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In 40K, is Chaos corruption of Non-Imperial human society inevitable?

Delirium said:
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.
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Do you think that a citizen in Ultramar experiences the exact same degree of oppression as someone living in, say, Necromunda?
 
Honestly one of the things that always comes up in these types of discussion is people conflating "A galactic polity the size of the Imperium" with "The Imperium of Man as it exists".

You can make a credible argument that the sheer scale of the threats in the 41st Millennium require an interstellar polity in order to muster sufficient forces to oppose, and I would actively agree with those. When an Ork Waaagh begins, the resources of a single solar system are not going to be able to turn it back without horrific casualties that make the whole place too fragile to resist the next threat, and that in the best case.

The issue, however, is that the Imperium is not the only option. A network of smaller, independent polities with solid mutual defence treaties would accomplish the same goal of mustering large forces to oppose a critical threat, without the need for a crushing centralised authority - hell, the Imperium's own threat response is highly decentralised as it is, pulling in forces from an escalating area as the threat grows, so the upper level is almost entirely superfluous.

The same goes for the Imperium's fanaticism and intolerance. Do polities in this setting need to take measures to deal with the threat that psykers can represent? Absolutely. Do they need to burn witches at the stake and teach their population that genetic divergence is something worth sparking pogroms over? No. Hell the fuck no. Set up a goddam training program and state agency or something, pass some strongly enforced laws and you're doing way better than the Imperium for the simple reason that your psychic population no longer comes to view the state as a mortal enemy that would murder them in extremely painful fashion as a first resort.
 
Maugan Ra said:
Honestly one of the things that always comes up in these types of discussion is people conflating "A galactic polity the size of the Imperium" with "The Imperium of Man as it exists".

You can make a credible argument that the sheer scale of the threats in the 41st Millennium require an interstellar polity in order to muster sufficient forces to oppose, and I would actively agree with those. When an Ork Waaagh begins, the resources of a single solar system are not going to be able to turn it back without horrific casualties that make the whole place too fragile to resist the next threat, and that in the best case.

The issue, however, is that the Imperium is not the only option. A network of smaller, independent polities with solid mutual defence treaties would accomplish the same goal of mustering large forces to oppose a critical threat, without the need for a crushing centralised authority - hell, the Imperium's own threat response is highly decentralised as it is, pulling in forces from an escalating area as the threat grows, so the upper level is almost entirely superfluous.

The same goes for the Imperium's fanaticism and intolerance. Do polities in this setting need to take measures to deal with the threat that psykers can represent? Absolutely. Do they need to burn witches at the stake and teach their population that genetic divergence is something worth sparking pogroms over? No. Hell the fuck no. Set up a goddam training program and state agency or something, pass some strongly enforced laws and you're doing way better than the Imperium for the simple reason that your psychic population no longer comes to view the state as a mortal enemy that would murder them in extremely painful fashion as a first resort.
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So basically, the Empire from WHFB?*

*Not perfect with the Witch Hunters running around true, but things got better and continued to do so with foundation of the colleges of magic and so on and were actually on a slow upward trend.
 
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Ford Prefect said:
Do you think that a citizen in Ultramar experiences the exact same degree of oppression as someone living in, say, Necromunda?
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Not the argument. There is no amount of mental gymnastics you can do to to argue that Ultramar doesn't meaningfully benefit from the Imperium's bigotry and zealous xenophobia. Literally the entire reason Ultramar is even a good place to live in the first place is because it's the home of and guarded and ruled by an order of deeply religious, brainwashed supersoldiers. Ultramar is a bad example of 'system that survives without Imperial anti-chaos measures' because the only reason it survives is a bunch of Imperial anti-chaos measures.

It's not an accident that one of the most famous and most powerful armies in the Imperium (The Ultramarines and their set of successor chapters) live in one of the nicest parts of the galaxy - it's like that because they made it that way and they made it that way because they are the enforcers of the Imperium's will. There are vanishingly few figures in the Imperium more politically powerful than Marneus Calgar (and later down the track Guilliman is without question the single most powerful) and what he chooses to do with his power is enforce bigotry, and zealotry and to abjure the mutant and the xeno and the heretic because he is an Imperial. I.e. The ruler of Ultramar is exactly the opposite of what the OP wanted an example of.

