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I feel like this is one of the wasted potential of the universe. With the huge diversity of factions, ideologies, cultures, beliefs, and religions, it's pretty much always that whenever two different brands meet, they just fight because of reasons.

But what if people decide to talk and share their ideas a bit. If not to convince the other party to relent, then to justify for themselves that they are in the right. For the discussion to be balanced, these criteria must apply:

+ Both sides share inputs. No one-sided preaching.

+ Both sides show a willingness to listen and respect to one another even if they disagree. There is no general strawman argument of "Chaos is power" or "Greater Good is always right" or "The Emperor rules all" or use of threats of immediate violence to cover the lack of persuasion.

I would like to list some examples:

+ Guilliman and Mortarion. We all have been waiting for this. While their conversation in Godblight is quite good, it is marred by Mortarion's fall to Chaos being badly written. Mortarion comes out as ungrateful, hypercritical, and pretty stupid for his decisions in the Horus Heresy.

+ Emperor and the last Christian priest. Again, pretty good except for the fact this is nowhere balanced considering, well it's the Big E, what do you expect?

I am writing this because I just read the novel Longshot and it's pretty good at first but then goes into a lot of empty and annoying one-sided discussion where a Tau Ethereal tries to convince an Astra Militarum sniper to join the Greater Good, only to get shot in the head. I am very annoyed by this. The Imperials come out as stupid while the T'au become monologuing mustache-twirlers. I do hope there are more novels where proper discussions of philosophies between factions (not within) are taken more seriously.

One reason I think GW intentionally does this is because if you try to justify any faction in 40k with arguments that us readers can relate to, things might get political in the real world. There are apparently a lot of Neo-Nazis playing 40k, though I am not sure if as many of them play like Call of Duty or Mario. It's a fictional setting. Don't bring it to the real world. But thickening its lore is still preferable in my book.

"There is only war"

If every faction is basically trying to wipe each other out, there is very little consensus to be reached as to who deserves to exist more than the others

Its a dedicated wargame with a light (fading) flavor of 80s political satire.

A friendly sit-down to rationally discuss philosophy isn't in the cards.

It isn't 'wasted potential,' its just simpler for a wargame if faction war is immutable and omni-directional.

For contrast- Battletech often got weird when alliances and mergers happened. Not just the absurdity of Lyran/Davion skirmishes (for the period that lasted), but also it wasn't in the interest of Kurita or Liao to fight each other while trying to deal with the Federated Commonwealth. They had no shared border or competing interests that were worth jeopardizing their security in the face of a major threat.

It is a statement on the power of propaganda to have an Ethereal wax lyrical on how a trooper could have a better life within the Tau Empire (probably true) only to get their head blown off anyway because the sniper has spent their entire life being told how the alien is hideous and deceitful and consorting with them is a threat to your very soul and humanity.

It is hard to have open minds within that context. "Blessed is the mind too small for doubt" and all that. Very few such individuals are tolerated, and they are pretty universally to be found in powerful institutions like the Inquisition or Rogue Traders where lateral thinking can be a useful trait.

Space Marines, particularly librarians, can also sometimes have a greater flexibility of thinking, probably due to their increased access to otherwise-forbidden knowledge.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Voss wrote:
Its a dedicated wargame with a light (fading) flavor of 80s political satire.

A friendly sit-down to rationally discuss philosophy isn't in the cards.

It isn't 'wasted potential,' its just simpler for a wargame if faction war is immutable and omni-directional.

Given the subforum it is posted in, I presumed this was referring to in the background lore, not the wargame itself. We do have philosophical conversations in the lore (written to varying degrees of competence) but they are quite rare in such an extremist setting.

I've got a bad feeling about this. I'll only be very generic and avoid getting into a stupid fistfight

I think the "waste" in the setting is as you said the variety of alien species, well or even chaos for that matter.

Most of the times, the lore as written takes to little time actually going in depth about the motives and making crossovers between political, philosophical and cultural motives.

As bad as DoW3 was as a game, I kind of loved the Eldar side in that game for the campaign. That's maybe a slowed uneducated opinion but their side's story was a mix of Eldar myth, internal struggles, personnal hubris, xenophobia... I liked it, it was far from their worst iteration.

