to the Constitution of the Republic of Erekia
Drafted at Selvar, March 1971 · Enacted June 1971 · Ratified by referendum September 1971 · In force from 1 January 1972
As amended by the Supplementary Act of 1989 and the Supplementary Act of 2008
WHEREAS the Republic of Erekia, having endured the governance of named authority and the consequences thereof, including the concentration of executive power in a single public identity during the years of the Council chairmanship, and having witnessed the reduction of national governance to a syllable screamed from a balcony and repeated until it became indistinguishable from the state itself;
WHEREAS the Assembly recognizes that governance conducted under named authority produces, by its nature, the conditions for the worship of personality, the substitution of individual reputation for institutional judgment, and the erosion of collective deliberation into the management of public image; and that a name is a thing to scream, and a face is a thing to love past the point of sense;
WHEREAS the Assembly further recognizes that it has been proposed, by a philosopher writing in this same year, that impartial judgment may be secured by requiring decision-makers to deliberate without knowledge of their own position in the society they are designing; and that this Republic honors the debt owed to that principle while acknowledging that a thought experiment and a constitutional provision are not the same instrument, and that what the philosopher proposes, this Amendment requires;
WHEREAS the Assembly affirms that the purpose of anonymous governance is not to diminish the persons who serve but to ensure that the work of governance is encountered by the public as work — as outcome, as consequence, as fact — rather than as the achievement or failure of a name;
NOW, THEREFORE, the Constituent Assembly of the Republic of Erekia does enact and ordain the following Amendment to the Constitution:
1.1. The Directorate governs. The Directorate is not known.
1.2. There shall be established a governing body of the Republic, to be known as the Directorate of the Republic of Erekia (hereinafter “the Directorate”), which shall exercise the executive functions of government as defined in this Amendment and in such implementing legislation as the Assembly may adopt.
1.3. The Directorate shall consist of seven (7) members, to be known during their service as Directors. The seal lifts twenty years after a term ends, or sooner if the holder dies, and then the record is opened and the country reckons with the work.
1.4. The Directorate shall operate as a body of equal authority. No Director shall hold rank or precedence over any other. No presiding officer shall be designated. The deliberative chamber shall contain a single oval table with seven chairs of identical construction, so that no position at the table presides; no nameplate, insignia, or distinguishing marker shall be affixed to any chair. The chamber shall be maintained under a constant ambient sound sufficient to prevent the clean recovery of any single voice by any listening instrument.
2.1. Each Director shall serve a term of twelve (12) years from the date of assumption of office.
2.2. A Director may be invited, by the procedures of Part III, to serve one (1) second term, consecutive with the first. No person shall serve on the Directorate for more than twenty-four (24) years, and no person whose service has once concluded shall be selected again.
2.3. Terms shall be staggered by seat, such that the seats fall vacant singly and in rotation. The initial schedule of staggered terms — by which the first seven Directors shall serve initial terms of unequal length, assigned by lot, of no fewer than five (5) and no more than twelve (12) years — shall be determined by the Transition Commission established under Part IX, and shall not thereafter be altered. Upon the conclusion of each initial term, all subsequent terms for that seat shall run twelve years.
2.4. A Director who dies in office, or who becomes permanently incapable of service, shall be replaced through an accelerated selection conducted under Part III, the replacement serving the remainder of the vacated term and eligible thereafter for one full term.
2.5. A Director may resign. Resignation shall be tendered to the Agency in writing, by cipher, without stated reason, and shall be accepted. For every purpose of this Amendment, including the clocks of Part IV, the term of a Director who resigns ends on the date of resignation.
3.1. The Directorate shall exercise the executive authority of the Republic in the following domains: national policy formulation; the allocation of national resources, including water; infrastructure and development planning; public finance, including the solvency of state institutions; public safety and territorial security; international negotiation; and such additional domains as the Assembly may designate by ordinary legislation.
3.2. The Directorate shall deliberate and decide by majority of those present, a quorum being five (5). Every vote shall be recorded by cipher in the sealed record, including every dissent, save on a question taken by weight under Articles 3.6 through 3.9. A Director who dissents is bound by the seal to carry the dissent in silence; the protection of the dissenter is the record itself, which shall keep the fact of the no until the clocks of Part IV release it.
