What, to the best of your ability to express it in currency here, is the typical cost of a citizenship share? E.g. if the Empire made contact tomorrow, what sort of people would citizenship be immediately affordable for? (Or would finding anything the Empire would value enough to enable trade be the bigger problem?)
I think the author has dodged this particular question before: Questions and Answer Time Again | The Associated Worlds
So, er, (noncanoically) somewhere in the range of half to one million USD equivalent in useful things, it looks like.
Iâm pretty sure exchanging for Esteyn is going to be the major hurdle, given the wild market fluctuations first contact with technologically advanced extraterrestrials is going to cause.
Itâs quite possible that those hypothetical first human citizens are going to be mostly research-related people who could leverage the value of patents and media-related people who could leverage the value of copyrights.
Itâs quite possible that those hypothetical first human citizens are going to be mostly research-related people who could leverage the value of patents and media-related people who could leverage the value of copyrights.
Iâm not sure to what extent this would actually work inasmuch as the patents, and more so the copyrights, are mostly being held by megacorps in the first place, and I suspect that even the eldrae would probably admit that the likes of Jeff Bezos or Robert Iger (to say nothing of Elon Musk) are probably going to be pretty poor citizens. OTOH the âpretty poorâ could in practice come out to âthey get the citizenship and then get gleefully sued into the ground shortly afterwardsâ.
I imagine perhaps there might be a few non-directly-megacorp media figures who had held on to enough of their copyrights to be worth bothering with. Unfortunately the first candidate in this category who comes to mind is J.K.Rowling and⊠well see above under âpretty poor citizensâ.
A lot depends on how much of existing property distribution inequality survives first contact. If the answer is âitâs just left standing, any further contracts pile up on topâ you might see the professional landlords (and large-property-owners in general) come in even before the media figures, though theyâd also be even more prone to the sued-into-the-ground thing.
It might take many years before prosperity trickles down enough to enable the citizenship of (some) non-assholes [maybe with the occasional really rare earlier example of someone who inherited millions from their rich parents but accidentally happens to be many standard deviations nicer than the average from that category], and even then charity sponsorship cases (of the âthis one exceptional person clearly deserves this but the hurdle is too high for them to plausibly get there anytime soonâ variety) might still be more common.
(I donât actually recall offhand - what is the eldrae/Imperial position on charity? It feels like to a large extent itâs âthatâs silly, if the recipients were meritorious enough theyâd have gotten rich themselves and if they arenât you shouldnât be rewarding themâ - possibly with some edge cases such as immortagens and maybe the occasional obviously unrelated accident [and I imagine much of the latter would be handled by insurance, but there could plausibly be some weird coincidences that insurance just so happened to not cover] - but I could easily be misunderstanding the whole thing.)
They do do something like charity, but they expect something out of you for the donation they have given.
âŠOh. Iâve missed that part, then. (I actually recall reading it at some reasonably-recent point but must have forgotten.)
I guess this means the really blatantly meritorious cases (and/or the most blatantly poverty-trap ones, and/or the ones that look most like the local governments are actively conspiring against them) would get offers to the effect of âOK, youâre clearly not getting that far out on your own before you accidentally starve or something and even if itâs not that bad we donât want to just wait until you get there by sheer luck alone, so weâll try to get you some money under a nice short, oh letâs say 144-year loan, and hopefully you repay that thereâd be serious trouble for you if you donâtâ. Maybe some of the less clear cases get similar offers but with slightly harsher terms.
âŠthere might also be quite a few other lolrandom (by Earth standards) projects getting sponsorship offers with similar loan setups, but thatâs more of a Post-Contact Hilarity matter.
Let me take a moment up front to expound briefly on immigration considerations in general, because long before you get to the question of who can afford a citizen-shareholdership, you start dramatically reducing the set with the question of who is permitted to purchase one in the first place.