This is more or less equivalent to arguing that New York City just happens to be placed in the United States and that it both doesn't benefit at all from US cultural imperialism and also isn't culpable in any of it. Or that London didn't directly benefit from centuries of British Imperialism, etc.
 
Delirium said:
Not the argument. There is no amount of mental gymnastics you can do to to argue that Ultramar doesn't meaningfully benefit from the Imperium's bigotry and zealous xenophobia. Literally the entire reason Ultramar is even a good place to live in the first place is because it's the home of and guarded and ruled by an order of deeply religious, brainwashed supersoldiers. Ultramar is a bad example of 'system that survives without Imperial anti-chaos measures' because the only reason it survives is a bunch of Imperial anti-chaos measures.

It's not an accident that one of the most famous and most powerful armies in the Imperium (The Ultramarines and their set of successor chapters) live in one of the nicest parts of the galaxy - it's like that because they made it that way and they made it that way because they are the enforcers of the Imperium's will. There are vanishingly few figures in the Imperium more politically powerful than Marneus Calgar (and later down the track Guilliman is without question the single most powerful) and what he chooses to do with his power is enforce bigotry, and zealotry and to abjure the mutant and the xeno and the heretic because he is an Imperial. I.e. The ruler of Ultramar is exactly the opposite of what the OP wanted an example of.

This is more or less equivalent to arguing that New York City just happens to be placed in the United States and that it both doesn't benefit at all from US cultural imperialism and also isn't culpable in any of it. Or that London didn't directly benefit from centuries of British Imperialism, etc.
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I'm not a big 40K guy but this seems to be missing the point thoroughly.

Yes, Ultramar clearly benefits from the presence and existence of the Imperium from everything that's been said, but the baseline argument here is a very simple "the people in ultramar lead much nicer lives than other people in the imperium, and also have much less chaos corruption. thus, without the ridiculously oppressive and cruel imperium standard on most worlds, maybe there'd be less chaos corruption".

That argument doesn't actually need to acknowledge why Ultramar is nicer to live in than most places, because the whole argument is that if the Imperium wasn't so shit, and thus didn't give rise to so much Chaos stuff, then people wouldn't need a totalitarian and oppressive empire to exist to protect them.

I might be speaking out of turn and not getting what Ford is going for, but by my reading it's "The Imperium is awful to combat a lot of threats, but a lot of those threats are created by its awfulness, thus if it was less awful there would be less threats", at least in the form of internal Chaos worship.
 
Squirtodyle said:
I'm not a big 40K guy but this seems to be missing the point thoroughly.

Yes, Ultramar clearly benefits from the presence and existence of the Imperium from everything that's been said, but the baseline argument here is a very simple "the people in ultramar lead much nicer lives than other people in the imperium, and also have much less chaos corruption. thus, without the ridiculously oppressive and cruel imperium standard on most worlds, maybe there'd be less chaos corruption".

That argument doesn't actually need to acknowledge why Ultramar is nicer to live in than most places, because the whole argument is that if the Imperium wasn't so shit, and thus didn't give rise to so much Chaos stuff, then people wouldn't need a totalitarian and oppressive empire to exist to protect them.

I might be speaking out of turn and not getting what Ford is going for, but by my reading it's "The Imperium is awful to combat a lot of threats, but a lot of those threats are created by its awfulness, thus if it was less awful there would be less threats", at least in the form of internal Chaos worship.
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Sure but the point of this thread is to discuss whether it's possible to have a society that isn't as fascist as the Imperium though. Really, the only reason I care this much is that Ford attacked me for not being on topic and questioned whether I'd read the posts in this thread before proceeding to completely derail it with this off topic, nonsense argument (which I'm not contesting) that Ultramar's quality of life is higher than the average Imperial planets.