3.3. All decisions of the Directorate shall be published as policy directives of the Republic, unsigned and unattributed, under the seal of the Directorate, and shall be entered upon adoption in the registers to which they pertain. The directive states what is decided. The record keeps who decided it.
3.4. The Directorate shall not legislate, and shall not adjudicate. Those powers remain where the Constitution placed them.
3.5. Within the chamber, Directors shall be addressed and recorded by cipher or by seat, and by no other designation. No signature shall be made in the chamber, and no handwriting shall leave it, handwriting being a signature.
3.6. Where a question before the Directorate is of such gravity that the eventual attribution of votes would itself govern the voting, any Director may demand, before the question is put, that it be taken by weight. The demand shall be spoken in the chamber and recorded by cipher. The demand, once made, is not debated and is not refused.
3.7. A question taken by weight is decided as follows. Each Director present receives two stones of identical face and unequal core, drawn from a common tray: the heavier assents, the lighter declines. Each Director passes one stone, sleeved and unobserved, into the vessel of decision, and the other into the vessel of discard. There is no abstention on a question taken by weight. The taking shall be administered by a single officer of the Agency, who shall enter the chamber for the taking and see nothing the balance does not say.
3.8. The vessel of decision shall be weighed upon an instrument that is a balance and not a scale, against a counterweight sealed above the weight of one voice short of the majority of those present and below the weight of the majority itself. The balance falls, or it does not. The question is carried, or it is not. No count shall be taken, no margin computed, no stone examined. The vessel of discard shall be neither weighed nor opened; the two vessels shall be returned together, and the stones mingled before any hand sorts them. The stones return to the workshop that made them, which keeps no ledger.
3.9. Of the taking of a question by weight, the record shall keep: the question, the date, the demand by cipher, and the fall of the balance. It shall keep no other thing of the taking, because no other thing exists. The memoranda of decision enter as Article 11.1 provides. The vote of a Director on a question taken by weight is known to that Director alone and dies with her; what is afterward said of it is testimony and not record. This is not a seal, and no clock releases it.
4.1. Upon assumption of office, the identity of each Director shall be sealed. The seal shall operate as follows:
(a) The Director’s name, likeness, biographical particulars, and all information from which identity could reasonably be inferred shall be classified under the highest tier of state confidentiality.
(b) The Director shall be assigned a numerical cipher of no fewer than four (4) digits, generated by the Agency, which shall serve as the sole identifier of the Director within all Directorate proceedings, internal records, and classified communications. The cipher shall be committed to memory and shall never be written by its holder. The cipher format may be revised between cohorts to prevent the recognition of pattern across terms.
(c) The Director shall not bring the cipher into the world, and shall not bring the world into the cipher.
(d) Upon sealing, the Director shall give consent by the oath set out in Schedule A, which is an oath of disappearance and not of loyalty, an oath of loyalty being a thing sworn to a face.
4.2. The period of sealed service begins on the date of assumption of office. The seal itself persists beyond service and is lifted only as provided in Part IV.
4.3. The seal applies equally to all Directors regardless of prior public life. No person who becomes aware of a Director’s identity through authorized channels shall disclose it while the seal holds.
5.1. Prior to assumption of office, the Agency shall, in consultation with the incoming Director, establish a cover narrative accounting for the Director’s altered circumstances during the period of sealed service.
5.2. The cover shall be true at every point at which it can be checked. The Agency shall establish and maintain such employment records, institutional correspondence, postal arrangements, itineraries, and physical particulars — including, where the cover requires it, the named streets of places the family will never visit — as are necessary to sustain the narrative against any inquiry the Director’s family or acquaintance might reasonably make.
5.3. The Director’s family shall receive the cover as truth. They shall not be informed of the service, its nature, its duration, or its existence. The seal admits no exception for love.
