Did Arkat Ever Use Chaotic Magic?

[Jeff]

6 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

But some Gloranthans think he might be, right?

So a little confusion is forgivable, no?

Every hero at a certain point likely gets tied into the Arkat story. Everyone has stories of him. He's acknowledged, feared, and admired - even by those he betrayed. But few devote themselves to him outside of Ralios and the trolls of Guhan. 

[Jeff]

20 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

There is a strong post-kierkegaardian strain here + a few other places that I find personally wicked delightful but tends to run aground on the game as it tends to be played. Drop most of us in a 14th century protosartarite stead Outlander style (apologies to the sassenachs) and they'll classify us all as "arkat" individualists, somewhere between devious, evil and insane. They, on the other hand, have their organic connection to their perennial wisdom and so on. That's how we know they're "Gloranthans." 

We might take refuge in their trickster complex if we get any time to prepare, speaking of sophisticated lightbringer contexts. I think any Orlanth community sophisticated enough to develop a strong sense of CA and the other professional lightbringers will really only interact with the Bull through CA intercession . . . she houses the berserks safely away from the china shop and lets them out in times of trouble, only to welcome them back when the trouble has been stepped on. Bad bulls get tricked into leaving town altogether, going out to make trouble for the real hillbillies.

Of course this is MGF for the CA player who wants to keep her hands clean and still maintain a big stick to threaten people with.

Yeah, Storm Bull, Babeester Gor, Trickster, and Humakt are all roles where the otherwise socially unacceptable can find a useful and accepted place in Orlanthi society. CA and Uleria are roles where those who might otherwise not be able to survive in Orlanthi society can find a place where they are revered and supported.

[mfbrandi]

10 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

There is a strong post-kierkegaardian strain here + a few other places that I find personally wicked delightful but tends to run aground on the game as it tends to be played … They … have their organic connection to their perennial wisdom and so on. That's how we know they're "Gloranthans."

I think there is a danger to making dissidence a modern thing and conformity an ancient thing. The ancient world produced the Analects, but it produced the Zhuangzi, too — and the legalists were radical in their way (whatever we think of their political conclusions — and Plato was doubtless no “snowflake” either). The Nysaloreans are explicitly compared to Socrates — and it is not as if he were the only troublemaker in Classical Greece. But on the other hand, I grew up in a country where religious education and acts of Christian worship were compulsory in schools … in the late 20th Century.

If we all were radical free thinkers and we wanted to try on traditionalism (hyper- or otherwise) as light relief or an exercise in empathy, that would be one thing, but I fear we all carry our own “dark age” around with us and construct our “elf games” to let our ids off the leash. Whereas Homer and the tragedians held their heroes up to scrutiny and found them wanting.

So we can make up stories where every barbarism is excused and justified — and unlike IRL, no pesky facts can get in the way — but is that a fun thing to do?

(Oh, and I don’t think the Arkati are justified because they assert themselves against a potentially meaningless world. I like to think that even if a degree of fear and trembling is involved, they know when their spades have turned, but they must act even though justifications have run out. I feel for their predicament. This is all just idle fancy, of course. And from a known ZZ sympathizer, at that.)

[mfbrandi]

53 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Of course this is MGF for the CA player who wants to keep her hands clean and still maintain a big stick to threaten people with.

You mean MGH, of course.

Spoiler

Maximum Gloranthan Hypocrisy

[scott-martin]

17 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

we all carry our own “dark age” around with us

I think you've revealed big jade hidden in the rock. The living experience Glorantha as a collective projection that might be noble in some lights and savage in others but is almost always considered in opposition to life here on earth, whatever trajectory that might take. The fantasy bronze age gives us something we aren't getting at home. From that perspective, everybody's Glorantha will be different because we're all here chasing something different.

If one "Glorantha" stops being fun there's always another. Seriously. For some people, the real MGF comes from adjudicating the various interpretations like they're divergent stagings of the same script. The game (ludus) as it tends to be played is not that kind of ludibrium but there's nothing stopping it from going that way except all the other fans.

This seems central to the Arkat story, which is really only marginally interesting IMG but matters a whole lot to other people. That's okay. But I can read the story well enough to know that the central tension is about where we draw the final line around the self and say "thou art not that." For Greg, one of the central disappointments of conventional life here on earth was that "religion" meant not just compulsory chapel service but full-fledged mid-century sickness unto death. Glorantha art not that. Glorantha exists in opposition to that. 

