Yeah, that is one of the things that I also struggle to understand and honestly most often simply ignore it. Though from what I was given to understand the general reason given for the difference in actions/behaviour is that Armageddon was host to actual Traitor/Daemon Primarchs and it was knowledge of them (or perhaps just the fact that they were still alive) that the Inquisition/Imperium wanted to keep suppressed and less knowledge of Chaos in general.
In 40K, is Chaos corruption of Non-Imperial human society inevitable?
- Thread starter BobTheNinja
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Yeah, that is one of the things that I also struggle to understand and honestly most often simply ignore it. Though from what I was given to understand the general reason given for the difference in actions/behaviour is that Armageddon was host to actual Traitor/Daemon Primarchs and it was knowledge of them (or perhaps just the fact that they were still alive) that the Inquisition/Imperium wanted to keep suppressed and less knowledge of Chaos in general.
Takareer
Words and feathers
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Re: The original question
Remember that Earth was not always the Imperium; even the Emperor, despite his long life and involvement throughout history, ultimately was not the first human. Any random human world has the potential to be as successful as the Imperium (or DAoT Earth), given the time and space. And, as we know, warp shenanigans can provide time and space aplenty.
Remember that Earth was not always the Imperium; even the Emperor, despite his long life and involvement throughout history, ultimately was not the first human. Any random human world has the potential to be as successful as the Imperium (or DAoT Earth), given the time and space. And, as we know, warp shenanigans can provide time and space aplenty.
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Part of the hurdle here is that this was maybe true then but it's not true now. Humanity is doomed by its own psychic potential and there's a reason that the two most technologically successful factions both happen to have some level of 'immune to the warp' built into them.
For all the talk of hypothetically possible, peaceful utopia there's an elephant in the room - the pre fall Eldar Empire was a post scarcity wonderland that seems to have lacked most social ills but which fell to chaos pretty much literally because it was too free and nice to live in.
The Eldar empire didn't fall because it was nice and free but because the majority of the population tried to outdo each other in hedonism and excess which for them seems to have included quasi-anarchy and indiscriminate (mass)-killings. The later doesn't necessarily follow from the first, indeed it requires a pretty specific idea of psychology and behaviour.
And even then the Eldar Empire did endure what? Several million years as a quasi stable political entity? Are we really going to say that to be a successful state/entity in WH40k you have to endure eternity more or less unchanged? Because it might just be the PolSci in me speaking but that seems like an impossible standard and neither very practical nor realistic. Political systems (and I think it isn't that much of a jump to include a species as a whole here) rise and fall even without the influence of Chaos.
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That's not a cause it's a symptom. The pre-fall chronology has always looked thusly: Utopia -> Decadence -> Depravity. The fall from Utopia to Depravity is a failing of the Eldar Empire's internal mechanisms as a result of how much personal liberty and power the average person had over their environment. It's a common thread that in the pre-fall empire almost every Eldar was an artist because pretty much every other form of labour had been erased. We're talking about a society where extreme sports means surfing on solar flares and all wars are fought with automatons. My point is that the Eldar are very much the exact optimistic depiction that most people have of idealised utopia in 40k; a society free to make use of the technological and psychic wonders of the 40k universe without any of the bad parts attached and which show exactly why that doesn't work anymore.
We could have a whole discussion about how old the Eldar Empire actually is (to put it bluntly I have trouble believing they spent the last 65 million years in the exact same state) but for the purposes of this debate all that matters is the other half of my post - what once might have been possible before is no longer possible now. It was once possible to have a psychic and technological wonderland but the very fabric of the universe has shifted over time to render this no longer possible or at least not very plausible. In other words when we put the pieces together; the current Eldar (Craftworld, post-fall Eldar) show something close to the potential ideal state of a psychic race in accordance with the current state of the immaterium. There is a rigorous enforcement of an extremely strict moral/religious/militaristic code where every member of the society is constantly aiming to be as emotionless and detached as possible. The Eldar are walking, talking proof that while you can quite easily ditch the trappings of outright fascism, an element of state enforced morality seems unavoidable.