It's pretty apparent to me that Ford is just quoting my posts to keep the argument going at this point which I have no real interest in continuing so actually you're right, it's not worth replying anymore.
 
Tealg said:
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.
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I feel like your stated position and your argument for it contradict each other. If the aim were really being able to play guilt free against the Imperium, then the Imperium having an excuse for why it is the way it is would be counter-productive. Thus, your point and your argument are in disagreement.

Yes, the Imperium is an oppressive, genocidal, totalitarian police state, a mix of space!North Korea, space!ISIS and space!Hitler. But that doesn't mean it has to be that way. In fact, the Imperium is just one thing that makes the dystopia even worse. Every faction does. The Imperium doesn't have to be that way, but it is, because everyone is despicable villains, because grimdark.

Except the Tau, of course. For the Greater Good!

Maugan Ra said:
Honestly one of the things that always comes up in these types of discussion is people conflating "A galactic polity the size of the Imperium" with "The Imperium of Man as it exists".

You can make a credible argument that the sheer scale of the threats in the 41st Millennium require an interstellar polity in order to muster sufficient forces to oppose, and I would actively agree with those. When an Ork Waaagh begins, the resources of a single solar system are not going to be able to turn it back without horrific casualties that make the whole place too fragile to resist the next threat, and that in the best case.
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I mean, one can also make the opposite case: An empire of such scale as the Imperium, and with such an absurdly inefficient bureaucracy as the Administratum, cannot possibly be responsive to the myriad of local threats that exist at every single corner of said empire. After all, the Imperium isn't facing one big enemy. It is facing literally thousands of crises at once, thousands of different, uncoordinates enemies, spread out over a region such that it can years to get there - and with the Administratum, entire generations to respond. Having dozens of human polities each responding to their particular crises and threats in the region would probably be better for fending off said threat.

If you face countless threats and raids at far away borders, you have to rely on decentralization, like the Frankish Empire establihing marches at its frontier with considerable autonomy. Of course, one could say that the Imperium already is feudal, but in truth, it's a weird mix of feudalism and totalitarian rule by centralized bureaucracy, the worst of both worlds.
 
Hykal94 said:
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
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Tolkien's Long Defeat also includes a Deus Ex Machina victory at the eleventh hour to redeem everyone and make all human suffering worthwhile. It's really just Catholicism.
Susano said:
I feel like your stated position and your argument for it contradict each other. If the aim were really being able to play guilt free against the Imperium, then the Imperium having an excuse for why it is the way it is would be counter-productive. Thus, your point and your argument are in disagreement.

Yes, the Imperium is an oppressive, genocidal, totalitarian police state, a mix of space!North Korea, space!ISIS and space!Hitler. But that doesn't mean it has to be that way. In fact, the Imperium is just one thing that makes the dystopia even worse. Every faction does. The Imperium doesn't have to be that way, but it is, because everyone is despicable villains, because grimdark.
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My stated point is that from a Doyleist perspective it's clear that the authors' want to set up the Imperium as the only solution to Chaos, because it helps maintain the balance of grimderp, and is thematically consistent with 40k as a tabletop setting.

My point is also that 40k's a fanfiction pool with no rules.
Susano said:
Except the Tau, of course. For the Greater Good!
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Yeah, cause the xenophobic totalitarian regime that conducts ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide is totally guilt free, because they're communists, not fascists.
 
Dunno, but the Imperium seems to be pretty awful. I am not sure if it´s lore or if it has been retconed, they had a policy of wiping out Imperial Guard regiments who fought and won battles against Chaos forces.

When your own side values the lives of your own men even less that the fucking nazis..
 
Untrue. In 8th edition (IIRC) Tallarn Desert Raiders warred against Nurgle demons alongside Grey Knights and won. For their service, the Grey Knights inscribed the name of Tallarn commanders on their armor before killing all of them.