We can build on that birthright or not. Even in the official hagiography (let alone Sandy's spooky acid cowboys of the astral realm) Arkat spends his life and wrecks the world pursuing a primal sin against being itself by going to war against an aspect of being that could have just as easily been himself. There's a death drive. The gnosis gets busted, the dawn age always breaks down. I just find it sad, but it happens. Is that "chaotic" at any point? I find all that sad too, but the sea and the rain are full of tears. And what does it say about Nysalor who may or may not be a "gbaji" at any given moment. That part can be fun to think about from a distance. When we're done thinking of it, maybe we're home after all.

[mfbrandi]

12 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

This seems central to the Arkat story, which is really only marginally interesting IMG but matters a whole lot to other people.

I think it is the apparently unmotivated hatred for Chaos — as opposed to having enemies who happen to be chaotic — that is the hook. Unfortunately, that there seems really to be no motivation, however occult, makes the interest marginal, the hook likely to snap (leaving an irritating remnant in the roof of one’s mouth). However, that is not solely an Arkat problem.

And there is something going for the Arkati: if they “consider themselves the epitome of the Light Side of Nysalor”, they are initiates of a dead chaos god — killed by their own founder/hero — dedicated to wiping out chaos. I mean that is a bit odd. In a good way. Presumably, they cannot finish up by eradicating themselves — in case chaos makes a comeback after they are gone. So they have to stick around. Although they might go bad at any time. It is a tale from the Cold War, after all.

[Jeff]

31 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

I think you've revealed big jade hidden in the rock. The living experience Glorantha as a collective projection that might be noble in some lights and savage in others but is almost always considered in opposition to life here on earth, whatever trajectory that might take. The fantasy bronze age gives us something we aren't getting at home. From that perspective, everybody's Glorantha will be different because we're all here chasing something different.

If one "Glorantha" stops being fun there's always another. Seriously. For some people, the real MGF comes from adjudicating the various interpretations like they're divergent stagings of the same script. The game (ludus) as it tends to be played is not that kind of ludibrium but there's nothing stopping it from going that way except all the other fans.

This seems central to the Arkat story, which is really only marginally interesting IMG but matters a whole lot to other people. That's okay. But I can read the story well enough to know that the central tension is about where we draw the final line around the self and say "thou art not that." For Greg, one of the central disappointments of conventional life here on earth was that "religion" meant not just compulsory chapel service but full-fledged mid-century sickness unto death. Glorantha art not that. Glorantha exists in opposition to that. 

We can build on that birthright or not. Even in the official hagiography (let alone Sandy's spooky acid cowboys of the astral realm) Arkat spends his life and wrecks the world pursuing a primal sin against being itself by going to war against an aspect of being that could have just as easily been himself. There's a death drive. The gnosis gets busted, the dawn age always breaks down. I just find it sad, but it happens. Is that "chaotic" at any point? I find all that sad too, but the sea and the rain are full of tears. And what does it say about Nysalor who may or may not be a "gbaji" at any given moment. That part can be fun to think about from a distance. When we're done thinking of it, maybe we're home after all.

Love it! For me the Arkat story winds through Glorantha. It is a funhouse mirror show where certainties fail once you move further, and truth requires great sacrifices to find. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers inherent in spiritual exploration, and the abuses that so-often accompany the "enlightened". And we should not forget that in the end, Arkat finds peace and balance - but we need to remain with him for the entirety of the ride.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

3 hours ago, Jeff said:

It is perhaps worth pointing out that the Arkat cult largely has to exist as a secret society in most human societies

I agree that this is reasonable and probably how it should be.  This is definitely not the impression I get

And in 1981, you may have been right:

Quote

The cultists of Arkat consider themselves the epitome of the Light Side of Nysalor, and condemn without hesitation he who is prey to the Dark Side. As exemplars, they pride themselves in their steadfastness, taking great pains to perform good deeds in the world and protect the good name of their hero god, who suffered so much and who paid the ultimate price for his inner knowledge. — CoT, p. 87

It does have an unfortunate whiff of Star Wars about it, but the Jedi Arkati would have a hard time setting an example (etc.) if they were completely hidden. (I mean, I guess you could, but it seems an against the grain reading, motivated retrospectively.)