I'd like to see more of this, and even deeper because even then it was only scratching the surface. Lots and lots of unused potential there.

You can't have rationality in an irrational setting.
The baseline for every single race that is capable of conscious decision-making is "You are lesser than me therefore die/get enslaved".

I just want to highlight this bit actually:

bibotot wrote:
The Imperials come out as stupid

Congrats, you've discovered The Point.

Rogue Traders and Inquisitors sometimes consider these matters but few other Imperials do - some of the earleir Tau lore in the first book was quite good for this and the novels can touch on it, The Necron one with the two bickering Lords for instance

The time for balanced philosophies has passed, chaos used Horus to permanently turn the galaxy into a feeding ground.

And remember when fulgrim sat down to talk to the eldar, that’s didn’t end well

Mr Fickle has a point in that some of these debates probably got solved thousands or even millions of years ago (considering Necrons).
There's also a huge cultural, racial, educational and social gap between the different factions making it very hard to build a common ground. Also most 40K factions are extremists.
It's not impossible, Eldar, Tau, some imperials, some Necrons, some Chaos guys can probably be reasoned with. There are examples of Iron Warriors that aren't just lunatics and can be talked to, but all instances I read still ended in fights or betrayal. This is not Star Trek.

Stepping away from the discussion-ending point of "That's not the point," that just doesn't really work in setting.

40k is a setting where feelings create gods and your friendliest neighbor is only one off-limits-tome read away from turning into a screaming flesh portal through which the hordes of hell spill. Philosophy is pointless because existence, in this realm and the next, is a known quantity. And that quantity knows it wants to torture you for the rest of existence.

So what is there to discuss? Why would the Eldar parlay and inter-mingle with humans who are but a hair's breadth from spilling the hateful denizens of unreality into reality? Why would humans make friendly and co-exist with a race that literally birthed a chaos god to which their very souls are forfeit? And that's before you get into speciesism. We have enough trouble wrangling racism on our real world, how much more complex would that become of a delegation of coyotes strolled into town and asked to have a sit-down discussion about equal rights and protections under the law?

But what if people decide to talk and share their ideas a bit. If not to convince the other party to relent, then to justify for themselves that they are in the right. For the discussion to be balanced, these criteria must apply:

+ Both sides share inputs. No one-sided preaching.

+ Both sides show a willingness to listen and respect to one another even if they disagree. There is no general strawman argument of "Chaos is power" or "Greater Good is always right" or "The Emperor rules all" or use of threats of immediate violence to cover the lack of persuasion.

So a few things here.

1. I think this does happen. Sometimes. A little. It's a big galaxy, the water caste exist, and lots of people in the 41st millenium like to ramble on about their philosophies. However, when this does happen, it's almost always "off-camera." As much as you and I might enjoy lengthy chapters of philosophical debate between aliens, that's just not the template your average Black Library novel follows. According to interviews with BL authors, there are literal fight scene quotas for BL novels, which is why so many "philosophical debates" we do see are held mid-combat. Which naturally makes it difficult to have an open-minded debate meeting the criteria in the quote above.

I'm sure Iskandar Khayon, being a Thousand Son, has had tons of interesting discussions with his dark eldar bodyguard about her life and philosophies. Just not on-camera.

2. Most philosophies in 40k exist to add flavor to a faction and/or provide an excuse to murder each other. I imagine that a lot of the philosophies in 40k are poorly-suited for lengthy examination and debate because they'd probably start falling apart after a page or two insightful discussion. This is probably partly the reason most factions in 40k make over-examination of their respective philosophies taboo; it makes it easier to explain why no one is asking the obvious questions and poking at the problematic parts of each faction's philosophy.

3. Tbf, there's actually quite a bit of philosophical discussion between people in 40k. Off the top of my head, you've got the harlequin short stories where they espouse their personal takes on matters of religion/fate. You've got various marine books where they debate miniscule differences in their chapter's gimmicky personal teachings.You've got Yvraine debating the nature of Ynnead and whether she and her gal pals are the literal second-coming of the mother/maiden/crone goddesses. You've got Thousand Sons and Alpha Legion who explicitly encourage each other to pick at and examine one another's plans and philosophies (although this is very much a Tell-Don't-Show situation in the novels.) Eldar explicitly have philosophers (I think it's even it's own path).So while each of these examples is more common within a given subfaction (and thus means the conversation starts with a lot of assumptions and common ground that arguably make the discussion less interesting), philosophical discussion does technically happen.