Which is to say that there seem to be basically two ways to have a non-imperium empire for psyker capable races:
1. Psyker genocide.
2. Strictly enforced moral, almost monastic code to keep everyone wary of Chaos and the distraction of pleasure/emotion/etc.
The Imperium is far from the best you can do with perfect knowledge of the setting and what the built in tolerances and limitations are but that's in some sense an odd metric to use, essentially analogous to the infamous spacebattles competence argument of 'why didn't this character read ahead in the script like me?'
I think rather than focusing on the tangled problem of chaos you might be better served zooming in on the myriad problems the Imperium has which are actually completely and utterly illogical in universe. There's no real reason to fear the alien for example - that's a singular product of the Emperor's vision for sole human dominion of the galaxy carried forward 10,000 years. Unlike with Chaos there's not even a pretence of an excuse here, it's literally just raw ethnic cleansing because the Imperium is scared of difference.
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Yeah, and after the rot set in it took one million years for that to fall over.
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I'm tempted to ask for a citation for this number but again it's irrelevant because the warp now is not the same as the warp then. The Eldar Empire worked for however many years it worked and then it stopped working and we can no longer go back because it fucked things up for everyone else permanently. The Imperium is doing the same thing again of course - fucking it up for everyone else I mean - that seems to be the life cycle of the dominant psychic races of the milky way, from the Old Ones to the Eldar to humanity.
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I mean if you want to take that approach, humans and eldar are fundamentally very different and there's no reason to assume that even a more psychically active human race would be more susceptible. Like it's explicit within the Warhammer 40,000 setting that eldar experience of the universe is just wildly more complete than humans, and that their emotional intensity is in an entirely different universe. If you accept WH40K sources on their face, it's simply not possible for humans to replicate anything like the Eldar Empire. Put another way, your argument turns on the most extreme possible outlier.
Obviously things are worse for the universe following the birth of Slaanesh, but it's worth noting that many of the problem are the result of actual material effort by agents of the forces of darkness and ineffectual handling by the galaxy's most dominant polity. The current state of the universe isn't accidental.
I still find it problematic that you basically equal personal liberty with extreme depravity since I think both the IC narrative (because again it took the Eldar thousands inf not millions of years to fall) and actual psychology doesn't really support that viewpoint. And I am also not sure how well the Eldar work as an general example of a psychic aware race since their extreme vulnerability stems from the fact that they created Slaanesh and are tied to it more than anything else. Also the existence of the Exodites suggest that even the Eldar are fully capable of living and thriving outside the rigid structures of the Craftworlds...
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It's not my argument (well it is but...) it's the narrative of 40k. The Eldar exist for a narrative reason, that psykers universally turned into daemon portals during the age of strife is a historical 'fact' in as much as anything is a 'fact' in 40k and it's a fact for a reason, that psyker numbers are growing is also 'fact' and the idea that humanity is still only just barely coming into its own in that regard is a repeated one. This isn't just something I've invented from thin air, it's a repeated motif that the psychic potential of the human race is just scratching the surface.
I'm not sure it's worth drawing much of a distinction between the agents of darkness and the darkness itself. If Tzeentch tells someone to do something which results in someone else falling to chaos that person has still fallen to chaos - in fact the idea that if not for Tzeentch they wouldn't have fallen is sort of the point. Before chaos nobody fell to chaos because chaos wasn't a thing you could fall to, then the Old Ones came around and destabilised things, then humanity and the Eldar gave the seething mass of the warp form and shape and the rest is history. Chaos is a self fulfilling prophecy in that respect, by trying to fight things and stave off the inevitable the way they are the Imperium is making things worse.