5.4. The Director may correspond with family through the office known as the Center, which shall receive, carry, and forward such correspondence under postmarks consistent with the cover. The contents of the correspondence shall be the Director’s own words in the Director’s own hand; the Center is a courier and not a censor, and its review extends only to the protection of the seal.
5.5. Approaching and following the conclusion of service, the Agency shall wind the cover down across a period of not less than one (1) year, by gradual and unremarkable steps, so that the return of the Director to ordinary life occurs without ceremony and without seam. There shall be no ceremony for the ending of a thing that was never allowed to begin in public.
6.1. The standing administration of the seal — the generation and custody of ciphers, the construction and maintenance of covers, the identification of candidates for the Selection Panel, the operation of the Center, the keeping of the sealed records, and the secure destruction of working papers — shall rest with an administrative body established for that purpose, herein “the Agency.”
6.2. The name, seat, staffing, and internal organization of the Agency shall themselves be sealed. Its officers shall be recruited by its officers, under procedures that are themselves sealed and inherited. Its budget shall be a single published figure within the national appropriation, itemized to no one.
6.3. The Agency shall answer, under seal, to the Constitutional Court, which may inspect its conduct upon its own motion or upon referral by the Constitutional Procurator.
6.4. Nothing done by the Agency shall be signed.
7.1. The Directorate shall convene in a chamber whose location is not published, beneath premises of genuinely ordinary public business, and shall be reached by a secure passage from public infrastructure, so that no person may be observed to enter the chamber who could not be supposed to have ordinary business above it.
7.2. Security personnel stationed at the ends of the passage shall verify cipher credentials by the card and not by the face, shall not meet the eyes of the credential holder, and shall not initiate greeting or recognition. This protocol is not discourtesy. The eyes are where a person is, and the person is not what is admitted.
7.3. All working papers produced in the chamber — notes, annotations, drafts, and any material bearing handwriting — shall be collected at the close of each session and destroyed within seventy-two (72) hours. Destruction shall be performed by hands that are not the hands that collected the papers, the chain deliberately broken, so that no person holds both the knowing and the unmaking.
8.1. Candidates for the Directorate shall be chosen by a Selection Panel constituted under seal by the Agency, applying written criteria of selection.
8.2. The criteria shall be written and may be revised only by persons who are themselves ineligible for selection, and shall be applied by persons other than those who wrote them. The author of the criteria shall not sit on the Panel.
8.3. The Panel shall not select for brilliance. It shall select for breadth of competence; for the demonstrated incapacity to leave a wrong figure alone; for a temperament suited to deliberation without recognition; and for the capacity to be unfindable without ceasing to be a person. These qualities shall be assessed against the candidate’s professional record and conduct, not against credential.
8.4. The identities of Panel members, and the fact of any person’s candidacy, are sealed.
9.1. Selection proceeds in four stages, in this order: the candidate is identified; the candidate is evaluated; the candidate is recommended; the candidate is invited. No stage shall be omitted and no stage binds the next.
9.2. Identification shall be communicated to the candidate in writing, by ordinary post, in a plain envelope, in language stating that the candidate has been identified for consideration for service under this Amendment and stating what the candidate may expect. Silence following identification is normal and does not indicate a decision, and the notification shall say so.
9.3. Evaluation shall comprise such structured conversation, discreet professional inquiry, and assessment of judgment and resilience as the Panel directs. The whole process, identification to invitation, shall run not less than six (6) months, it being the design of this Article that no person arrive at the invitation quickly.
9.4. The invitation shall be communicated in writing in the same manner as the identification, shall state the term of service, the operation of the seal, the provisions made for family, and the year in which the candidate’s name would be released, and shall provide the means of reply. The candidate shall have six (6) weeks to accept or decline. Silence is declination.
9.5. A candidate who declines shall suffer no consequence of any kind. The fact of identification, evaluation, recommendation, and declination is sealed, and the candidate may not disclose it.
10.1. The Agency shall maintain, for each Director, a sealed record comprising: the true identity and biographical particulars; the cipher; the dates of service; the votes, by cipher, on every matter before the Directorate, save questions taken by weight, of which the record keeps what Article 3.9 permits; the memoranda of decision; and any notation entered under Part VI.