So a society with secrets — a freemasonry? — but not a secret society in a “no one must know you are a member and anyway we don’t exist” way. But that was then, and this is post-Dan Brown?

But canon is only for Chaosium writers and do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law — just don’t tell any Arkati assassins that I said so.

[John Biles]

51 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I think it is the apparently unmotivated hatred for Chaos — as opposed to having enemies who happen to be chaotic — that is the hook. Unfortunately, that there seems really to be no motivation, however occult, makes the interest marginal, the hook likely to snap (leaving an irritating remnant in the roof of one’s mouth). However, that is not solely an Arkat problem.

Arkat's war on Nysalor/Gbaji started because Nysalor's followers were spreading diseases and then 'curing' them to win people over to their cult.  This act of deceit is where the name Gbaji (deciever) came from.  The effort to stop them ended in disaster, but he survived and losing his Brithini allies just made him madder.  And each step caused him to more and more flush any ideals he had down the toilet in the quest for enough power to finally destroy Nysalor.  Accompanied by anyone he did have any affection for dying in the process.

Only when Nysalor was dead and he'd basically trashed everything save Kralorela did he finally look at the wasteland he'd made (and called peace) and tried to do better - I'm pretty sure the main goal of the Arkat cult is to ensure no more Arkats.

Or at least, that's what he hoped, but by now, there's a bunch of factions and most of them are bonkers in their own way.

The interesting thing about Arkat is that he shows how the quest for revenge makes you into a monster and lays waste to the world.  He started out with understandable righteous anger at what the cult of Nysalor was pulling and in the end, he became the perfect soldier caste person - a killing machine shorn of all pity, hesitation, or guilt.  Too late, he came to regret that.

And then he tried to close the door behind him with his cult, but he failed.  Arkat collected the tools to make the perfect vengeful madman, and then Argath repeated his sins for similar reasons.  But did even more damage.

 

 

 

 

 

[metcalph]

42 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

It does have an unfortunate whiff of Star Wars about it, but the Jedi Arkati would have a hard time setting an example (etc.) if they were completely hidden. (I mean, I guess you could, but it seems an against the grain reading, motivated retrospectively.)

I don't see the text as requiring that the Arkati set a public example, and to infer that from epitome seems to me a stretch.  Consider the epitome of a secret agent or a humble person; are they well-known or not?  

[Ormi Phengaria]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

We might take refuge in their trickster complex if we get any time to prepare, speaking of sophisticated lightbringer contexts.

 

Quote

If the ritual setting is missing, trickster is missing. If his companions–all the other spiritual forces within whose fixed domains he carries on his mischief–are no longer with us, then he is no longer with us. Hermes cannot be rightly imagined without the more serious Apollo whose cattle he steals, or the grieving Demeter whose daughter he retrieves from the underworld. The god of the roads needs the more settled territories before his traveling means very much. If everyone travels, the result is not the apotheosis of trickster but another form of his demise.

Here we have come back in a roundabout way to the earlier point: trickster belongs to polytheism or, lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people and institutions and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that their boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly disturbed. Most of the travelers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level. Trickster isn't a run-of-the-mill liar and thief.

—Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

And to keep this from seeming too tangential, I'll give the thought that "Arkati Trickster Shaman" is, in many ways, an apparent triple redundancy. Any such transplants would likely just find themselves dissolving away into the whole by one means or another. Yet "Arkat" passed through these context-shifts while remaining "Arkat", even if that appears self-evidently contradicted to those who didn't follow him to the very end. His pledge is what protected him, and the pledge was set upon Mystery, though perhaps he did not at first comprehend this himself.

[mfbrandi]

8 hours ago, metcalph said:

I don't see the text as requiring that the Arkati set a public example, and to infer that from epitome seems to me a stretch.

Fair enough, and not from “epitome” alone; we also have “exemplars” and “taking great pains to perform good deeds in the world and protect the good name of their hero” [emphases mine]. It all seems to me to tend in the direction of showing virtue and setting an example — public things.