I don't think that's what I'm doing though? What I'm saying is that the nature of chaos is such that the commonly presented idea of a perfect 40k society doesn't have the necessary defences against it. It's a general rebuttal at this sort of notion:
Which is demonstrably not true. Defeating chaos is not as simple as creating an egalitarian utopia because such a utopia is vulnerable to people for lack of a better phrasing choosing chaos. I'd say it's highly analogous to the paradox of tolerance and the difficulties we have IRL with the ethical principles behind restricting certain types of thought and expression. If you allow all speech then you must also allow people calling for the restriction of speech, etc. An anti-chaos utopia has to be designed from the ground up to be anti-chaos, meaning it has to know the precise limitations and capabilities of chaos and then convince all of its citizens to follow the rules somehow. In the case of the Craftworld Eldar the mechanism is extreme adherence to a sort of state enforced Jedi code complete with mandatory military service, perpetuated by the racial memory of what happened when they didn't do that.
That said I should explain something else here about my beliefs for 40k - I think this mostly only applies to large space empires. Small empires seem to be relatively immunised against it by virtue of sheer population difference and the closeness of cultural group think. I think the best case scenario would be a space holy roman empire or federation of states. You make each individual power too small to fall to chaos and you make the superstate vague and compartmentalised enough that it can't fall either. You would also have to dismantle the Imperium in order to calm the warp before you could do any of this.
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I am trying to impress upon you that that the narrative of Warhammer 40,000 provides an example of the most extreme hedonism imaginable over the course of epochs having a negative effect. That is, if you are raising it as a counterpoint to what was said earlier about quality of life having an effect on the effectiveness of Chaos corruption, then it is not a very good counterpoint. You can't say 'look at what happened to the eldar' because what happened to the eldar is an outlier and one of the defining moments in galactic history. It's not a natural end state of anything anyone was talking about.
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That's a complete goalpost shift, the topic that sentence is responding to is your assertion that the Eldar are more psyker-y than humans and so they're not similar enough to be compared.
That aside my take on the fall is that it wasn't a product of hedonism but rather hedonism was the product of the fall. The fall and the birth of Slannesh aren't actually the same events imo because the Fall isn't an event so much as a period of time. I'll also note again that you're still talking in uncertain and really at this point unproven time scales that I don't think are necessarily true. I could be wrong here because I don't keep up with every new book that comes out but I'm pretty sure that we still really have no idea how old Eldar society actually is, just that pre-historic Eldar existed 65 million years ago and eventually developed into the dominant race of the galaxy. If you're going to make the positive claim that actually the Eldar were just fine in immediately pre-fall conditions for millions of years I think I'll ask you to provide some evidence for it. The only actual source I could find on this was from first edition which puts the Eldar Empire at around 30 or 40,000 years old at the time of the Fall, for obvious reasons I think we'd both agree this shouldn't be taken as gospel.
In actuality my understanding is that The Fall and its associated hedonism were a relatively quite short period, the Eldar didn't survive as hedons for millions of years, if I had to guess at how long it was I'd say probably a few hundred at most.
Here's my thesis on that subject and what I'm most trying to get across:
It's not good enough to just raise the quality of life because in a post Fall galaxy such a society is vulnerable to chaos still. In order to beat chaos you have to raise the quality of life and create institutional mechanisms to actively prevent Chaos seeping in.
Edit: like if it's really true that the Eldar were just fine in post-scarcity stasis for millions of years then I'll concede. I just don't think it is because I can't remember reading it anywhere for myself and it doesn't fit with my view of how 40k is written.
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You know, no one's brought up the nature of 40k so far. 40k's purposes as a setting are, in order of priority:
Looking at 40k through the lense of purpose 1, yes, The Imperium is the only way humanity can resist chaos, because playing against a xenocidal police state is the only way to make playing as mindcontrolling daemons or world eating bugs feel guilt free. Everything needs to be awful, forever, and the Imperium fits that. Also, GW doesn't sell alternate human faction miniatures. That's 40k's authorial intent, at least as much as a tabletop setting with multiple author's and writers has one intent.
However, seen through the lense of the second purpose, a setting to set original rpg campaigns, civ quests, or fanfiction in, authorial intent doesn't mean jack shit. Sure, a Mary Sue human civilization is hiding behind a warpstorm and is ready to kick chaos ass, do whatever you want, 40k is a setting at least partially conceived as the base for fanfiction.