10.2. No portion of a sealed record shall be destroyed, altered, or redacted prior to its opening, except by order of the Constitutional Court upon a finding, published in redacted form, that specific material poses a danger that outweighs the public interest in the eventual whole.
11.1. Every decision of the Directorate shall be entered in the sealed register of decisions, together with the date, the votes by cipher save as Article 3.9 provides, and the memoranda on which it rested. Entry is made upon promulgation in the registers to which the decision pertains, and promulgation may follow adoption by the publication cycle of the register concerned.
11.2. The seal on a decision record lifts twenty (20) years after the entry of the decision in the register. Upon lifting, the record shall be open to any citizen upon application to the public records office.
11.3. An opened decision record discloses the ciphers and not the names. The identities of the deciding Directors remain under the longer clause that governs the living and the recently dead, and are released only as Article 12 provides. A country shall be able to read what was decided before it can read who decided it.
12.1. The seal on a Director’s identity lifts at the earlier of the following:
(a) twenty (20) years after the conclusion of the Director’s term; or
(b) two (2) years after the Director’s death.
12.2. In no case shall the identity seal lift during service.
12.3. The lifting of the seal does not wait upon the wishes of the living. The seal does not lift for the living who wish to explain themselves; it lifts on the schedule, and the schedule is the same for every holder.
12.4. The registry shall open the record in the year the schedule appoints, or as soon thereafter as the record can be prepared. The duty admits no remedy against the registry for administrative delay; the clock is the law’s, and the lateness, where it occurs, is the country’s to notice.
13.1. Sealed personal papers deposited in the public archive by or concerning a person of the record who was never a Director — including the papers of the architect — shall open twelve (12) years after the death of the person, this being the clause that governs the dead, which runs shorter than the clause that governs the living.
14.1. When an identity seal lifts, the Agency shall deliver the name, together with the opened sealed record entire, to the designated profile writer of the newspaper of record, who shall prepare and publish an account of the service.
14.2. The profile writer shall be a journalist of standing, designated by the newspaper and not by the state, serving for such period as the newspaper determines. The profile writer shall have the whole of the opened record and shall exercise independent judgment. No organ of the Republic shall review, approve, or censor the profile before or after publication.
14.3. Where the sealed record contains a notation entered under Part VI, the profile, and every official retrospective of the service, shall be required to cite the notation first, before the dates of the service and before any of the work.
14.4. A released Director shall not be required to participate in any publication, appearance, or ceremony connected with the unmasking, and shall not receive errata concerning herself. Beyond the delivery made under Article 14.1, no notice of a lifting is given to any person, the family included; the publication is the notice.
15.1. A breach of the seal occurs when a Director, by intention, negligence, or involuntary disclosure, communicates the Director’s identity, cipher, or the fact or substance of the service, or any knowledge held only by reason of the service, to any unauthorized person while the seal holds.
15.2. The clause does not remove a Director who tells. It notates her.
15.3. Upon confirmation of a breach, a sentence describing what the Director did shall be entered into the sealed record, where it shall stand at the head of the Director’s name when the seal lifts — before the dates of the service, before any of the work — the first thing every profile and every retrospective is required to cite.
15.4. Where the Director enters the describing sentence in the Director’s own words, the notation shall be entered in those words and not in softer ones. The record shall preserve the distinction between a confession authored and a confession extracted, a confession authored being the greater record.
15.5. The term of a notated Director continues. The work continues. The notation is the whole of the consequence the clause provides; resignation under Article 2.5 remains available and is never required.
15.6. No breach shall result in criminal prosecution of the Director for the act of disclosure. The Republic holds its Directors accountable through the story that will be told about them.
15.7. No recipient of a disclosure commits an offense by having heard, nor by acting in their own ordinary right upon what they heard. The withdrawal of one’s own money is no crime. The looking is not a crime that can be charged. A recipient who further publishes the identity of a serving Director may be liable under the general confidentiality statutes; the Director is not answerable for the recipient.