Spoiler

exemplar:

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition:

• noun — One that is worthy of imitation; a perfect example or model. synonym: ideal.
• noun — One that is typical or representative; an example.
• noun — A copy, as of a book.

from The Century Dictionary:

• Serving as an example; exemplary.
• Conveying a warning; fitted to warn or deter.
• Pertaining or relating to an example or to examples; containing or constituting an example.
• noun — A model, original, or pattern to be copied or imitated; the idea or image of a thing formed in the mind; an archetype.

https://www.wordnik.com/words/exemplar

————————————————————————

epitome: the typical or highest example of a stated quality, as shown by a particular person or thing

example: something that is typical of the group of things that it is a member of; a way of helping someone to understand something by showing them how it is used

typical: showing all the characteristics that you would usually expect from a particular group of things

exemplar: a typical or good example of something; synonyms: example; model

model: something that a copy can be based on because it is an extremely good example of its type

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/

But maybe that is just me. And anyway, maybe things have changed — been retconned — since CoT.

“Epitome” can be slippery: we might say of a fictional character that they are the epitome of the secret agent (George Smiley, maybe — I dunno), and in the fiction they may be completely anonymous, but to us up here in Metaland, the character functions as an example, is well known. But the Arkati see themselves as examples, as models to be emulated. What is it all the cool kids say these days, “you can’t be what you can’t see”?

[mfbrandi]

9 hours ago, John Biles said:

I'm pretty sure the main goal of the Arkat cult is to ensure no more Arkats.

Sure: we only have nuclear weapons to prevent nuclear war.

9 hours ago, John Biles said:

Arkat's war on Nysalor/Gbaji started because Nysalor's followers were spreading diseases and then 'curing' them to win people over to their cult.

And we can agree that those Nysalor prophets succumbed to — what we are told is — the all-too-human temptation of the dark side. But it is explicit that Chaos and the dark side are not the same thing.

Spoiler

The dark side of Nysalor is not, as one might expect, merely alignment with Chaos. It is a more subtle temptation. Once a being has realized that there is no final difference between Chaos and Law, he may later make a similar but false parallel between his personal ethics and his personal desires, reasoning that since there is no ultimate division to the former, neither is there any final difference between the latter …  Law and Chaos create in different ways, and all creativity rests upon co-operation between elements of existence. He who operates solely from personal desire will not cooperate … In this sense, fully Lawful beings can be as much agents of the dark side as was the worst Gbaji prophet. — CoT, p. 87

The collapse of the difference between Chaos and Law is said not to legitimize the collapse of personal ethics and personal desire (i.e. if I want it, it is right for me to have it) — it is a false parallel. As far as I can see, the sin of the Dark Siders (very Jack Kirby) is non-cooperation, which is said to imply non-creativity. But it is allowed that Chaos can create — else no Glorantha — so Chaos does not imply the dark side … and we are told Law does not exclude it.

(Because it is a false parallel — a bad argument — it is utterly unclear what Chaos, Law, and illumination have to do with the dark side. One might just as well say that because there is no final difference between Lemons and Oranges, I can do whatever I like and it is OK. Cue demented cultists setting fire to all the lemon trees to prevent my lousy behaviour.)

Anyway, now we feel fully justified in our war on the dark side — on the non-cooperative, non-creative free riders. Yay us! Go team! But:

Quote

[the Arkat cult’s] great duty is to maintain order and stamp out Chaos … they aim only to destroy Chaos, and will not rest till they have done so. — also CoT, p. 87

Am I alone in wondering how we get there from objecting to spreading diseases to spread the Good News?

This is why I asked earlier in the thread whether illumination was a form of Chaos magic (and it does seem to be magic). If it is, then illumination is not the only route to the dark side (because “fully Lawful beings” can get there) — and anyway, Chaos doesn’t imply illumination. And if it is not, then even if we have to stamp out illumination lest it lead — in some mysterious fashion — to the dark side, that is not really a war on Chaos. Although, if “there is no final difference between Chaos and Law” (presumably the stance of the Arkati illuminates), what would a war on Chaos even look like?

I cannot shake the feeling that I have been making a schoolboy error for the last 40-odd years, but as is the way of such things, I cannot think what that error might be.

[Ormi Phengaria]

Illuminates have nothing intrinsically stopping them from using their power to take from the world and give absolutely nothing back. They also have nothing intrinsically stopping them from using Chaos to this end. Demonstrably, when Illumination is widespread and unrestricted in the world, people who think and act like this amass great power. And Nysalor doesn't care.

All he wants, if he could be said to want anything, is for you to ask questions about the universe and find their answers, a process which naturally leads to Illumination. If wrestling with those tough questions just makes you a better immortal cannibal tyrant? You know what, that's great for you, it's great to see someone working through their issues and really growing. We're all just here to find own meaning, man.

