You Cannot Command Us Not to Trust You

The Prince of Perhaps the Stars refuses allegiance for the most principled reason imaginable: They don't trust Themselves to deserve it.

JEDD Mason has a side. There are Masons willing to die for Them, Myrmidons who have drilled in secret for months, Delians who would abandon the stars. A million people might follow, if only the Prince would let them. But the Vs — the symbol of the new order, of trust in what Jehovah Mason will build — appear on Romanova's shoulders only in fragments. The Blacksleeve Masons marching under the Oath wear no Vs. The Myrmidons carry them only individually. The students at Campus, 122 of them in a city of a million, are the Prince's entire formal following.

Because JEDD won't permit more. Not yet. Not until They know what Their new order will be. They don't trust Themselves with the allegiance of people who have trusted Themselves unconditionally.

The narrator, 9A, who watches all this through satellite imagery, hits the logic square: "99.99 percent is good enough for anyone except mathematicians, philosophers, and You. You overkindly, wonderful, infuriating . . . ​You're too much."

This is not false modesty. This is a specific philosophical position: that the right to accept someone's allegiance requires certainty of what you'll do with it that most political figures don't even pretend to seek. You don't join JEDD's side without JEDD being sure it's a side worth joining. And JEDD isn't sure yet.

The counterargument from 9A is equally specific: "You cannot command us not to trust You."

Not: you deserve our trust. Not: you're definitely right. Just: the act of trust is ours to give or withhold, not yours to refuse. You can fail to merit it. You cannot un-grant it once given. The students at Campus wearing the Vs aren't waiting for JEDD's permission. They're deciding for themselves. JEDD saying "don't trust me yet" is information, not a command. Information they've received and weighed and chosen to discount.

This is one of the stranger things about trust: it doesn't quite work the way either party thinks. The trusted person imagines they can refuse it until they're ready. The trusting person knows they've already given it, and it's no longer the trusted person's to refuse.

There's a version of this that's just flattery dressed as philosophy — the humble leader who disclaims and discounts and in doing so becomes more trustworthy by the act of disclaiming. Palmer writes it straight enough that JEDD's refusal feels genuine: They really do believe 99.99% isn't enough, and They really are frightened of what they might do with unconditional loyalty. The Prince is not performing humility. The Prince is genuinely terrified.

But 9A is right that terrified humility is not a valid reason to make other people carry the cost of your uncertainty. The students at Campus have done their own math. They have surveyed the field and decided that the unknown new order JEDD will build is better than the known orders they're watching collapse. They're not naive — they're the Prince's peers in years, and they've watched the same disasters play out. Their trust is evidence, not category error.

"You may not trust Yourself, my Prince, but they trust You. And I trust You."

The deepest version of this problem: what if 9A is wrong?

JEDD's caution might be justified. The Oath MASON swore — which Utopia was already in, without anyone quite knowing — suggests forces shaping JEDD's future that even JEDD hasn't consented to. Someone built them into that obligation. And maybe a Being boundaryless and unfamiliar with time has better grounds for uncertainty about Their own future actions than the students at Campus can imagine.

But even if JEDD turns out to be wrong, even if the new order is broken, 9A's point survives: the 122 students still got to make that choice. Their trust still belonged to them to give. The moral error (if it comes) would be JEDD's failure, not theirs for trusting.

What you cannot command is not whether you're trusted. What you cannot command is whether the trusting was the wrong thing to do.

Perhaps the Stars is the fourth and final Terra Ignota novel by Ada Palmer.