The biggest misunderstandings of 40k probably derive from the third and fourth purposes, since novels and wikiwalks are probably the only way most of us experience 40k. Unlike serious, standalone novel series the novelizations aren't the setting's Bible, they're fanfiction good enough to get the GW seal of approval, and serve to flesh out the world and populate it with characters for individual player's rpg campaigns/tabletop army battles/shameless ultramarine smut. You want a legendary, high level commissar with a full backstory and complex personality to show up and wow your PCs? We got a couple pre-made for yah! Want a terrifyingly powerful elf warlock? How asshole-ish do you want em?
All of this of course comes at the detriment of an internally consistent setting that always has the same themes and narratives, and can be easily discussed in a... *checks* ... Fiction discussion forum.
@BobTheNinja does that help?
- A setting for a tabletop army game that doesn't want you to feel too bad about playing as or against any one faction, and thus makes certain all are uniquely awful.
- A setting for a tabletop rpg that presents a boatload of local and regional problems that player characters can conceivably fix during a campaign without unduly affecting the greater setting.
- A pulpy dark Sci-Fi setting for novels.
- A self consistent setting that lends itself to dissection and discussion.
Looking at 40k through the lense of purpose 1, yes, The Imperium is the only way humanity can resist chaos, because playing against a xenocidal police state is the only way to make playing as mindcontrolling daemons or world eating bugs feel guilt free. Everything needs to be awful, forever, and the Imperium fits that. Also, GW doesn't sell alternate human faction miniatures. That's 40k's authorial intent, at least as much as a tabletop setting with multiple author's and writers has one intent.
However, seen through the lense of the second purpose, a setting to set original rpg campaigns, civ quests, or fanfiction in, authorial intent doesn't mean jack shit. Sure, a Mary Sue human civilization is hiding behind a warpstorm and is ready to kick chaos ass, do whatever you want, 40k is a setting at least partially conceived as the base for fanfiction.
The biggest misunderstandings of 40k probably derive from the third and fourth purposes, since novels and wikiwalks are probably the only way most of us experience 40k. Unlike serious, standalone novel series the novelizations aren't the setting's Bible, they're fanfiction good enough to get the GW seal of approval, and serve to flesh out the world and populate it with characters for individual player's rpg campaigns/tabletop army battles/shameless ultramarine smut. You want a legendary, high level commissar with a full backstory and complex personality to show up and wow your PCs? We got a couple pre-made for yah! Want a terrifyingly powerful elf warlock? How asshole-ish do you want em?
All of this of course comes at the detriment of an internally consistent setting that always has the same themes and narratives, and can be easily discussed in a... *checks* ... Fiction discussion forum.
@BobTheNinja does that help?
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No it isn't. We're still on the same topic. The topic has a few different prongs, but it's still the same topic.
Let me turn this around on you for a moment: how long do you think it took for the Eldar to fall? The Eldar are very consistently depicted as being unbelievably ancient, rising to prominence in the aftermath of the War in Heaven. If the Eldar were a utopian post scarcity society for .1% of its existence that would still be 65,000 years, which is still shitloads better than the Imperium, which has almost totally collapsed, what, five times in 10,000 years?
In general the various Eldar books suggest that the Eldar at their height dominated the galaxy for huge swathes of prehistory. Nothing I've ever read suggested that the Eldar Empire only reached its height in M30. And even if it did, that would still suggest hundreds of thousands or millions of years of technological civilisation without any of the deprivation experienced by citizens of the Imperium.
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But why does it matter how long the Eldar took if that avenue is now permanently closed in the current iteration? It's unfair but it doesn't work like that, you can't put a new human space empire where the old Eldar one was because the Eldar (and then later the Imperium) have fucked up the warp so completely and Chaos is so overwhelmingly advantaged. Like Chaos literally just ripped the galaxy in half, what can a minor human empire do when chaos power of this magnitude comes knocking at the door from the outside like that? It's all well and good to establish that a human empire of sufficiently minor size can hypothetically not fall from within but again it doesn't solve the problem.