That chain of causality is what makes Nysalor Chaotic, even though Illumination is not Chaotic in itself, and even though simply being selfish and destructive isn't Chaotic in itself. It is why the Gbaji Wars occurred, and why the Arkati view and appoint themselves as monitors of Illumination and the Other Side.

[Eff]

Or to put it another way, Arkati defend against the prospect of people accumulating vast quantities of power with which to dominate others through radical freedom via accumulating vast quantities of power with which to dominate others through radical freedom. But they do it for good/with the right elemental affiliations. 

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

All he wants, if he could be said to want anything, is for you to ask questions about the universe and find their answers, a process which naturally leads to Illumination.

But we all want that, don’t we? Not necessarily at all costs, but certainly at high cost: if there are truths to be discovered, we want them to be discovered — and by preference, we would grasp them ourselves (although none of us will ever know everything). If as a bonus, we are freed from our obsessions to destroy, or lose the hate which had ruled our lives, all the better.

Now illumination — or just plain ordinary knowledge — will sometimes allow us to do things we couldn’t do before. Some mean, destructive people will take their immunity to spirits of reprisal, or their knowledge of how to work iron, or how to build nuclear weapons and use them to do wicked things. Gosh, who knew? But did illumination make them do it, or did it just put a tool in their hand?

So do we leave the fruit on the tree and never step out of the Garden of Eden? Do we accuse Socrates of impiety and of corrupting the youth of Athens? Rhetorical questions both, so put you foot on the path to illumination — we may never get there, but what other path is there?

3 hours ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

You know what, that's great for you, it's great to see someone working through their issues and really growing. We're all just here to find [our] own meaning, man.

That sort of Me Generation claptrap is probably exactly the target of the dark side stuff. I probably hate it as much as anyone. It didn’t fade away with the 1970s. It is surely as bad now as at any time — “my truth” indeed! However, these two things are not the same:

• illumination doesn’t come with a moral lecture, a set of values, it is neutral;
• whatever you want, whatever you believe, it is right for you, and I approve.

[Eff]

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

That sort of Me Generation claptrap is probably exactly the target of the dark side stuff. I probably hate it as much as anyone. It didn’t fade away with the 1970s. It is surely as bad now as at any time — “my truth” indeed! However, these two things are not the same:

• illumination doesn’t come with a moral lecture, a set of values, it is neutral;
• whatever you want, whatever you believe, it is right for you, and I approve.

The thing with the snark there, "it's great to see someone working through their issues and really growing", is that the only alternative to it is violence. If you're confronted with a Bartleby the Scrivener, who would simply prefer not to leave the building he's squatting in, you must violently remove him from the premises. There's a wide range of possibilities for peaceful resolutions depending on tolerance, of course, but the two endpoints, of non-interventionist psychobabble and drawing a knife, remain a palpable presence.

And what Illumination does is remove a psychic prophylactic against recognizing the violence as violence. Because you can always displace the siccing of retributive spirits as the god's decision, not your own. When someone falls behind on their tithes and refuses to make good, when someone refuses the marriage contract their family negotiated for them, it is not you, the priest, who shreds their lungs apart from the inside or incinerates them with lightning, it's Orlanth, who knows better, despite the belief in the setting and the fandom that the gods are incapable of acting on their own. 

Because Illuminates are immune to a particular subset of techniques for enforcing control here, they are thus a terrifying presence even if they do nothing but live out their lives humbly and peacefully. They are beyond indirect authority, and if it is necessary to bring them into line, it must be done via force that is more naked and less justifiable on its face. The problems become pettier, less about defying the will of the gods and more about sassing the priest. It is thus that Illumination comes alongside Chaos, not because they do anything to positively bring it, but because they throw the justice or injustice of the society into sharp relief. 

And it is then that the demons of Chaos emerge to force confrontations with injustice.

Of course, what you can do is operate at a level beyond this, and rigidly control the means of freedom, inculcating everyone who achieves the liberation of enlightenment in your own ideological beliefs, preventing them from ever challenging the order of the society that you think is just and correct. This requires you to be omnipresent, to murder ruthlessly and without thought for what anyone has done in moral terms, and to discipline any shirkers or rivals. But in this way, you can keep the Chaos monsters to the bad places where we don't go. 

