Ebriarchy
Far enough in the future that everything you’ve ever loved is long-forgotten and lost never to be found again, people are getting drunk. Not so drunk as to keep them from doing their job, but pretty drunk. Their job is ruling the galaxy, so they can get quite drunk before it becomes a problem.
This is how ruling the galaxy works. You take a random selection of N people, such that M is enough to have a party and M is N*P where P is the fraction of randomly selected people from across space who are fairly cool and that you would want to party with, and you put them in a room with some music and some booze and a dance floor, also hors d’vors, and you wait a while until some of the people have stopped having fun, and you can identify out P. Then you kill everyone who isn’t cool, but you get rid of the bodies real quick.
If the party is going well enough, no one will notice. Then you assign each partygoer a constituency and tell them they are the supreme lawmaking body, and freshen their drinks, and answer their questions, and ideally after a few days you reach a metastable state where conversations like this happen:
LEROY (lurches up to EVELYN): Hey, Evie.
EVELYN: Screw you, your sector invaded mine, remember?
LEROY (who in point of fact does not remember): Oh jeez Evie you aren’t going to hold that against me still are you?
EVELYN: What do you want?
LEROY (who can’t remember what he wanted): Uh. Yeah. Listen. This invasion thing.
EVELYN: You want to pull out?
LEROY: I dunno about that. But maybe we could, like, negotiate.
EVELYN: I want a pony!
LEROY: Fine, jeez, take a stupid pony, just get off my case. (Shambles off)
Note: In the preceding example it was later determined that Leroy’s sector had not invaded Evelyn’s; she was thinking of someone else. But the principal is sound!
AVRAM: Bet you I can hit that bottle from here.
STEWART: With that?
AVRAM: No, with a shot put. Of course with this.
STEWART: What’s the bet?
AVRAM: How about eighty million war orphans?
STEWART: Yours or mine?
AVRAM: I got too many anyway. Eighty million war orphans against… what do you have too much of?
STEWART: Hold on, I got a report here… uh… poverty.
AVRAM: My eighty million war orphans against your poverty. Eighty million poverty?
STEWART: Sure.
AVRAM: Hah! I made it!
STEWART: Damn.
AVRAM: Hand over that poverty!
STEWART: Best two out of three, my poverty says I can beat you at darts?