storm; the doctor does not consult onlookers before cleaning a wound; the good man does not ensure the victim was well-thought-of before saving a life; and nor then ought we to require such before executing the duties of our offices in accordance with our merits.

This is the fundamental flaw of democracy: it trades away competence – and, indeed, reality – for a fool’s pleasant illusion of control. And, of course, for someone to blame when it turns out that you needed competence after all.

Sardal Amanyr-ith-Amaranyr, Minister President of the Council of Ministers, 1651-1739

Cultivating Mighty Oaks

Cimór gazed out over the lectern as her audience finished connecting. The virtual space was crowded with avatars – the glowing spheres with emoticon faces that nym-avatars defaulted to, naturally, hiding identity, culture, and species – haloed with the expected glows marking slow connections and packet loss. Even those telerepresenting from less backward worlds found their connections impaired by the exigencies of encapsulation and multibounce routing.

The avatars themselves were arranged in groups of six: each representing the bundled communications of a single supercell’s membership, six cell leaders from different polities – carefully selected to be safely independent and yet of potential aid to each other, as well as synergistic personality matches – who would be given cross-communications at the end of the introduction. Each group, so far as it could perceive, was the only group in the auditorium.

The last avatar flickered into being, its “face” set to apology-but-necessity. Glancing down at the lectern, Cimór watched the extranet security panel flicker through its final checks, then spill out blue confirmation that the layered overweaves were properly secured, and the termination points were, at least, as secure as dumb agents were able to determine.

A flick of a finger brought the opening of her presentation up in the well, the COG’s tree logo, and the embracing text: Freedom’s Seed. Access to Tools and Ideas.

“Gentlesophs,” she began. “Thank you for attending. At this introductory talk, we’ll be discussing how to find and recruit new members for your seedling, while maintaining the proper security, deniability, and above all, cell structure. I’ll be presenting general strategies along with specific notes on adapting them to different types of polities and cultures, as well as both memetic and software tools to assist in assessing possible candidates for suitability and reliability, as well as eliminating potential spies, saboteurs, and agents provocateur.

“But first, let’s talk about the sort of candidates you should consider – a subject which will also answer a question many of you doubtless have, namely, why we recruited you.

“The first division to be made is that of the loud and the quiet. The loud, whichever kind they are, should be immediately dismissed as possible candidates, although the reasons differ between the loud and violent, and the loud and… shall we say less violent, in their use of violence is generally casual, rather than targeted.

“We do not support the former because even on the rare occasion that they espouse that they’re emulating the Drowning of the People, the Saryala Disarming, or the Spontaneous Disarchy of Dorentil Major, in practice the overwhelming majority of people whose plan is violent revolution not only cause a lot of collateral death and destruction along the way, but tend to be the sort of kveth-sakkar whose primary interest is being free to oppress someone else. We have, obviously, no interest at all in supporting that – and from your perspective, the reasons why such make bad partners should be obvious, even apart from the high-profile attention such activities tend to draw.

“We do not support the latter, meanwhile, for a variety of reasons – not least that many of these ‘activists’, too, are all too happy to support a heavy cratic hand just as long as it is perceived as working for them. Frankly, gentlesophs, we support groups with libertist values out of enlightened self-interest, and those who merely improve a few of the proximate results without addressing the ultimate causes do not provide a useful return on our investment.

“To you, on the other hand, they are dangerous. The sort of activities they participate in, especially the ones that are themselves coercive, are hell on operational security, break up the cell structure, and attract a lot of attention – the kind that makes more constructive activities harder to carry through under scrutiny, and can be easily spun to turn the general population against them – or, depending on the ruthlessness of the security state, to justify mass arrests or massacres. In either case, they’re just meat for the machine – and so if a seedling goes down this path, we drop it from the network.

“The recruits you want are the quiet ones. The tools and ideas we can supply are attuned to supporting those with an eye on the long term, and with a desire to live free, well, and under the radar in the meantime – and to build. That’s who you need to grow all the institutions of a civilized society in the shadow of the uncivilized, until one day your would-be masters wake up to find themselves redundant, ignored, and impotent.

“That’s why we selected you, and who your best candidates for recruitment, in turn, are likely to be.

“Now, any questions before we move on to practical matters?”

– Freedom’s Seed COG, introductory talks to proto-seedlings