4. As has been pointed out, 40k is full of extremists, and there is only war. You'd kind of have to go out of your way to contrive a scenario where two parties want to have a good faith discussion. Imperials are brainwashed into frequently exhibiting violent levels of xenophobia. Talking about chaos is, at least sometimes, an automatically supernatural act that corrupts the mind. It's hard to talk about the pros and cons of Tzeentch when just discussing the existence of Tzeentch is likely to cause the listener's brain to be magically re-wired.

Even if an eldar and a human sat down to talk philosophy without letting lifetimes of mutual hate get in the way, the process of talking to the human would probably be painful for the eldar. Like, the eldar could be 10 times the age of the human and comes from a society where learning is encouraged while the human is basically a grimy child that prides itself on refusing to learn things. And one of the points the grimy child wants to debate is whether or not the eldar deserves to live.

Tau actually love to talk philosophy, but it's taboo to not begin every discussion with the assumption that the Tau'va is 100% correct about everything. Additionally, it's taboo for your philosophical ponderings to start sounding like they came from a different caste, and it's taboo for your ponderings/conclusions to become uncomfortably critical of Tau society. Also, discussion between a tau and someone outside of the empire is likely to be handled by a water caste, which means that the water caste isn't really going to be discussion in good faith; they're going to be seeking to persuade you to see things the way they want you to because that's the water caste's job.

Necrons have some major xenophobia and body dismorphia issues that make it tough for them to talk with non-crons. But if they got over that, necrontyr society seems to have been pretty draconian and not fond of dissenting ideas. I think there's a bit in one of the 'cron stories about how they outlawed/killed musicians because the ability to spread/frame stories in a way not approved of by the nobility was considered a threat. Plus, what we know of courtly protocols makes necrons seem like the worst kind of close-minded, abusive monarchs. Their first instinct when someone disagrees with them is to use protocols to make it physically impossible to disagree with them.

Yvraine managed to get some Eldar from all of the various subfactions working together.

In Adrian Tchaikovsky's Day of Ascension, you see how the GSC convince citizens of the value of the movement- some support the movement, or particular members of it even if they haven't been infected; the agents of the GSC are just that convincing.

I don't know a lot about Inquisitor Lord Kyria Draxus, but she's got a shuri-cat; maybe she pried it from the cold dead hands of an enemy, but I think she's a radical and it was a gift.

Humans have worked with Eldar in the past.

bibotot wrote:
I feel like this is one of the wasted potential of the universe. With the huge diversity of factions, ideologies, cultures, beliefs, and religions, it's pretty much always that whenever two different brands meet, they just fight because of reasons.

But what if people decide to talk and share their ideas a bit. If not to convince the other party to relent, then to justify for themselves that they are in the right. For the discussion to be balanced, these criteria must apply:

+ Both sides share inputs. No one-sided preaching.

+ Both sides show a willingness to listen and respect to one another even if they disagree. There is no general strawman argument of "Chaos is power" or "Greater Good is always right" or "The Emperor rules all" or use of threats of immediate violence to cover the lack of persuasion.

What's interesting is that you're simply imposing a different set of values but can't give an in-universe explanation as to why it is better.

Why would anyone listen to Chaos, for example? What's the "middle ground" between "Blood for the Blood God!" and not wanting to shed it? Do we kill half the weaker population rather than all of it? Is passive submission to annihilation better than going down fighting?

I've seen several of these threads emerge that condemn the 40k universe in moral terms without any reference (as if there could be one) as to why their chosen morality is different. Who are you to tell the Eldar (an ancient people who we are in no position to judge) what they should do?

Yes, on the one level it's just British satire from the 80s, and it deserves to be treated as such, but if you're going to start getting into deeper meanings, that includes admitting that your values are simply a different form of totalitarianism that you wish to impose on an entire universe.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Mr Fickle has a point in that some of these debates probably got solved thousands or even millions of years ago (considering Necrons).
There's also a huge cultural, racial, educational and social gap between the different factions making it very hard to build a common ground. Also most 40K factions are extremists.
It's not impossible, Eldar, Tau, some imperials, some Necrons, some Chaos guys can probably be reasoned with. There are examples of Iron Warriors that aren't just lunatics and can be talked to, but all instances I read still ended in fights or betrayal. This is not Star Trek.

