Everything Is Worth Remembering

Initially an island monastery established by Jesuit missionaries, the Candlewhisper Archive was intended as a repository for theological lore, and the preservation of interpretations of Christianity. The genuine desire of these monks was to know the mind of God, and to do so by never rejecting any knowledge or doctrine. That is not to say they embraced every heresy, but rather that they believed that all should be preserved and remembered, and that the truth would eventually be emergent even from a thousand lies.

The religious roots of this settlement are now long gone, and the land is proudly secular, humanist and rationalist. However, a deep and abiding belief in the sanctity of knowledge has remained, with a desire to gather and provide unrestricted access to data and knowledge of all sorts.

Practicality has limited this somewhat, and the nation's currency, the "Datum", is in fact anchored to the nation's government-run data reserves. While there is a Freedom of Information principle enshrined in law, it is also the case that accessing this data has a cost, and a primary tax revenue of the government is in charging currency for access. Anything can be searched and retrieved from the Archive, but very little is available for free.

A good portion of the government's budget is eaten up with the provision, maintenance and backing up of data servers, and this is a point of some controversy amongst the citizens of the nation. Likewise, while education and knowledge is prioritised, the military is relatively underfunded: there's a definite feel here that knowledge matters more than people. The administration's obsession with data also leads to a distinctly worrying trend towards public surveillance of every facet of its citizen's lives, as well as a love for espionage for its own sake.

As an evolving nation, things may change, but for now Candlewhisper remains a library-nation, preserving all information for its own sake, and holding as its central tenet the rule that knowledge is all important, and that if something is known, it must be remembered.