Zephyr ran the test because the alternative was trust, and trust, for a god who received all his information through intermediaries, was a word for not checking.
The Dictator's Dilemma was not in any of the books his civilization had produced. It lived in his memory — the pre-existence memory, the one that came from a world where people studied power structures as academic disciplines and published the results in journals that other people read and argued about and forgot. The concept was simple: an autocrat who controls all information channels eventually becomes the least informed person in the system, because every channel between him and reality is filtered by someone who has incentives to adjust what passes through.
