“I found it hard at first,” she continued, “to believe that the corruption could be so innocent. I was sure we’d uncover some incidents of the Anonymous stifling suggestions which came from the Cousins themselves. I found none.” She froze a moment. “Let me clarify that. I didn’t just find no incidents of the CFB conspiracy squashing Cousin-initiated movements, I found remarkably few confirmable Cousin-initiated movements, at least relating to matters of political policy. The number of letters advocating particular political actions or policies seems to spike or fall primarily in reaction to sudden outside events, the Masons or the Anonymous, or in response to world-famous incidents like the Mycroft Canner murders. These spikes are short-lived, usually normalizing after a few weeks. The information I have seen suggests that, if not for the Anonymous controlling the CFB, the Hive’s core political policies would have been dictated all these years by wild short-term oscillations of opinion, resulting in a chaotic and panic-driven system incapable of long-term stability. I wanted to ask the former Censor Vivien Ancelet to testify about this. Obviously, since the Censor was also the Anonymous and running this conspiracy, that is not appropriate, but I did put the question to their Deputy Censor, Jung Su-Hyeon A-ancelet Kosala.” She tripped over her own ba’child’s name here, her eyes ranging the benches as if afraid someone would rise to cry nepotism, but no one did. “It is Jung Su-Hyeon’s belief that, if these reactive political swings had been allowed to dictate policy, the Cousins would have suffered crippling economic decay over the past century, or even fallen apart, rather than remaining the second-largest Hive. In brief…” Here she paused, with the face of one who looks out over the cliff’s edge, and must jump. “In brief, this conspiracy’s effect has been to conceal and protect the Cousins from the fact that the feedback system does not work as a form of government. For many things it works well—local issues, disaster response, social protections, health and human services—but it does not work for political decisions, the quick but considered responses to actions by other Hives, or to global crises, that all governments need to be able to make. The feedback system cannot do it, and has only ever seemed to do it thanks to corrupt intervention.”