The Empire, after all, simultaneously runs the most permissive and the most restrictive immigration policy in the Associated Worlds. There are, for example, no restrictions on personal versus business travel, and no restrictions on length of stay (and thus no special status for permanent residents). There are no work permits. There are no limits on owning property. There are no visasÂč. You just turn up, and if they admit you, you can stay as long as you like.
If they admit you.
The Empire is a mite particular about who it wants hanging around, and while some countries on Earth at least pretend to exercise some discretion with regard to citizenshipÂČ, the Empire both takes those things a lot more seriously, and applies them to all admissions.
To summarize: you can and will be refused entry by the Imperial Guard of Borders and Volumes for any of:
- posing a security threat (including citizenship of a threat nation or membership in a proscribed organization);
- being a public health risk (including insanity, and thatâs by their standards, not yours or your countryâs);
- being a felon or habitual misdemeanant (and again, thatâs by their standards, nor yours or your countryâs);
- being obviously indigent;
- lying to your inplacement officer, or having been previously deported;
- or failing to sign and seal in good faith and under an alethiometer your acceptance of form I-180.
That last, of course, is the big one.
You can find the text of the major affirmation (that you agree with and are attached to the principles of the Fundamental Contract) over here, and that also notes that the full form includes your agreement to respect the law and pay the ESF on earned income during your stay.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to contemplate the percentage of potential applicants from Earth likely to be culled by this clause, but I note that this is where a lot of what section three of the Charter labels as âwidely-accepted dyspraxic defect, philosophical incompatibility, or other unassimilabilityâ comes in. (And that while they have received over history more than a few diplomatic complaints about large sections of other countriesâ populations being rejected as lunatics, politsÂł, bad religionistsâŽ, shopping-cart-non-returners, litterati, people who talk at the theater, etal., said complaints are generally taken as evidence that the policy in question is all of good, right, and necessary to preserve social trust, harmony, and civilized standards in general.)
Having said all that, yes, theyâre expensiveâ”. As I said back here, the market price of a citizen-share is determined by the ability of the capital & obligationsⶠattached to that share to balance the Dividend and provisions likewise. That ainât cheap; itâs basically saving/investing enough money to live off without depleting your capital.
(I believe JHPrimeâs figure is based on an old comment of mine reading:
To come up with a decent comparison â and I reserve the right to change this if I think I was wrong â itâs probably something of the order of buying a nice house in a good neighborhood, in some suitably average city here.
Iâll stand by that until I have a better way to compare the really hard to compare. Call it $750k in hard currency.)
On one hand, itâs inevitably going to be expensive. It has so many features that regular citizenships donât (remember, if you get something for free, youâre the product), starting with actual clearly defined contractual limits, and extending on through such things as a perpetual revenue stream that will more than repay its value over time, complimentary full-coverage crime insurance, all the Barbarian Repellentâą you could ever need, and so on and so forth.
On the other hand, itâs good that itâs expensive. It is, after all, the Worldsâ leading premium citizenship brand. When people get something for free, they donât value it, and/or start feeling entitled to it as a gift from the magic entitlement-satisfaction fairies. The high asset value of a citizen-shareholdership is a reminder to everyone that Civilization Is Not Free.
On the gripping hand, as I also mention in the referenced post, itâs not impossibly expensive for most people. For one thing, it comes with an income stream, which you can use to at least partially cover a loan to get itâ·. There are also entire organizations which exist to sponsor/invest in new immigrants, for a fairly wide variety of reasons.
(When I used the example of the girl turning up at inplacement with nothing but her abuelaâs book of family recipes, a dream of opening a restaurant, and a helping of determination - well, I wasnât kidding, folks. The Empire loves people like her. Finding sponsorship and investment for her restaurant will be downright easy.)
((Incidentally, for Post-Contact Hilarity purposes, some people are going to be mightily offended that â well, letâs just say that down on the USâs southern border, we have would-be immigrants willing to undergo many privations and then work miserable jobs in shitty conditions to get a better life for themselves and their families. It should not surprise anyone, but inevitably will, that said sponsorship organizations will find it a much better deal to invest in putting Esteban, there, through Space Engineer School than in the inplacement of one of Americaâs finest college-educated commies with a major in political whining.))
