"It has long been observed that what is commonly referred to as the “grand game” of geopolitics is not, in fact, a game in any conventional sense, but a system of negotiated pressures maintained by a limited number of actors with sufficient capacity to influence outcomes across distance.
These actors, such as the heirs of the Tradehouses of the Heart or the Khaanephan shah's, operate under the assumption that stability may be produced through controlled imbalance. Conflict, when contained and directed, is not a failure of the system, but one of its primary functions.
The cost of this arrangement is not borne equally. Those who participate directly in the structuring of these pressures incur minimal immediate risk. Those who exist within the fields generated by their decisions: laborers, soldiers, dependents, absorb the majority of the resulting instability. This distribution is considered acceptable, insofar as it does not interrupt the continuation of the system itself.
It is therefore inaccurate to describe such outcomes as unintended. They are, rather, consistent with its design." - Tserr’vek, On Exchange, Obligation, and the Maintenance of Order, 2008 SDS, pg. 1
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"The races of the Heart of the World have made measurable progress in reducing the mutual resentments that once defined relations between them. Conditions once considered impossible have become ordinary through time and progress. Human, yinglet, baxxid, and others now live beside one another with a degree of continuity that previous eras failed to sustain.
This development is widely regarded as evidence of advancement. In many respects, this assessment is correct.
Yet it has been repeatedly observed that societies which achieve prolonged internal stability often begin to expand the scope of their desires beyond necessity. Comfort becomes expectation. Expectation becomes appetite. Appetite, when shared at scale, acquires political and economic momentum of its own.
At this stage, the outward movement of such societies becomes difficult to distinguish from compulsion. Resources, labor, land, and influence are drawn inward from peripheral regions in order to sustain the increasingly feverish requirements of the center. Resistance to this process inevitably produces new resentments, and these resentments, in time, are incorporated back into the system that created them.
Historical precedent for this pattern is abundant. The Ten Seasons War, waged within the Heart of the World six centuries ago, remains among the clearest examples: Betelan’s conquest of Dinnlan was justified publicly through arguments of security, continuity, and regional stabilization, while privately driven by Betelan’s unslakable thirst for iron, of which Dinnlan possessed considerable reserves. The resulting occupation enriched the administrative and industrial centers of Betelan for nearly a century while rendering large portions of Dinnlan economically dependent upon the very structures imposed upon it, with Betelanan chauvinism only being actively scrutinized, questioned, and dismantled centuries later. Today, similar processes may now be observed in relation to Tilmuhl, toward which numerous states and trade concerns increasingly orient themselves due to the growing demand for commodities such as kilcane and other materials deemed necessary for the continuation of modern economic life.
Thus the cycle resumes under altered conditions, while continuing to describe itself as progress." - Tserr’vek, On Exchange, Obligation, and the Maintenance of Order, 2008 SDS, pg. 84