Well yes, but all the dwarvish neurosis about living up to the example of their ancestors are rooted in the fact that according to the pyramid said ancestors are axiomatically better. It is a mentality that breeds the kind of self destructive shame which is their biggest weakness because you can't pass the bad stuff up the pyramid. That time goblins took your hold isn't also the fault of the king before you, it's just yours.
Man, I will never quite get why you can be the most "We need to give Waystones to
everyone! If you're not for this, then you're for Global Warming/Chaos!" and "That is a very cynical way of viewing the world and one that would be entirely alien to the dawi" one minute, and completely "Trying to live according to your society's deepest and oldest values and
religion is self-destructive; perhaps the self-destruction comes
from those values and religions" another.
Course, I'm also pretty sure I remember you getting tetchy in another Warhammer quest thread about the Dwarfs keeping their secrets and technology from the Empire of Man -- when the Dwarfs had
given humanity steel and many technologies due to Sigmar, and forged an alliance that lasted on and off (and with Dwarfs, having the flexibility to understand when an allied polity would have its "off" centuries like humans would, is remarkable bit of flexibility and understanding; perhaps they learned from the Elf alliance, or perhaps they just had the common sense to know that humans aren't like elves or dwarfs and don't live as long as either and so adjusted expectations).
Anyway.
Implying that maybe the focus on the old and the ancestors, the thing that is this society's deepest value and religion, and thus also the source of their good, their source of 'What do we think is good?' -- and has
actually created a lot of good and a lot of good people; it
does create virtuous individuals and inspire virtuous deeds -- is actually
bad and the source of their society's ills.. well. It's like the past and the Ancestors get all the bad and none of the good. Maybe you'd argue that you're only counterbalancing all the people who would automatically assign all of the good to the Ancestors and the past, and that you have to take that philosophical/debate stance in order to straighten the scales. But like. This is what a society's and religion's values call and consider good, what they consider vice and virtue. It's like arguing that the 7 Virtues aren't virtues and the 7 Vices aren't vices, because in some circumstance or by some perspective so-and-so virtue can be defined as bad or lead to bad results or because you'd need some amount of some vice in order to not die, and that therefore slavish obedience to virtues and denouncement of vices is bad. Or that some values are too exclusionary of things or people. Or that some values will lead to trouble for a person or a society. Metaphorically speaking anyway.
All philosophies/cultures/religions/peoples and individuals have to contend with a sort of balance of trying to make things work. Anything taken to excess -- or not excess, but to
stupidity, to unwise interpretation -- would wind up dysfunctional or evil. That doesn't mean that a given society's values are wrong; the proof will be in the doing and in the history. And history has had the Karaz Ankor do great things and provide a lot of stability and safety for their people.
That they got hit with 2 of the most cataclysmic back-to-back crisises ever, should not reflect badly on them.
Nations have
died to those kinds of apocalypses! The Dwarfs are still around.
The Nehekharans died to Nagash. The Ogres died to the comet. The Sky-Titans died to the Ogre migration. The Strigoi Kingdom died to some Waaagh sent by Neferata, and the Border Princes get reset like a chessboard every few decades or century or two. Myrmidia's combined nation fell and splintered into two after her death, though Tilea and Estalia still remain extant. Who the heck knows what the Reman Empire (was it an Empire?) was or how long it lasted or when it fell. The Norse Dwarfs got wiped out recently.
The Karaz Ankor are still around. Maybe they're just dying slowly, if you think that's all it is. But they're clearly doing, or have done,
something right in order to be able to persist all this while.
And furthermore, maybe it's better to die with honor and virtue, than live on as a scoundrel.
Somebody has to be willing to die for their principles, when the situation gets bad and there's no out, or else nobody
else will ever survive because of their sacrifice or nobody else will ever be inspired to believe that principles/virtues are worth holding to your dying breaths.
But perhaps you believe that the only acceptable thing is to
live with your principles; that anybody, or perhaps any nation or kingdom rather than any individual and instead ignores the individual, who dies for his principles is a chump because you instead should have
won with your principles (or changed your principles)?
Well... this isn't that world. Where you can hold onto your principles in every scenario,
and also survive in every scenario. Sometimes fighting the good fight just kills you.
There might be a question of if it's worth it do that anyway. That's a tricky question to answer. What if we all die in a thousand years when the High Elves die out and the Great Vortex collapses? Does that mean that Caledor Dragontamer and the Ulthuani were suckers for doing things the way they did or for persisting in the face of the inevitable/obvious? Well, a lot of people lived in the meanwhile that wouldn't have otherwise. Or if you say that everybody's souls would have gotten eaten so even everybody who died was lost so it was all pointless... well, I dunno.
Were the Dragons wrong to come to this world, if some/most/all of them meet their ends on this world? Well, who knows if it would have been better on another world? Who knows if death might not have caught up to them eventually anyway? Or who knows, what if they might have
won against the Chaos Gods instead? Maybe fighting that fight would have been worth it then?
Do these events only have validity if we defeat Chaos, or if we stall Chaos as long as possible? Do things that were begun, only get judged by how they end? Or by how they persist in the millenia between the start and end; and if a lot of people had to struggle very very hard to try to make it and it sucked, then it wasn't worth it?
These are questions whose answers come down to a matter of perspective, of how you look at the situation, and of psychology and internal bias, and of religion and philosophy. There aren't necessarily answers or easy ones. Though I think I'd default on the answer of "Try. Nevertheless, try/live anyway." Because if you don't try and don't keep on living -- even if life sucks, even while life is hard -- then nothing gets done and nothing happens.
The disagreement, I suppose, is that you think more tactically -- you think that living means being wise in the moment, and that if you are living unwisely, then you are living wrongly. I guess that's where we clash a lot. And why I sometimes find it odd that you can be so harsh on Dwarfs or Elves for one thing, but then be all "Therefore, Waystones for everyone" another, and "Dwarfs should give all their tech to the Empire" another. It feels like some kind of short-sighted thinking to me, I dunno. And I keep trying to explain the past and the future in terms of the present, like with the previous two posts, but that just gets you to call a society a pyramid scheme ((okay you didn't call it, but you liked the post that did, and you immediately mused that "This society blames the individual for failure, and gives all glory to the past")).
I tried explaining that, from a certain perspective or even with/due to some psychology or mindsets, that
even a focus on the past and the Ancestors can instead be a focus on
your present and
your future; or come about
because of the things in the present. That some peoples and cultures can have a
melding of past and present. And that this can be done as a
virtuous circle rather than as a necessarily pyramid scam. Though acknowledging -- or perhaps just leaving it to the obvious implication of, because it didn't really need to be said, we all know what happens if things are done badly by bad people -- of the fact that, yeah,
if you are evil or bad or led by evil or bad people or there are more bad people than good people in your nation/religion/leadership that this will be interpreted in bad ways and lead to bad things. But that just gets you to retort or believe that the Ancestors/leaders are doing it badly which...
At some point, you just gotta think that you think that a given institution or philosophy is just bad, and does nothing good. That everything bad will be attributed to them, and that anything good that comes about will be simply independent and unattached to them. At some point, you can only just disagree about things, I guess.