Plus, of course, the reason I talked about the admission requirements so extensively up there (and, indeed, there rather than naturalization is where most of the barriers are) is because you donât have to get the citizen-shareholdership first. You can come and stay and work and earn money as a non-citizen resident, and as such can earn the price of your citizen-share in a real economy, not some half-crippled emerging market. That goes much quicker.
(The Imperials like this option, because this helps select for people likely to prosper in their society. It also solves, to a large extent, the problem of getting your hands on hard currency. The exchange rate vs. the gAu sucks.
âŠI feel like Iâve commented elsewhere on things that tend to have value in first-contact scenarios, so Iâll dig that up and get back to it.)
Anyway, this post is long enough on its own, so close for now and continue on specific points later.
Footnotes:
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Well, technically, there are four visas. Two of those donât change anything in the inplacement process: one, the I-series, simply notes that you chose to clear inplacement at the consulate at your point of departure, rather than at your port of entry, and the other, the N-series, is used by people who live next door to an exclave and cross the border every day, and so donât need to repeat the whole process every day. The other two which do bypass the normal inplacement process are the D-series (which also serve as proof of diplomatic immunity), issued to accredited diplomatic personnel on the grounds that there are some nasty little fascists you occasionally have to talk to; and the V-series, which require that a citizen-shareholder in good standing has taken full personal responsibility for everything you do in the Empire, on pain and penalty of sharing all your pains and penalties - including loss of citizen-shareholdership if you get yourself deported. Either is about as rare as a snowball in a supernova, and as such are irrelevant here.
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The US, for example, requires in theory for naturalization âgood moral characterâ and âattachment to the Constitutionâ.
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If you have strong views on things the government should be forcing people to do or on how other peopleâs property ought to be allocated, the alethiometer will pick up that you are blatantly lying about your attachment to certain principles in re liberty and property, and leave you to hold a bitchfest in the extrality area with the rest of the slavers. Also, by their standards, this requires obligation. Strategic defaulters and adulterers beware, youâve basically made a public declaration that your word is no good. Like I said: painfully high standards.
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To pick the obvious example, there are those certain religions with, 'hem, ideas about the proper place of women in society, which tend to attract the response that they and the god that produced them can both fuck off back to the shithole rapetopia that they crawled out of. Yes, they will judge you for your beliefs. What the hell else are they going to judge you on?
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Of course, unlike the fees most countries charge for naturalization, when you die - or renounce your citizenship, although not when you are stripped of it - the citizen-share returns to the Empire and its value is paid out to your estate. An Imperial citizen-shareholdership is an investment, and not one purely expressed through the Dividend.
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And while the Empire has high expectations of its citizen-shareholders, it also has high expectations of itself where its responsibilities to its citizen-shareholders are concerned. Lots of polities say things like âthe first duty of any government is to protect its citizensâ; rather fewer task themselves with, say, making good the victims of any crime within their territory, or a certain amount of battlecruiser diplomacy.
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And, no, they donât use something wacky like the USâs credit rating system. Itâs more like the Japanese system in which they ask relevant questions like âdo your numbers make sense (i.e., can you actually pay this)?â, âdo you have a history of default?â, and âare you, fundamentally, a sophont of integrity?â
Probably not the one Iâd have picked to illustrate, that, inasmuch as itâs mostly merely pointing out the superiority of utils over fuzzies insofar as the notional point of charity is to solve the damn problem, not merely to let you feel good about yourself for helping. Especially since the latter often ends up prolonging the problem indefinitelyâŠ
I would rather recommend here:
Not Quite a Trope-a-Day: Blue and Orange Morality | The Associated Worlds (eldraeverse.com)
(read the section discussing mélith) and
A Question Grab-Bag | The Associated Worlds (eldraeverse.com)
(scroll down to the section discussing vices and virtues, specifically greed and charity).