(In all of this, it's worth asking whether the plague the Riddling Priests "spread" was a communicable disease common in Peloria or Kethaela that spread as a virgin-soil epidemic in Seshnela and Tanisor. Clearly, canonically this is false and the Nysalor priests were running a false-flag operation of literal well-poisoning, but if we ignore the facade of canon, what might come from probing this possibility?)

[Eff]

A converse of all of this is that the psychobabble is a manifestation of the concept of forgiveness, and no matter how much I, personally, might believe in a one-strike rule where any degree of moral or functional failure requires immediate destruction (luckily I would be perfectly morally guided and every action I take would be beyond reproach) forgiveness is one of those things that people keep doing to each other. And so the potential for Illuminati behavior is there even if you try to guard against it with harshness. 

[Ormi Phengaria]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

But we all want that, don’t we?

No. However, many do desire a cure to their existential sickness, and Illumination can provide that. Illumination is calming. It calms instinctive revulsion towards chaos, and the terror felt by its encroachment into the world, and provides the same calm to chaotic beings in the hatred and pain they feel towards existence and life.

But this condition is not universal, just familiar.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

But did illumination make them do it, or did it just put a tool in their hand?

The latter, as follows from Illumination being neither Chaotic nor selfish inherently. However, giving a desperate and anxious person the unshakable knowledge that there is no fundamental difference between chaos and cosmos has a predictable, typical outcome. In the most benign case, they come to the belief that there is no difference between their personal existence or nonexistence, and lie down to rot. Rashoran calmed the gods as well, and most of them who received his teachings faced the Darkness and their demise in peace. Mortals seem to have a greater persistence for a time, but not usually for the better.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Rhetorical questions both, so put you foot on the path to illumination — we may never get there, but what other path is there?

Plenty of people get by without the Secret Knowledge. The persistence of chaos in any given worldview is not a failure, morally, intellectually, or otherwise. In fact, they too recognize that chaos is an inseparable part of the world in which they live, just in a different way, and one which is easy to malign as hypocritical, irrational, or malicious from a supposedly elevated vantage. But they haven't seen what we've seen.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

However, these two things are not the same:

• illumination doesn’t come with a moral lecture, a set of values, it is neutral;
• whatever you want, whatever you believe, it is right for you, and I approve.

True. But the practical distinction between these, for Nysalor, is simply not there. It's not there for the god, who wasn't and isn't a god, whose meaning is Illumination and the Riddle. It's not there for the cult in whatever form it takes, because such organs are constituted by purpose. And it most certainly is not there for any given Illuminate by the mere fact of their Illumination.

Edited February 17, 2023 by Ormi Phengaria

[metcalph]

9 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Fair enough, and not from “epitome” alone; we also have “exemplars” and “taking great pains to perform good deeds in the world and protect the good name of their hero” [emphases mine]. It all seems to me to tend in the direction of showing virtue and setting an example — public things.

The comments I made for epitome also apply to exemplars - they do not mandate the cult to be a public one.  One can make good deeds in the world and protect the good name without being public.

9 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

But the Arkati see themselves as examples, as models to be emulated. What is it all the cool kids say these days, “you can’t be what you can’t see”?

Let's take a non-gloranthan example - Batman...

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Eff said:

And what Illumination does is remove a psychic prophylactic against recognizing the violence as violence. Because you can always displace the siccing of retributive spirits as the god's decision, not your own.

I always read the immunity to spirits of retribution as showing that those spirits were just the cop in the head. The unilluminated — the benighted, if we must — inflict “the god’s” vengeance on themselves. Understandably, the illuminated stop doing this.

But why do the benighted not see violence as violence? So they think a big god did it and ran away — violence is violence, and it doesn’t matter who the perpetrator is, does it? I am — as usual — missing something important.

4 hours ago, Eff said:

forgiveness is one of those things that people keep doing to each other

I have never really understood forgiveness, and I wouldn’t attempt it. That is not all bad, however: the flip side is that an action which harms me is just that — it is not a scandalous injustice or a blow against the cosmic order — without the fuel of self-righteous indignation, vendettas are impossible to take seriously and grudges tricky to keep going. 😉

[Akhôrahil]

20 hours ago, John Biles said:

I'm pretty sure the main goal of the Arkat cult is to ensure no more Arkats.