The Sabbat Crusade war against Chaos forces 99% of the time but the Inquisition doesn't kill any Imperial forces. Eisenhorn ivestigates a series of murders and finds the killers wers Guardsmen with severe PTSD fighting Chaos forces. They die by Eisenhorn hands, not because they weere tainted, but because they opened fire on him. Similarly, before that in the first novel, he invades a Chaos planet with Guardsmen who had fought them before.

It's really inconsistent.
 
Tealg said:
Yeah, cause the xenophobic totalitarian regime that conducts ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide is totally guilt free, because they're communists, not fascists.
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Have you heard of a thing called a 'joke'?

I'm not saying, to be clear, 'it's just a joke' is a valid defense of anything, but you literally pulled out a humorous footnote that is debatable in whether it even seemed to be intended to be read plainly and then went on a rant seemingly assuming Susano is some manner of communist apologist or whatever for... a silly footnote that was intentionally made missable, positioned to be disconnected from his actual main point etc.
 
BobTheNinja said:
or if there are actual in-universe reasons as to why non-Imperial, interstellar human civilizations cannot exist without falling to Chaos.
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As others have pointed out, there's a really big one: The Imperium doesn't like competition.
Estro said:
The planet broke before the guard did, after all.
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Cadia Stands!
Maugan Ra said:
The issue, however, is that the Imperium is not the only option.
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The Imperium should not be the only option. The Imperium takes great pains to ensure that it is the only option. But its not often a good option.
Alex said:
Yeah but they have mech suits and those are rad as fuck. :p
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That'd be the Skitarii. Get your yearly dose limit for rads just standing next to them for a few minutes.
 
Tealg said:
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.
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Except this assumes that 'mind controlling daemons' and 'world eating bugs' are strictly speaking necessary to the setting. 40k has rewritten its background again and again and in fact has often rewritten it to make the Imperium less unsympathetic, so this doesn't really follow. The Tyranids (well, Genestealers, back in the day) could just as easily have been written as a functional polity which wasn't genocidal and happened to have buggy aesthetics, Chaos could have been retconned to be more benign, with the positive aspects of the Chaos Gods emphasized, they literally rewrote the Necrons entirely to make them sympathetic and capable of things like 'diplomacy' and 'having actual characters,' and it's not hard to say "the galaxy is constantly full of skirmishes because communications is slow, everyone borders everyone else, and no faction is actually particularly united."

I strongly suspect nobody who plays Starcraft or whatever feels bad about playing the Zerg either, so this is kind of silly.

And if we're going back to "authorial intent" then we can and should also go back to the authorial intent from first purposes, and you can absolutely do a wargame where every faction has a reason to go to war against every other faction, that you play on a tabletop with small groups of miniatures, without making the setting absurdly and oppressively grimdark.
 
Tealg said:
My stated point is that from a Doyleist perspective it's clear that the authors' want to set up the Imperium as the only solution to Chaos, because it helps maintain the balance of grimderp, and is thematically consistent with 40k as a tabletop setting.
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Except that infamous 40k blurb that coined the very term "grimdark" made it clear that the Imperium is the worst regime to ever rule humanity. That is part of what you dub the "grimderp". It isn't that the Imperium is necessary. It's that the Imperium, just like every other faction, makes the setting even worse, even more dystopian. Humanity is preyed upon by orcs and literal daemons and world eating bugs and in addition it slaves under the most cruel, most wasteful, hilariously inefficient regime history has ever known.

Because grimdark.

Yeah, cause the xenophobic totalitarian regime that conducts ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide is totally guilt free, because they're communists, not fascists.
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It's always fascinating how people in the 40k fandom have a tendency to get all outraged about the (admittedly existent) Tau atrocities, while at the same time that is stuff the Imperium is doing on a regular and daily base on far larger scales.

Besides, Tau being "xenophobic" is as well attested as the Imperium killing off all regiments which fought against Chaos, i.e., there is one single mentioning (of humans of a conquered planet getting sterilized, in this case) in all of the messy canon. So, if we want to apply equal standards...
 