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Very optimistically for the Earthicans, Iâd expect somewhere between 99% and 99.999% to be eliminated, and further expect that the majority of the exceptions would likely be one or more of the following:
- (likely the largest category) not sufficiently corrupted yet on account of being very young, but also consequently incapable in terms of not actually being adult enough to consent properly, which makes them not-very-eligible in other ways
- extremely downtrodden, and/or otherwise isolated, in ways that would make it very hard for them to even find out that the offer exists, never mind actually be capable of travelling anywhere near a spaceport
- tied down to what they feel is their calling, such that their disappearance would cause (what they would consider) undue distress to way too many of their neighbours, until and unless they train a successor in their job and maybe not even then
Youâd probably still get a few plausible applicants, likely mostly people otherwise in the third category who did manage to train a successor, and/or had their previous lifelong job become illegal (or, less likely, profoundly obsolete) under them such that they cannot continue it on Earth any more.
I cannot name any likely candidates offhand, not being sufficiently familiar with the relevant kind of street economy âŠI guess the likes of that one ceviche lady.
Itâs always fascinating to me when I find someone who thinks less of humans than I do in the wildâŠ
How accessible are Empire-grade pyschedesign services outside the territory of the Empire? IOW, if someone is refused entry on the grounds that their sanity is not up to snuff, how easy is it to get that corrected?
All else aside, Iâd be shocked my own self not to find at least one practice located, for your convenience, in the starport extrality area.
Itâs not that I think less of humans, itâs that I feel like those requirements are unrealistically high when applied to humans who just arenât normally wired to think in those ways.
But maybe Iâm misunderstanding what the requirements actually mean (I recall having commented according to a very long requirement list that Iâm awkwardly not finding any moreâŠ), and/or maybe I just hadnât met (and/or hadnât recognized) the people who were actually close to this level.
(Overall it feels like any humans who are sufficiently egalitarian are almost always insufficiently propertarian, and vice versa, with the exceptions being mostly those who have accepted the status quo as deeply unfair but too big to challenge, which also doesnât sound like it would qualify. But, again, Iâm fairly sure I originally had some harder-to-overcome problem in mind that I canât currently find a source on.)
In retrospect - I should have probably commented about it but forgot - I agree that thereâd probably be a large (compared to other relevant categories; probably over 0.01% worldwide, much more concentrated in California) population of self-modification-nuts (of the kind that IOTL might try to connect experimental cybernetics to their brain) whoâd be happy to show up to one of those psychedesign clinics to make sure their philosophy is corrected to something that the Empire finds appropriate.
(There might also be an even larger amount of people trying to fob off their small children onto the Empire to be educated there. How well would that work is a hard question; my guess is âprobably not veryâ, but Iâm not very confident on the reasons for such.)
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â(There might also be an even larger amount of people trying to fob off their small children onto the Empire to be educated there. How well would that work is a hard question; my guess is âprobably not veryâ, but Iâm not very confident on the reasons for such.)â
Probably very poorly, since Eldraic âpublic schoolsâ are high school or college level, not preK-high school.
I think itâs interesting that you use the word âegalitarianâ there, not least because itâs something which no-one there would think to use as a self-description of their society, but also because itâs one of those dangerous words with a wide spread of implications in English.
Which is not to say that it is entirely wrong: there are features of their society that would read to us as egalitarian: isonomy (one law even-handedly applied to all, in practice as well as in theory); a lack of both cultural differences (there is no high vs. low culture divide) and segregation by social and/or economic class (in both city layout and permissible event planning); and genuine meritic appreciation.
(Which is to say, while humans often possess a lamentable tendency to dismiss those who appear beneath them in socioeconomic status, provided youâre skilled at whatever it is you do and do it to the best of your ability, even the humblest clerk or laborer in the Empire will earn himself a nod of respect and admiration from those he passes on the street, however exalted.)