15.8. A Director may report a breach — the Director’s own or another’s — to the Agency, to V.O.I.C.E., or by entering a statement before the assembled Directorate; and where the question of a breach reaches the Directorate, the members shall be asked whether any member wishes to enter a statement, and an entered statement shall be received without interrogation.
16.1. There shall be a Constitutional Procurator, to whom any citizen may make, in confidence, any statement touching the operation of this Amendment, including confession of conduct adjacent to a breach.
16.2. The Procurator’s office is a part of the machine. Statements received travel upward under seal: matter touching the integrity of the seal shall be conveyed to the Directorate and, from its founding, to V.O.I.C.E., as a notice and not as a charge.
16.3. No statement made to the Procurator shall of itself ground a prosecution of the person who made it.
Inserted by the Supplementary Act of 1989
17.1. There shall be an office known as V.O.I.C.E., charged with the integrity of the seal. The letters of the name are assigned no expansion by this Act or by any instrument of the Republic.
17.2. The integrity of the seal shall rest on procedure, and not on the accident of whether a given officer can sleep.
17.3. The daily attestation. On each day of service, before entering the chamber, every Director shall answer, to an officer of V.O.I.C.E., the three questions: any incidental contact; any unanticipated personal communication; any condition affecting capacity for the work of the next two hours. The answers shall be given and recorded without elaboration.
17.4. The annual review. Each Director shall undergo, annually, a structured review conducted by a trained officer of V.O.I.C.E. The review shall be conducted by observation and conversation; no method inconsistent with the dignity of the Director’s person shall be employed. The officer’s notebook shall not be shown to the Director. The officer may record findings beyond the Director’s words.
17.5. The logs. V.O.I.C.E. shall maintain an office whose only function is to read the anomaly logs of the public administration and to ask, of each line, whether it touches the integrity of the seal. A line that touches the seal shall be pursued by procedure and attributed to no accuser; the finding-out, like the deciding, is done by no one.
17.6. The family relations of Directors are sealed also from the reviewing officers, who shall conduct the review without being told whom the Director loves.
17.7. V.O.I.C.E. shall administer the unmasking schedule formalized by the Supplementary Act of 1989, in conjunction with the Agency and the registry.
18.1. Where the sitting Directorate determines, by a vote of no fewer than five (5) of its members, that a circumstance has arisen which the ordinary instruments of government cannot meet without placing the constitutional order itself in danger, the Directorate may convene a joint session consisting of the sitting Directorate and the cohort before it — that is, the seven former Directors whose terms of service most recently concluded, without regard to seat — fourteen ciphers in all.
18.2. The joint session may adopt, by majority of the fourteen, orders of extraordinary administration, including the suspension of public assembly and the requirement of documentation for travel between the provinces. No order of the joint session may suspend the seal, alter this Amendment, or extend a term of service.
18.3. An order of the joint session shall run for ninety (90) days and may be renewed once. It may not be renewed a second time, and no subsequent joint session may adopt an order in substance the same within five (5) years.
18.4. The joint session may stand up such temporary administrative organs as the execution of its orders requires. Such an organ is the order’s administrative face; it shall bear a name, issue the public instruments of the order under that name, and be dissolved when the order lapses. What cannot be signed shall nonetheless be stamped.
18.5. Every order of the joint session shall be, in every particular, lawful: drafted, adopted, recorded, and sealed, every authorization present. The record of the joint session — whose emergency it was, what it was invoked to prevent, and whether it prevented it — shall be entered in the sealed register and shall open seventy (70) years after entry, this clock being set, deliberately, to outlive the persons the order reached.
18.6. The names of the fourteen remain governed by Article 12 and are not extended by this Article.
19.1. The architect holds no portfolio, casts no vote, enters no session, learns no cipher, so that the architect cannot be suspected, ever, of having built a machine she meant to operate, and so that the design would be cleaner than its designer, would outlive her preferences and her affections, would be a thing and not a reign.
19.2. The criteria of selection shall be written by the architect and applied by a panel the architect is not on, from which application the architect is removed.
