Monday 25 February 2019

Revisiting 40k: Four Explanations for Turning to Chaos - Or, Milton, Orwell, Burke and Lenny Murphy Walk Into a Bar...

Why would an ordinary human in either the Warhammer Old World or the 40k Imperium turn to worshiping chaos? "Because they want power" is not a good answer; most of those who do it end up the lowliest mooks, dead in fairly short order or horrendously mutated and abused. I can think of four explanatory theories, which I describe as the Miltonian, Orwellian, Burkean and Murphyist accordingly.

Miltonian: Because, ultimately, you feel that you have been unjustly treated and your feelings of frustration boil over into open rebellion. This makes sense as an explanation for the actions of Horus and his comrades (which, let's face it, is a cheap knockoff of the Paradise Lost story anyway) and, perhaps, for chaos space marines. You feel betrayed because you are not accorded the accolades you know you deserve, and you become capable of monstrosity as a result.

Orwellian. In Orwell's famous 1940 review of Mein Kampf, he said:

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”

(Try to imagine a journalist saying anything remotely as thoughtful or important today.)

Need one say more than this? The Imperium offers (apparently) a quasi-feudal social structure in which many people can expect only at best a life of drudgery in return for physical security. Worship of the chaos gods offers "struggle, danger and death", and so some people - perhaps the populations of entire planets - embrace it for that reason alone.

Burkean. There is a kind of implicit social commentary running through Games Workshop games - although it is a very Anglo-Saxon one. It says, roughly, that class structure exists and is grossly unfair and has all sorts of other negative consequences, but overthrowing it is worse. You have a choice between the present feudal order and, both literally and metaphorically, chaos.

But it would hardly be surprising if some people didn't turn to chaos in that context, just as some people turned to Jacobinism and untrammeled blood-letting during the French Revolution or violent anti-clericalism during the Spanish Civil War. If the current system is shit, radicalism begins to appear sensible, and in the Imperium, radicalism = chaos, QED.

Murphyist. Occasionally in life there pops up a special brand of psychopath who, through personal charisma, is able to convince people around him to not only commit heinous acts but to enjoy it - to embrace darkness. The classic example for me is Lenny Murphy, leader of the "Shankill Butchers", a band of loyalist paramilitaries who cooperated to torture and murder at least 23 Catholics in and around the Shankill Road area in Belfast - ostensibly as acts of "terrorism" but more likely simply to satisfy Lenny Murphy's psychotic and sadistic impulses. Other examples would include Charles Manson, and John Bunting for Australian readers (Snowtown ranks up there with the most disturbing "Never watch again" films I have ever seen, but it is a really effective study in this phenomenon). What would it take for people to turn to the worship of Khorne? Answer: perhaps not all that much if they've not got much going on in their lives and a very compelling lunatic persuades them it would be a good idea. It's all downhill from there.

Don't worship any chaos gods, kids.

29 comments:

  1. All good reasons to go deeper in the 'spiral of chaos' thing. In the WFRPG 2nd edition book 'Tome of Corruption' there was another reason: people who get into worshiping chaos without knowing it. In the Empire there are a lot of 'regional cults' or 'secret societies' that are, in the core, chaos cults. But the worshipers don't know until it's too late...

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    1. Yeah, the Jim Jones/Children of God model of religious worship, you might say.

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  2. With regards to the 'Orwellian' motivations, I've always liked this page from Liber Chaotica: https://i.imgur.com/Kf4FYoI.jpg

    That kind of anarcho primitivism or fascist idolisation of strength is perhaps distinctly khornate with the opposite - pure hedonism - being slaaneshi. In the same way, the Burkean motivation would be a tzeentchian while its inversion would be nurglite.
    For example, a nurgle cultist might be motivated by fatalism. They spread plague and despair because they believe that suffering is inevitable and the only relief is by the grace of their parental figure, Papa Nurgle.

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    1. Yeah, I like that idea - although suddenly now I imagine a lot of Khorne worshipers standing about talking about their "praxis".

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  3. Some revisionist Lovecraftian authors have broached the idea that worshipping the Old Ones can be a desperate response to social oppression, from the worst atrocities of colonialism (Drake, "Than Curse the Darkness") to the racism and xenophobia of 1920's USA (Lavelle, The Ballad of Black Tom).

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    1. As much as I'd say it run counter to (some) of Lovecraft I'd also argue that when played straight this would make for something even MORE dark and foreboding. The core idea in this is that 'life is shit, let's use some eldritch shit to change things'. Anyone Lovecraftian story which stays true to the root of how eldritch forces are going to screw everything and drive to insanity could easily play this angle for maximum horror as people go from 'shitty situation' to 'seduction to dark power' to 'abyss gazing' and then before you know it there is no turning back.

      Of course I suspect the type of author to write such stories would lack the balls to show these people suffering the consequences of dabbling in 'things man was not meant to know'. And then what happen if the person at the core of this newly formed cult never had good intentions and exploited people dumb/desperate enough to follow him? What if he even stoked the fires to exploit them even more?