Itâs just that none of those things, in their view - and nor, for that matter, does esteeming liberality, generosity, and kindness as high virtues - detract from the fact that theyâre elitist to the bone and proud of it. Just ask them, and you too can receive a very lengthy lecture series on why excellence is better than mediocrity, achievement is better than sloth, knowledge is better than ignorance, virtue is better than its lack, and as a logical consequence, greed, ambition, and striving make the galaxy spin.
They love greatness, and they love people who manifest greatness, and have no problem with the rewards of it being distributed accordingly; unto those who create a lot of value, a lot of value will be given, and - by and large - look upward with admiration for achievement, downward with respect for striving, and in both directions with collegial comfort.
(The human tendency to look up and down with jealousy and scorn, respectively, strikes them as indicating something unpleasant and theyâd rather not get any of it on them, thanks so much.)
Very badly indeed, since pre-university education (i.e., just about all of it up until the 15-19 age range) is taught at home (with the aid - possibly - of private tutors, and the aid - definitely - of online, AI-assisted mnemonesis-assisted simulation-space-assisted, etc., courses). There are no schools to do the educatinâ. What youâd be looking at is âfind someone to foster my child, pleaseâ, which is a much harder row to hoe.
That said, as seen here, for example, people like the Agalmic Education Foundation and the Technic Imperative produce copious amounts of freely downloadable educational material which is available almost everywhere in the Worlds, even - and especially - in those polities which would prefer their children didnât receive an education quite that comprehensive. (Or quite that liberal.)
Feels like part of the problem for humans here is that itâs nontrivially hard for a human-on-Earth to manifest greatness (in noticeable ways) in the first place even if they would otherwise have it, at least if they did not already have the benefits of inherited greatness-rewards from their family.
âŠthough I guess for particularly-exceptional cases even Earth has ways of finding out, most of the time (Carl Gauss and Srinivasa Ramanujan werenât born in particularly higher-class families), and the Empire doesnât have the kind of absolute poverty that makes it hard in a modern-or-earlier Earth context for yer average clerk-or-laborer to actually be able to apply their non-labor-related talents.
(Imperial sophotechnology might also make it easier to discover hidden talents that the sophont in question didnât realize they had in the first place; I do wonder what the position on that is.)
Come to think of it, one problem that on face value Iâd expect to also show up in the Empire is the âknow the right peopleâ thing - i.e. that folks with pre-existing connections would have a lot more opportunities to advance. But that might be mitigated by the eldrae position on favors as very serious business such that they almost certainly wouldnât be dispensing those to just some friends unless said friends had already done something else for them.
Side note: Imperial inplacement procedure considered as a proxy for the scaled up shopping-trolley test - i.e., to strongly select for those people who will send in their ESF cheque every year without the aid of a massive bureaucracy to extract the money from them.
âŠif it works in this way, thatâs going to be a big problem for any ADHD-or-otherwise-forgetful folks⊠which would unfortunately also include a good deal of the smarter and/or more liberal humans. Iâm guessing memory trouble is a fixed problem in the Empire, but Iâm not entirely sure how, and I suspect the practical answer is âhave their muse(s) remind themâ, which might not necessarily qualify for this particular test.
[EDIT: on further thought maybe the test is âdo they actually do it when just reminded, as opposed to, like, having to actually be sued or somethingâ? It would certainly mean that memory retention problems donât directly ruin too many otherwise good candidates, though it also means that the shopping trolley analogy isnât that close. But it was just an analogy anyway.
I also imagine that most people with memory problems - especially for the problems closer to Alzheimerâs than ADHD, where itâs not too closely tied up with actually-nice things - would just fix them once thatâs an option; the hard part might be being allowed to reach the area where it is an option, but that doesnât necessarily have to be Imperial territory. Um, how did you phrase it, âstarport extralityâ, right?]
âŠCome to think of it - I think Iâve seen it mentioned somewhere but Iâm not very confident - how does the Empire deal with what we would call neurodivergence? It feels a lot like the answer could be âlike, it doesnât just happen, thatâs dysgenesisâ, but even if this is in fact the case, there would probably still be edge cases where it could come up.