What sort of galaxy are we positing here? One where the Eldar never fell? One where the Imperium never existed? I don't even know if that's good enough, you might have to go all the way back to the Old Ones. The thing is that these civilisations have left deep and borderline permanent scars on the face of creation itself. Let me use a different analogy: if all the powerful and developed countries on earth disintegrate tomorrow, the nations that take their place still have to deal with Climate Change and the plastic apocalypse and so cannot just slot themselves into a developed standard of living without devising a completely new way of powering it. They can't bring back the coal that we've burnt and the rare earth metals that we've used up in our smartphones.
I feel like we're coming at this from completely divorced perspectives.
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You're the one who raised the Eldar dude, my example was Ultramar.
Like this isn't a matter of us coming from different perspectives, I don't think you understand my original point, which is that the gruesome conditions the Imperium enacts supposedly to suppress the emergence of Chaos do not work and often exacerbate the issue.
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I raised the Eldar because they're responsible for the fact that you can't do what they did anymore.
Also Ultramar is literally the Imperium? I don't get what you mean here to be honest.
In any case I'm not saying the Imperium's methods are justified, I'm saying that they're a product of their context and that constructing a better Imperium would require a ton of out of universe knowledge of detailed limitations for the other factions in the setting which nobody ever had. In fact part of my point was that the Imperium makes things worse for itself in even more ridiculous ways, e.g. the Emperor's paranoia about aliens and how that's infected the entire way the Imperium views xenos alliances. The Imperium is bad but the reason it's bad is because it had powerful bad actors making decisions in already difficult situations.
Like yes, if some human warlord somewhere was given a complete copy of the Lexicanum in M21 and given free reign to construct a human space empire it might have turned out differently but I'm not convinced that's a useful piece of trivia. If all the characters knew the oncoming danger then they wouldn't have fallen for it in the way that they did.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
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- Firelink Shrine
I think one of the harder things to comprehend is that it's really really hard to imagine the Eldar in their golden age. A long lived, psychically active race, whose problems are more or less solved, going the hedonist route because, well, that's what would happen in the long run? Not because the Eldar are predisposed to decadence (because many of them wouldn't survive until now), but because it's ancient lore that modern 40k writers more or less need to deal with.
I think it was Aaron Dembski Bowden who went to the r/40klore subreddit in which the OP asks "what do you hope the HH will finally answer?" and his own question was "Why did the Emperor abandon Angron's allies in their time of need?"
The entire old lore, and partly Horus Heresy, is a bunch of wargaming books writing text blurbs about Cool Epic Things in SPACE that doesn't really matter until someone decided "you know, we could make novels and make money off this."
Either way, I certainly don't believe Chaos Corruption is inevitable. I don't believe in Tolkien's Long Defeat, where every victory is temporary and the end point is defeat or worse. I don't know if the series is headed into that direction like Warhammer Fantasy. it likely won't because hey, I like my novels too.
The Interex, and course modern Eldar, are more or less the examples to counter the OP's premise.
I think it was Aaron Dembski Bowden who went to the r/40klore subreddit in which the OP asks "what do you hope the HH will finally answer?" and his own question was "Why did the Emperor abandon Angron's allies in their time of need?"
The entire old lore, and partly Horus Heresy, is a bunch of wargaming books writing text blurbs about Cool Epic Things in SPACE that doesn't really matter until someone decided "you know, we could make novels and make money off this."
Either way, I certainly don't believe Chaos Corruption is inevitable. I don't believe in Tolkien's Long Defeat, where every victory is temporary and the end point is defeat or worse. I don't know if the series is headed into that direction like Warhammer Fantasy. it likely won't because hey, I like my novels too.
The Interex, and course modern Eldar, are more or less the examples to counter the OP's premise.
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What on earth do you think this thread is actually about?
Zedalb
I just started a Patreon!
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Well to answer the title of thread.