      There is a good (and yet shockingly human) Lovecraftian tale in there, its just im not sure anyone would have the guts to write it.

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  4. There's also the possibility that life in the Imperium sucks so badly that embracing Chaos can get you what you want/need. Slaanesh offers pleasure. Nurgle offers a warped kind of security (along with warped versions of community and unconditional love). Khorne offers revenge for perceived wrongs and an outlet for frustration. Tzeentch's acolytes are often depicted as more overtly religiously-minded than a lot of the other cults, but I suppose mysticism and the allure of knowing "how things really work" is a powerful appeal on its own. Chaos in general promises agency and power, which has a certain appeal when "to be a man is such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable".

    Your Orwellian theory doesn't really track for me, given how the fiction takes great pains to point out that for the vast majority of citizens daily life in the Imperium very much does *not* involve comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, or common sense (as far as I know it's silent on the matter of birth control), but is almost comically high on struggle, self-sacrifice, drums, flags and loyalty-parades.

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    1. Hmm, I suppose the first half of my comment is a version/restatement of your Burkean theory.

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    2. When you put it like that, you're probably right. Maybe Orwell's explanation is more compelling for why most people buy into the Imperium!

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    3. I never got the impression that most people were offered much of a choice! But I would say that militarism and religion seem to be good ways of papering over an absence of material comfort, agency, justice, etc.

      The introduction of the Tau provides the only counter-example I can think of, where living as second-class citizens in a Japanese mecha version of Plato's Republic is apparently much more comfortable than life as an imperial citizen, but very few un-conquered imperials seem to seek it out.

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    4. Comparing the Imperium and the socio-political situation there to ours and trying to draw lessons or inference between them always gets weird real quick.

      The cosmos of 40k, the way reality works, is essentially the Fascist dream-state writ large as a real actual thing. There really is a giant corrupting force beyond reality that specifically hates us, there really are mutated people (though not all mutants are bad in 40k) and secret cults trying to subvert human polities, absolute and total faith in a magical super-leader can actually, really sometimes work miracles and might protect your soul, this corrupting force really is so insidious and powerful that the most insanely extreme actions do start to look not only reasonable, but necessary to suppress it, because the reality of 40k is set up that way.

      Hitler would recognise the 41st Millennium. Just swap Jews for mutants and cultists, and aliens, and he would be quite happy .
      there.

      So the question of falling to chaos gets strange because instead of it being "why would people like us, in our moral universe, fall to Chaos" it becomes "why would people in a realty where super-fascism actually works and is at least partially justified, turn to chaos" - and that's a whole sense of strange impulses, similar to but contextually quite different than what would be experienced from people-like-us.

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    5. To be slightly more charitable to the Imperium, it's maybe more like Hobbes ramped up to 11 than Schmitt. (Although you can see the relationship between Hobbesian thought and fascism quite nicely in the 40k universe).

      I like Tom's example of the Tau. When it comes down to it, nobody actually wants to live in Plato's republic. It would be a nightmare. Orwell totally got that. (I recently read Sebastian Junger's book, Tribe, which starts off with the observation that lots of white American pioneers voluntarily went to live with the natives but the reverse almost never happened - the wider point he wants to make being that people actually seem to prefer struggle to safety if they feel like they are contributing to the struggle in some way).

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    6. Mind you, the Tau government is also an expansionist military state that heavily emphasizes a culture of self-sacrifice and contribution to the Greater Good, so it's not like you'd lose out on the narrative of civilizational struggle in exchange for a better standard of living (you also get to have unaccountable philosopher-kings and a eugenicist caste-system, which, not my personal ideal world). I'm also not really agreeing with Orwell 100% - it seems fairly self-evident to me that people can lead lives of reasonable material comfort and still feel like they have a mission in life that provides them with a satisfying narrative that involves contributing to something greater than themselves, so it's not really an either-or I don't think - as I'm saying that getting members of a highly xenophobic society to sign up for colonization by literal aliens is probably a hard sell.


      I'm personally invested in my view of the 40k world as a place that could be improved, but won't be due to inertia and the incentives of people in power, but simultaneously I agree with Patrick that the metaphysical underpinnings of the setting are pretty fascist. In addition to the fifth-column mutants and cults, when the wrong sorts of books or degenerate art can summon up literal demons from a literal hell, any amount of draconian censorship is a rational response.

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  5. In my own work converting WH's "Chaos" to B/X, I decided that the four chaos gods are really just over-the-top versions of the classic 7 Deadly Sins. In this regard, they are just personifications of the worst parts of "human nature," and folks who identify strongly with one aspect or another is drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

    Plus, once you start growing extra limbs and hiding from the local witch-hunter, there's really no going back to church, right?
    ; )

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  6. Surely the Warhammer chaos gods are just metaphors for human failure states. Khorne is a personification of the urge to hurt someone *so much* that you're willing to sacrifice all morality and humanity just to make them scream and bleed. Ditto Slaanesh for pleasure, Nurgle for bare survival, and Tzeench for knowledge and/or power. The mutations and whatnot serve as literalised metaphors for the way in which that kind of psychology makes you subhuman in some ways and superhuman in others, and for the ways in which it forces you to conceal what you have become from the rest of society. Chaos cults are just organisations which encourage those sorts of mindsets, usually by offering some kind of spurious ideological justification for why it's not just acceptable but *praiseworthy* for you to value your own knowledge / pleasure / survival / bloodlust more than other people's lives.