Won't they be disappointed by the HeroWars, then! 🙂

[Akhôrahil]

On 2/16/2023 at 11:28 PM, mfbrandi said:

Sure, that is why I phrased my original comment the way I did: my death squad killed w, x, and y — they were all terrible people, and you were all glad to see the last of them — but now they have killed z, and none of you can see what was wrong with z; everybody loved z and their turnips. So either you are all too trusting and my death squad can get away with unjustified killings so long as we bring in enough broo scalps, or we are going to have to come up with something a bit better than “z just smelled wrong”, no?

If they kill Chaos with 90% precision, a lot of people are going to be fairly accepting of the iffy cases where you can't be sure. Cost of doing business.

It becomes meaty if Storm Bulls killed your uncle with questionable evidence of his Chaoticness. Should you attempt revenge?

[Eff]

25 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I always read the immunity to spirits of retribution as showing that those spirits were just the cop in the head. The unilluminated — the benighted, if we must — inflict “the god’s” vengeance on themselves. Understandably, the illuminated stop doing this.

But why do the benighted not see violence as violence? So they think a big god did it and ran away — violence is violence, and it doesn’t matter who the perpetrator is, does it? I am — as usual — missing something important.

 

I don't think that psychological interpretation holds together. It may be a fantasy metaphor for psychological phenomena, but I think it very much is concrete and material and driven by the cult and the cult apparatus.

You think that "violence is violence, and it doesn't matter who the perpretrator is"? Would that more people had your clarity of vision. But we must live with distinctions between homicide and murder, of murder in the first degree and murder in the second degree, of manslaughter, of lawful killings, of lethal use of force in self-defense. Even for killing, there is justified killing in various forms and there is unjustified killing in various forms, and that's only a matter of law- in the social realm people frequently make even finer gradations of justification and rationalization, and all this is multiplied for lesser forms of violence.

So, too, there is a distinction between the impersonal act of divine wrath or justice, and the personal act of the creepy priest who has very strong opinions on how people's children should marry.

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 I have never really understood forgiveness, and I wouldn’t attempt it. That is not all bad, however: the flip side is that an action which harms me is just that — it is not a scandalous injustice or a blow against the cosmic order — without the fuel of self-righteous indignation, vendettas are impossible to take seriously and grudges tricky to keep going. 😉

Of course, in the political context, matters look quite a bit different, and cursing the wolf people with a mark signifying people's freedom to kill them as monsters of Chaos may extend a bit beyond what any one wolf person thinks about it, whether they contextualize this as a scandalous injustice or whether they think that injustice is the hallucinatory product of self-righteousness.

[mfbrandi]

12 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Cost of doing business … Should you attempt revenge?

Revenge? I wouldn’t recommend it. The SBs are hardly going to find an angry relative undermining or frightening. And they probably love a bit of vendetta. Before you know it you are them, and they have won — even in the unlikely event that you kill them. Especially in that event.

Cost of doing business? Well, there are likely a few random misfires, but more worrying is that the pattern of wrongful killings is unlikely to be all that random. Reflective individuals who call into question a life of fear, hatred, and killing are — I imagine — mostly not illuminates, but likely disproportionately victimised. And minor personal grudges will generate claims of cosmic threat, some of them even sincere.

It is said that the illuminated are hated because they may turn into supervillains, but I doubt it is the dark side people are truly worried about. It is the thought that all the bloodshed, hatred, and paranoia is unnecessary and can stop — that’s what scares people. Ever try explaining the sunk cost fallacy to an SB and a broo shaman as they were squaring off? How did it go?

Before you know it, the peaceniks start to despair of getting their fellows to see sense, and they start doing the mathematics: how many — and how few — people can we feed to the Bat and still see a worthwhile reduction in bigotry and bloodshed? Where on that curve do we want to sit? And that one tortured child in an Omelas basement — that is starting to look like a really good deal. Is this another manifestation of the dark side? Well, it doesn’t require illumination, self-deception, and bad arguments, but one suspects that these soured idealists would find it easy to talk to the Arkati. Although, some of them looking at the Arkati plan of perpetual pogrom might turn green and turn back.

Now to have these problems in a setting might be seen as a good thing — a very good thing. But to insist that reveling in a sempiternal bloodbath is the only choice that makes any sense, and that characters who think otherwise are to be slain out of hand, what does that say about us as players?