(âŠwandering in from lurksville)
To the first point, the concern is not to select against the sorts of people who might forget. The concern is to select against the sorts of people who think itâs acceptable to just blow it off. Memory issues ⊠well, frankly, any modern soph who tries to keep their entire brain in the inbuilt meat part is kinda weird anyway, and accepting the assistance of electronic or other aides-memoire to remember things is not only acceptable, itâs expected.
Which leads to the other point, about neurodivergence. To begin with, the Empire is polyspecific, and even members of the same species arenât all running on stock hardware. The degree of neurodiversity in that population would put Earthâs biggest weirdo collection to shame. Additionally, theyâre perfectly happy to examine, say, an ADHDerâs collection of traits and say, hey, with a bit of support here, and a tiny tweak there, you can soar on those hyperfocus and intuitive leap superpowers without also forgetting to eat or do laundry!
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I quote: provided youâre skilled at whatever it is you do and do it to the best of your ability, even the humblest clerk or laborer in the Empire will earn himself a nod of respect and admiration from those he passes on the street, however exalted
To strive, fundamentally, is what earns you respect and admiration. That doing so, in a society which doesnât let idiot status games overpower its ability to meritocracy, usually causes one to experience a hard take-off in oneâs awesome solves that manifesting problem and allows the Empire as a body to continue to feel smug about its ability to suck out the most productive and interesting parts of less enlightened politiesâ populations like a cosmic libertist vampire.
(With that paragraph re greatness, what I am meaning is that, for example, no-one resents or begrudges the CEO of All Good Things, ICC his tremendous wealth, his private leisure moon, or the shintai statuette of him in the shrine of the AGT corporate kami as a literal demigod of retail logistics, because of his great achievements and value-addition to the universe. Such achievement is not expected of everyone - just that no-one envies those who outpace them. Admire, aspire, yes, but not desire to depose.)
I quote: a lack of both cultural differences (there is no high vs. low culture divide) and segregation by social and/or economic class (in both city layout and permissible event planning)
tl;dr In Imperial culture, the classes do not self-segregate, which means those connections are far more distributed than you might imagine. Just about everyone will have people from all over the metrics in their social circle, not to mention the fine tradition of xicésésef networking (which most closely approximates to the Chinese guanxixue, only without some of the unfortunate implications) which permits just about anyone to tap their extended networks.
Six Degrees of Gilea Cheraelar, anyone?
On a more general note, I think that part of the issue here (for both the discussion and for people attempting to successfully immigrate) is that oneâs finding oneself in a very different social background and many core assumptions are, um, different.
Looked at from the outside, those brought up in Imperial culture look at our political, social, and economic relations and see, for the most part, a clusterfuck in which we end up in the defect-defect box of the Prisonerâs Dilemma all the time - as everyone thinks everyone else is out to get them and responds by being out to get everyone else - and a lot of the selection process is because, frankly, they donât want to import that sort of trouble. âBetray them before they betray youâ is a shit basis on which to build a civilization, and yet it is implicit in so many of our structures - despite the fact that we are, by Earthâs standards, a high-trust society.
[To use work in general as an example, anyone at any level - executive, manager, or basic employee - who tries to do the equivalent job there according to current US rules and customs will crash and burn more spectacularly than a Boeing stuffed with magnesium powder and lithium batteries.]
To succeed requires the ability to understand that the cultural core of Imperial citizen-shareholdership is understanding that things should not work that way, and that because things should not work that way, everyone has made a conscious commitment to harmonious cooperation in the great project of Being A Civilization. Defectors need not apply - and insisting on behaving as if this was a low-trust society is a species of defection - and will be shown the door.
Then none was for a party; then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor, and the poor man loved the great.
Then lands were fairly portioned; then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers in the brave days of old.
- Horatius at the Bridge, Macaulay