19.3. There shall be maintained, adjacent to the chamber, a gallery: a narrow room behind a long pane, from which one is permitted to see and forbidden to act. The gallery is the one provision the design makes for its designer.
20.1. The persons who drafted this Amendment are ineligible for selection to the Directorate.
20.2. The names of the drafters are sealed for twenty (20) years from the first sealing.
21.1. Upon ratification, the Assembly shall establish a Transition Commission to constitute the Agency and the first Selection Panel; to assign by lot the initial staggered terms under Article 2.3; to commission the chamber, the table, and the passage; and to oversee the first sealing, which shall be conducted without ceremony.
21.2. The Commission shall complete its work within eighteen (18) months and dissolve. Its working papers shall be deposited, sealed, with the public records office, and shall open on the clock of Article 11.
22.1. The following shall not be altered by ordinary amendment: that Directors serve unknown; that every seal lifts on a defined and equal schedule; that the Directorate deliberates as a body of equals; and that breach is answered by the record and not by the cell.
22.2. The provisions of Article 22.1 may be altered only by national referendum in which a majority of eligible voters participate and two-thirds of those voting approve.
23.1. Any other provision may be amended by a two-thirds vote of the full Assembly, certified by the Constitutional Court as consistent with the protected provisions.
23.2. Any citizen may submit to the Assembly a proposal for the amendment of this Amendment. The Assembly shall receive and file every such proposal, and is obliged to no more.
24.1. This Amendment may be repealed only by referendum under Article 22.2. Upon repeal, all seals of serving Directors shall lift within one (1) year, all other identity seals within two (2), and all sealed records shall pass to the public records office within three (3).
To be read to each Director by a clerk, with the Director’s number, at sealing. The procedure shall not exceed a few minutes. It is not an oath of loyalty, an oath of loyalty being a thing sworn to a face. It is an oath of disappearance.
> “I consent to be unfindable. I consent that the good I do will not be known to be mine, and the harm I do will not be known to be mine, until the seal lifts, and I consent that it may lift only when I am past being glad of it.”
“The Agency” means the administrative body established under Article 6, whose name is itself sealed.
“Assembly” means the legislative body of the Republic.
“The Center” means the office established under Article 5.4 for the carriage of Directors’ family correspondence.
“Cipher” means the numerical identifier of no fewer than four digits assigned to a Director under Article 4.
“Cohort before it” means the seven former Directors whose terms of service most recently concluded, without regard to seat.
“Constitutional Procurator” means the office established under Article 16.
“Decision record” means the entry made under Article 11 for each decision of the Directorate.
“Identity seal” means the seal imposed under Article 4 and lifted under Article 12.
“Notation” means the sentence entered under Article 15.
“The Passage” means the secure corridor by which the chamber is reached under Article 7.
“Person of the record” means any person whose papers or identity are held under any seal of this Amendment.
“Profile writer” means the journalist designated under Article 14.
“Sealed record” means the file maintained for each Director under Article 10.
“V.O.I.C.E.” means the office established under Article 17. The letters are assigned no expansion.
Supplementary Act of 1989. Inserted Part VII (Integrity Assurance), establishing V.O.I.C.E., the daily attestation, the annual review, and the log-reading office, and formalizing the unmasking schedule. Adopted by two-thirds vote of the Assembly following a breach proceeding of 1987, the particulars of which are sealed and open on the clocks of Part IV.
Supplementary Act of 2008. Inserted Articles 3.6–3.9 (the question taken by weight), with consequential amendment of Articles 3.2, 10.1, and 11.1. Adopted by two-thirds vote of the Assembly following the unmasking of a living Director in 2007; certified by the Constitutional Court as consistent with the protected provisions, on the ground that the weighed question creates no seal: a seal is a promise kept by a clock, and the stones promise nothing — no more than the working papers Article 7.3 has burned, lawfully, since 1972.
No other Supplementary Act has been adopted. Proposals for the amendment of the Amendment are received and filed under Article 23.2.
Filed in the Office of the Constitutional Registrar
Selvar, Republic of Erekia
Certified copy: September 1971; as amended 1989 and 2008