The Enlightened Manifesto

There are as many different ways to see the world and proposals to make it better among those influenced as there are influenced individuals, so we can't speak of a single unifying principle like the Promise Doctrine for those loyal to The Court.

There is however a semi-fabled text, known as the Enlightened Manifesto, of ultimately unknown authorship, that has been often cited to discredit the Promise Doctrine. There are many publications circulating around libraries and bookstores under this title, each one from a different author, often claiming to be the one true artificer of the manifesto, but these are all believed to be reflections of the original text at best and outright hoaxes at worst.

The original text wasn't a book at all, but a series of letters sent to notable influenced business people and aristocrats over the course of several years. Their existence was only made public when a mysterious fire destroyed a veshite aristocrat's house. The fire conveniently took place during the course of a widespread miner riot in Ill-Vess, quickly consuming the entire building before the busy authorities had time to respond.

By the time firefighters got there, the whole place was little more than smoking cinders. Among these, they found the charred corpses of the aristocrat, his family, and an unidentified adult partially melted to a metal safe. It is when the relatives of this aristocrat opened the safe that they discovered part of the letters, though these relatives announced the letters were stolen a few weeks later, allegedly before they had the chance to copy or even study them. The actual content of the surviving letters was thus lost amidst a sea of sensationalist journalism, wild speculation and probably a hefty dose of misinformation as well.

The refutation of the Promise Doctrine however is remarkably similar in all the contemporary texts and, unlike all the other claims, has never been publicly denied by these "accidental" receivers of the letters.

The many forms of the Enlightened Manifesto defend that the use of a strong military force as deterrence is not only a waste of resources better allocated to other ends, but that paying the largest beastfolk clans tribute would guarantee the safety of The Steppes just as much by but a fraction of the costs. Furthermore, any system created and operated by humans is by its very nature imperfect, rendering large armies an unacceptable hazard that could be used to oppress its own people or precipitate a war against others as command over them passes through different hands. More ominously, the manifesto also claims that the kinds of threats an army is prepared to deal with are but a mere and insignificant fraction of the dangers to which humans are exposed at any given time.

A similar argument is made against the drive to explore the world, but with notable differences. By the same principles, the Manifesto warns against the consequences of the wrong people gaining control over the knowledge and artefacts of the saurians or feyfolk, but their solution is not to stop looking for them, rather to harshly regulate this search, allowing only what they call the enlightened to access the findings. Only the enlightened, they claim as a regrettable but unavoidable fact, are prepared to process, analyze and deal with these deeper truths and powerful relics and use them for the greater good for everyone. The enlightened, the letter purportedly explained as an example, are already on the verge of gaining the power through these means to "neutralize" the beastfolk menace more easily than any army ever could.

It is because of this that the enlightened and the rest of their goals must remain hidden, for the very knowledge of these goals, they claim, endangers their mission and humankind as a whole. Just like one wouldn't give a loaded gun to a toddler no matter how much they love them, the enlightened will continue to nurture and work to keep other humans, their children so to speak, from harming themselves, among other things by restricting access to these dangerous artefacts.

That, the letters allegedly conclude, is "the promise to our children".