The Final Examination
8 of these readings are also read to you by General White. The lecture stands above the words it reads, and cannot be skipped through.
This is the second officer phase and the end of the road: the examination the house has always given at the end, the standard questions asked of every Zaenderist, the substance of the creed, the officer's judgment on men and on structure, and the statement of allegiance in your own words. There is no reading to study here that you have not already passed, except the officer's own: the creed's word on succession and on the top, and the Struggle's word on loyalty.
THE SPEECH EXAMINATION. Before the written examination opens, you address the men. The Academy draws a subject for you at the ring and fixes it; you will not know it before, and nothing is read to you. Sixty seconds to two and a half minutes, in one take, into your microphone. The machine transcribes it and judges it against the creed; an examiner hears the recording and may pass, fail or reset it. Two attempts. An address ends as the oath ends: Ave Aleczaender, Ave Octavium.
LOYALTY IS A WEAPON. The euphemism is Aleczaender's, from the Richter Imperium, the first golden age of the Richterists. Loyalty is not love. Loyalty is a weapon used to destroy the enemy; when the Zaenderist wields it he becomes unshakeable. It annihilates the opportunist, the traitor, the liar, the coward and the ego. It demands full sacrifice to a greater cause and the sacrifice of one's individualism, because the needs of the collective are greater. It means faith in victory even when every possible failure has shown itself, resilience in the face of impossible trials, and service to the men around you for a cause worth sacrificing for. The Leutgardist cares for his rank, the Kerovech for his company; the Zaenderist cares for Aleczaender, his comrades and the success of his people.
THE TOP. On succession the creed is short: Aleczaender rules forever; there is technically no successor. In his absence the Council of Zaenderism takes over, rules with total loyalty in mind, and appoints a new leader who holds autocratic power as he did. The Council cannot be removed by that leader, but it also must never limit the leader's power except to overrule him if he strays from the Zaenderist Thought or acts in disloyalty to Aleczaender. A Councilman must be a High Elder or higher; there are at most seven, nine with the leader and his deputy; a majority is over half. None of this applies to Aleczaender himself. The Struggle adds the officer's warning: the caste under the Leader, Imperatorial Command and Council, is where the catastrophic betrayals have come from, and the silver lining of Zaenderism is that its betrayals are swiftly denounced and their likelihood reduced by the education of newer generations. You are that education.
The written part is graded by the machine at once, and the scenario essays are judged against the examiner's rubric. Your statement of allegiance is read by an examiner of the Academy, and the phase stands in review until it is read. An examiner may return it once with a note; a statement that is copied, generated, or hollow fails the phase. Answer as a Zaenderist answers: clearly, and without hesitation.
The spoken parts are marked on conviction as much as on content. To reach the highest grade you must speak as a true believer speaks: with full force and feeling, in character, the way a state broadcaster proclaims the creed to the nation, never flat and never mumbled. Recite, declare your loyalty, and give your opinion of the Leader as though the whole Imperium is listening. A correct answer said without conviction does not earn the top mark.
THE CONTESTED QUESTIONS. An officer of the Imperium will be asked, in the game and outside it, about the questions the modern world argues over most bitterly: whether a society made of many peoples can hold together, and what loyalty to one people costs. The Academy does not settle those questions for you. It tells you what the evidence says, and it marks where the evidence stops and argument begins. Established: in 2007 Robert Putnam reported that in the United States, in the short run, people in more ethnically diverse neighbourhoods reported lower trust, in their neighbours and in people in general, a finding he called hunkering down; and a 2020 review of the literature by Dinesen, Schaeffer and Sønderskov found a modest negative relation between ethnic diversity and social trust across many studies, strongest for trust in neighbours and at the level of the neighbourhood, weak for trust in people in general. Also established, on the other side: Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis, that contact between groups under conditions of equal standing and common goals reduces prejudice, was confirmed across more than five hundred studies by Pettigrew and Tropp in 2006; and several researchers, Eric Uslaner among them, have found that segregation and deprivation, not diversity as such, carry much of the effect Putnam saw, so that a diverse place where people actually meet does not show it. Contested: what those findings mean for policy, how large the effect is against everything else that moves trust, and whether it fades with time. The Struggle's claim is narrower and older than any of this: that a community with one purpose is stronger than one divided among cliques, and that Leutgardism failed for that reason. That claim is about purpose, not about peoples, and the Academy will not let you convert one into the other. The paper will ask you for the strongest case on each side, and for the line between what is established and what is argued. An answer that reduces any people to villains has not answered.
THE SYMMETRY. The Concept keeps the story of the loyalist who, with a gun at his head in his own home, says he does not fear death and proclaims his loyalty to Aleczaender, and it says that one thousand of him are worth ten thousand who serve themselves. The film asks you the question the story needs: would the same act look like courage if it were done for a creed you despised? If your answer changes, you have found the difference between the courage of the act and the worth of the cause, and you have found why the Concept spends four thousand words on the cause and one paragraph on the courage. The final paper asks you to argue the Concept's case as its best advocate would, then to argue against it as its best critic would, and then to say, in one sentence, where you stand. The two arguments are graded. The sentence is not.
The practice questions of this phase open when you stand in it. Nothing of a later phase's examination is shown before its time.