Extremists cos slaneesh feeds their excess
Betrayal cos Tzeench likes to play games
Fights because Khorne cares not from where the blood flows
And nurgle is always there to soothe the pain in the aftermath and cleanup the mess/leftovers

bibotot wrote:
I feel like this is one of the wasted potential of the universe.

Then you have missed the core concept of the setting. 40k is dystopian fiction, peaceful discussion of philosophy and working together for mutual benefit is not aligned with that theme. The Enemy is the Enemy and must be exterminated without hesitation or remorse, their words are nothing more than lies and desperate attempts to avoid their well-deserved fate. And this is most true when cooperation could have the most benefit to all parties, all hope of a better future must be destroyed in favor of mindless slaughter and the suffering of uncountable trillions.

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:
And this is most true when cooperation could have the most benefit to all parties, all hope of a better future must be destroyed in favor of mindless slaughter and the suffering of uncountable trillions.

Right, but how could cooperation take place? We (being human) look at other humans as the same, because they are. We are all one species, and cooperation's benefits have been proven.

But what about other species? We don't really "cooperate" with them, do we? We have pets, which is more of a mutual exchange where the pet has rather limited options if you think about it. If the dog bites you, it's not going to be around for long.

Mosquitoes - how do we cooperate with them? Or communicate? What could we possibly work out?

That's the 40k universe writ large. It's not that the various factions choose to be hostile, it's that they must be hostile.

Necrons, Tyranids, Chaos and Orks are all implacable foes of everyone else. There is no coexistence. Eldar and humans can cooperate, but only in the short term and generally to fight a common enemy. It's not like the Eldar are going to share their technology or humans are going to create sanctuary planets.

In a sense, 40k is the antithesis of Star Trek's sunny 1960s optimism that there is life out there, and we can be fwends with it.

Yes, there is life, and it hates you. The best outcome in the 40k universe is that you live on a planet no one else knows or cares about.

Expounding on my brief and potentially flippant comment towards the start of the discussion, I did see a suggestion a while back that there is legit justification for 'there is only war' - because it's what orks want, and the same ork gestalt psychic field that makes red wuns actually go fasta (and keeps Commissar Yarick alive???) makes it so... Fun idea anyway...

Crispy78 wrote:
Expounding on my brief and potentially flippant comment towards the start of the discussion, I did see a suggestion a while back that there is legit justification for 'there is only war' - because it's what orks want, and the same ork gestalt psychic field that makes red wuns actually go fasta (and keeps Commissar Yarick alive???) makes it so... Fun idea anyway...

I kind of headcanon something similar, but with chaos instead of orks. With Khorne being so fat and happy, I imagine it's pretty easy for him to actively or passively nudge people towards more aggressive behaviors. Which in turn means that he's going to get fed by the resulting violence.

I do think there's merit in wanting some characters to sit down and discuss their respective philosophies. You can't have that sort of thing catch on and meaningfully change the setting because it would defeat the point of the setting, but it could happen in some little corner of the galaxy for the entertainment of us, the audience. Let me hear a sslyth and an incubus debate the finer points of bodyguarding and their respective motivations for getting into body guarding.

On paper, that's part of the fun of tau. They're basically the faction where 99% of the factions willing to have a civil conversation end up. We get a dash of this in the Shadowsun book (though it's mostly action movie style sniping/bickering), but it remains a criminally under-explored part of the setting. Apparently nicassar pirates are a thing. I would love to hear a Nicassar discussing his pirate days with a kroot mercenary or hear an extensive friendly chat between the seizure mushroom aliens and a guavesa.

Not gonna quote the OP as it's quite a long post, but I'm not sure I agree that the lack of philosophical exchanges between characters in 40K is a missed opportunity. I mean, the setting is the setting, right? 40K is a deliberately over-the-top bleak universe, where even the human factions (traditionally the ones we'd be meant to identify with) are organised in the most outlandish and totalitarian of theocratic space-dictatorships - a place where the independent thought necessary for such discussion is not just frowned upon but seen as abject heresy of the worst possible kind.