The answer to the question is no

For starters you have many societies that survived or even thrived without the use of imperial draconian measures like the interrex and likely that advanced human civilisation that was genocided by Macharius (see a pattern here). Both these and several other empires were doing pretty well and only fell ironically enough due to conquest by the IOM (sure the interex got destroyed due to the actions of Erebus but the fact that chaos had to resort to suckering the imperium to do it for them hints that they weren't able to establish a foothold.

I would also like to point out that the imperial methods of chaos containment are at best inefficient and mostly self defeating. Hiding the truth about chaos from the masses only makes chaos' job easier as no one can tell if this new cult in the underhives worships the emperor in the form of a golden eagle or a chaos cult slowly subverting the planet . By the time anyone realises what is really happening the planet is already in flames. Doesn't help that life in the imperium is so horrible that anything that promises something better will at least be considered by the less fortunate.

There's also how the imperium deals with psykers , aka brainwashing, vilification and worse. This in turn means that any newly psyker will almost certainly not only see the imperium as an enemy but will be more vulnerable to the whispers of chaos.

Typing on phone so that's all I have for now
 
I mean, on a basic level, human societies that are as of yet out of contact with the IoM exist and have existed for the entirety of the separation without getting sucked into the Warp. So not only is corruption not inevitable, if corruption were inevitable, 40k would not be 40k.
 
I appreciate eveyone's feedback on this. There's one other idea I had that I want to run by everyone to see if it at least seems plausible, and that's an alternate form of FTL developed by this hypothetical human polity.

Specifically, I envision it as a sort of inverse of the normal Warp drive. Instead of tunnelling directly through the Warp to achieve FTL speed, instead this drive would utilize Psyker power and special amplification/focusing technology to bend realspace around the ship similar to an Alcubierre drive, thus avoiding the majority of problems of Warp navigation, Warp Storm fuckery, and Daemonic incursion. I'm thinking that the main drawback is that the drive is several times slower than normal Warp travel, but is considerably safer and more reliable, not unlike Tau FTL drive tech in that regard.
 
BobTheNinja said:
I appreciate eveyone's feedback on this. There's one other idea I had that I want to run by everyone to see if it at least seems plausible, and that's an alternate form of FTL developed by this hypothetical human polity.

Specifically, I envision it as a sort of inverse of the normal Warp drive. Instead of tunnelling directly through the Warp to achieve FTL speed, instead this drive would utilize Psyker power and special amplification/focusing technology to bend realspace around the ship similar to an Alcubierre drive, thus avoiding the majority of problems of Warp navigation, Warp Storm fuckery, and Daemonic incursion. I'm thinking that the main drawback is that the drive is several times slower than normal Warp travel, but is considerably safer and more reliable, not unlike Tau FTL drive tech in that regard.
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Problem: If you're powering this with psychic powers, you're still at risk of getting eaten by Daemons.
 
I just write said:
Problem: If you're powering this with psychic powers, you're still at risk of getting eaten by Daemons.
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I'm aware, but I figure the risk is somewhat mitigated if, one, one isn't travelling directly through the Daemon's home territory, and two, the Psyker driver operators in question have special vetting and extensive training to prevent that sort of thing, in addition to other precautions.

That said, I agree that there's probably no way to completely prevent some incidents of possession from occuring if the conditions in the Warp are particularly bad.
 
This had a pretty vigourous discussion more than once in the RPG politics thread.

It's fair to bring up on multiple levels that the Imperium is actually the author of a lot of its own problems. Chaos is part of this. The Imperium's incompetence and repression severely wastes its resources and actually helps promote the spread of Chaos. Plus its militarised society and overreliance on protection by Space Marines simultaneously leaves it hugely open to political instability.

I can't find the original post, but someone made the point that Chaos could be argued to be a reflection of what it draws off of. The reason Chaos is so awful and unspeakable in 40K is because it draws off of an awful and unspeakable society. One wonders what shape Chaos would take if the Imperium were replaced by a democratic, federalised instellar government that practised religious tolerance and civil society over military dominance rather than... the Imperium as we have it now.
 
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