    I would imagine that choosing to worship a chaos god is almost never the *start* of someone's moral descent. Rather, it comes at the end, after they've already fallen so far and sacrificed so much that they have nothing left to lose. The job of a cult would be to facilitate and accelerate that process, guiding their members further and further from social norms, until by the time they revealed that they actually were actually a chaos cult their would-be initiates would be too debased to care.

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    1. I think this is right. I've always thought that the irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of the Imperium of Man was that it had turned itself into such an intolerable place to live, in the name of providing physical security from the forces of Chaos, that it's constantly creating the failure states that allow Chaos to thrive.

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    2. I think that kind of makes sense for Slaanesh - we can all see why the mindless pursuit of pleasure is a "human failure state" - but I'm not sure it works for the others as well. Is wanting to survive a failure state? Or wanting knowledge in itself? Is wanting to hurt somebody else a life choice, or just an emotion that happens uncontrollably from time to time?

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    3. Well, no. They're lords of excess. Their followers are people who have become so consumed by their urges and obsessions that they've fallen below (or, as they would put it, risen above) the threshold of humanity.

      It's perfectly natural to want to survive, to learn, to gain control over your environment, to experience pleasure, and to bring harm to your enemies. None of those are inherently 'chaotic' forces - in fact, they collectively provide most of the glue which holds society together. But when any one of them is taken to antisocial extremes, they can potentially become morally, socially, and/or psychologically corrosive, and I think that's what the chaos gods usually stand for.

      (Fun fact: before they got retconned into oblivion, the Gods of Law were intended to be *more* ferocious than the Gods of Chaos, which would have done a lot to clarify the theme of morality as a balancing act between various inhuman extremes...)

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    4. I do get what you mean but I suppose the question then becomes: why do people take those things to such antisocial extremes that it ends up having theological significance? So we're back at a "why" question again.

      What interests me about the GW universe is that it's basically Christianity but you can see the devil and know what he does. And yet people still worship him. The chaos gods actually exist - you actually have to decide to worship them (notwithstanding being tricked into it) - so the explanation that it's just a facet of human nature taken to an antisocial extreme doesn't seem quite right to me. There's a conscious choice involved. Does anybody ever say to themselves, well, I'm really violent and want to hurt other people and so I might as well worship Khorne?

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    5. I would say Joseph is arguing for what the Chaos Gods represent from the writer's perspective while you're examining them diagetically. I'd also say that the Emperor being worshipped directly as a god, rather than as the son of God, is an important distinction from Christianity (though it's hard to argue that a society built entirely out of Gothic cathedrals isn't drawing on Christianity). His divinity is (heavily implied to be in a lot of the fiction) entirely man-made. You can prove the existence of the Devil, but the existence of God requires an act of faith.

      That's why I prefer 40k without the Gods of Law. I think the lack of a supernatural counterbalancing force to Chaos makes for an interestingly bleak spin on the Moorecock worldview. Entropy is inevitable, while order is something that people have to make for themselves.

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    6. I guess I see chaos worship as somewhere you'd end up rather than something you'd start from - a symbolic representation of embracing your own worst self. But I do take your point that having the chaos gods being obviously real and obviously evil does strip away a lot of the reasons why people do those sorts of things in real life. In reality, war criminals and terrorists and serial killers always have endless excuses about why the awful things they've done were actually completely reasonable and justified. Those are harder to maintain when you've literally sold your soul to Heavy Metal Satan.

      A lot of it probably depends on how *voluntary* you consider the act of chaos worship to be. Do you actually have to sit down and consciously decide to devote yourself to Khorne, or is Khorne more like a psychic force that blossoms within you, calling you to him as you surrender yourself to violence and sadism? In the WFRP stuff I've read it sometimes seems to be one and sometimes the other, but they lend themselves to very different pictures of what a chaos cultist actually *is*. People losing themselves to violence is common. People who look in the mirror and say to themselves 'On balance, the only thing I care about is hurting other people, and I'm actually totally OK with that' are very much rarer.

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    7. Yeah, there is that distinction. I suppose I prefer to see it as voluntary because it's more interesting that way and there's less of an excuse for it. It seems more in keeping with the setting, somehow.

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  7. Or you could go with a DARE angle. The Empire loudly trumpets ridiculous lies about chaos that people think that ALL of the negative things that people say about chaos are lies and don't know what they're getting into.

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    1. Now you've got me wanting some 1980's anti-Chaos PSA's for
      high-school kids. Or maybe a "very special episode" for the 40k TV sitcom.

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    2. Over the top propaganda is always fun.

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  8. I'm sorry mate.

    You are doing a great job.

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  9. Milton - Nurgle
    Orwell - Khorne
    Burke - Tzeentch
    Murphy - Slaanesh

    Maybe???

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