No chaos corruption isn't inevitable, you could die to orks, tryanids, civil war, the imperium, dark eldar, necrons or a variety of other threats first, chaos could simply destroy said society first.
If you mean, eventuality wise?
I mean sorta, just the nature of a long narrative means either is possible.
Practically if your really concerned about it, being a blank is genetic, you could have a society that was almost destroyed by demons/the warp/chaos a few times early on, and essentially though it being such a positive survival trait, the population became almost entirely blanks. This combined with the knowledge of chaos from fighting it, and experience in doing so, would certain help them survive and resist corruption quite easily.
This may also help against the nids, and orks given they both use psyker powers as a regular effect.
It would also hide them from the imperium at least somewhat, because of how warp jumps are done by psykers and such.
There are other possible answers you could give, but really if you want to write something or do a game with non-imperium humans you just can.
Yeah chaos is a risk but so is everything?
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You cannot seriously be pretending Ultramar - a part of the Imperium which follows imperial rules - is better than the Imperium. Ultramar only gets to look pretty on the surface because it can export human misery to other places, this is literally like arguing that first world nations have nothing to do with the terrible living conditions elsewhere on the planet - conditions are like that because we pay good money to keep them that way so we can fuel our consumerist culture. Ultramar is provided for by the rest of the Imperium and even within the 500 worlds there are still forge worlds and hive worlds with the typical misery of 40k. Maccrage itself, the shining jewel of Ultramar, explicitly has an extensive slum full of anti-imperial sentiment that has at multiple times in the past been a hotbed for chaos activity for a more specific refutation of this ridiculous point.
As for what this thread is about, whether or not human polities of a certain size will inevitably fall to chaos? I've answered this a few times but to say it again: Yes, I do think human political entities of a certain size are guaranteed to fall to chaos in 40k if they don't have a strict anti-chaos plan in place. It doesn't have to be as terrible as the Imperium or anything but it has to exist in some capacity. I even brought up the Eldar as a positive example of how this can and has been done in the setting - the Eldar are a relatively extensive network of colony ships which maintain a futuristic quality of life and which more or less show my suggested structure of a loose federation of individually minor independent states should work. This system is maintained and protected by a rigorous anti-chaos moral code enforced by the state and the inertia of their traditionalist culture. If someone refuses to comply they're exiled from the ships but are allowed back if they agree to comply at a later date.
I see no reason why a system of small human states (say, one system each) couldn't achieve something similar given the technology base.
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I'm not talking about its moral standing in the universe, I'm talking about it's quality of life. It's quite explicit across a number of sources that it's a pretty decent place to live, and certainly records many thousands of years without any meaningful Chaos presence. That, I think, is completely evident from my post so I have no idea you would think otherwise. And more to the point this appears to be the first you've read this post, despite it having been on the first page, suggesting you just jumped into the thread without reading anything, which probably explains why you didn't know what the topic was until I asked.
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Alternatively I did read it and just thought (and continue to think) it was fairly irrelevant/off topic?
The topic if you would like to read it yourself, is not about quality of life, let me quote the OP for you just so we're all actually addressing it.
It's about whether the fanatacism, zealotry, etc. is necessary for sufficiently large human civilisations to avoid Chaos. It's irrelevant what the quality of life on Ultramar is when Ultramar is a product of the Imperial System. It owes its quality of life to the Imperial System and abides by and enforces the Imperial System on its citizens. That their quality of life might be on average slightly higher is completely and utterly irrelevant to what the OP was asking and what I was trying to answer.
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The eldar don't even fall to chaos, regardless. They get eaten by the birth of a god because at that point literally nobody alive understood how a Chaos God was born.
BobTheNinja
Sword of Possibility
- Location
- Multiverse Sector Texas
Weighing in on this, I personally think that a civiliation's core values and its quality of life are strongly connected. As we can see from countless examples, the zealous hatred, paranoia and contempt fostered by the Imperial Cult, along with a blatant disregard of personal liberties in favor of near-blind obedience to authority, leads to a hotbed of elitism and social stratification, and all of the horrible, nasty problems that comes with it.
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