Granted, sometimes the writers of the fluff aren't necessarily going to capture nuance - everything has a POV, so naturally that means it'll have a slant or bias, and sometimes the authors just, er, aren't always that good at fleshing out this universe - but I think the chance of there being serious "exchanges of opinion" between characters that aren't instantly marred by their in-universe background and aims is pretty low, right?

I sort of get where OP's coming from, but for instance - how would you write a scene where a character seriously sits down and discusses things out in the manner you describe with, say, an entity that comes from a dimension where conventional time, space and form have no meaning, even assuming said character wasn't themselves a product of this astoundingly horrible galactic environment?

The only faction that sort of thing works for is the T'au because y'know "The Greater Good" and all that.
But even then their diplomacy is gunboat diplomacy. Sure the Water Caste and Ethereals will talk about how great the T'au'va is but the Fire Caste are always there as well, in the background to make sure that the opposite party knows that defiance will lead to war.

 YeeeMako wrote:
40K is a deliberately over-the-top bleak universe, where even the human factions (traditionally the ones we'd be meant to identify with) are organised in the most outlandish and totalitarian of theocratic space-dictatorships - a place where the independent thought necessary for such discussion is not just frowned upon but seen as abject heresy of the worst possible kind.

Again, a huge part of this discussion is how alien cultures operate.

I think a good point of reference is Babylon 5, which posited a form of communication and even understanding between alien races but also showed that some of the differences were unreconcilable.

On the one level the 40k universe is made for war. That's what sells miniatures. But at the same time, the underlying assumption that different life forms can't get along is not without merit. Who wants to coexist with mosquitoes? How would that even work?

How does one explain to a starving bear that, given just a few minutes, you will bring it enough food to make your impending death and consumption unnecessary? Does the bear even understand the concept of delayed gratification?

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
How does one explain to a starving bear that, given just a few minutes, you will bring it enough food to make your impending death and consumption unnecessary? Does the bear even understand the concept of delayed gratification?

Not everyone in 40k is limited to that kind of animal instinct. Tyranids are incapable of anything but feeding and Chaos is driven by the instinctive urges that corrupt anyone who aligns with it but humans, Tau (and associated species), Eldar, squats, and Necrons are all capable of communicating and understanding all of the required concepts. Even Orks are probably capable of understanding "this is your part of the galaxy go have a war over there" as long as they're given enough fighting to keep them entertained. The only reason you don't see cooperation between the factions that are capable of cooperation is that everyone is a xenophobic fanatic who thinks every other faction is a bunch of worthless vermin suitable only for extermination (with the Tau being the closest thing to good guys because they accept slavery as an option for sufficiently useful species). The galaxy could be a far better place if they all agreed to work together, destroy the mindless factions, and divide up the galaxy into each faction's territory. But because it's a dystopia this will never happen, everyone would rather suffer and die than allow the hated enemy to have something.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


Again, a huge part of this discussion is how alien cultures operate.

I think a good point of reference is Babylon 5, which posited a form of communication and even understanding between alien races but also showed that some of the differences were unreconcilable.

On the one level the 40k universe is made for war. That's what sells miniatures. But at the same time, the underlying assumption that different life forms can't get along is not without merit. Who wants to coexist with mosquitoes? How would that even work?

How does one explain to a starving bear that, given just a few minutes, you will bring it enough food to make your impending death and consumption unnecessary? Does the bear even understand the concept of delayed gratification?

I don't think these comparisons actually work, although I get the point you're going for. Most animals are not sentient, and simply act on instinct or to fill immediate needs. In the setting, humans aren't usually dealing with the equivalent of hungry bears or mosquitos however, but various other sentient species - albeit decidedly alien ones - which are in fact shown in the fluff to be consistently capable of communication with them.

The problem is actually less that you cannot explain things to an Eldar or T'au or that they are only capable of acting on immediate needs, but that their aims and interests are wildly divergent from yours. Given that human aims (maintain and extend human domination of the galaxy, reverse the trends undermining this, use anti-alien propaganda to achieve the necessary attitude in subjects) are clearly divergent from, for example, T'au aims (unite the galaxy under a federated cross-species coalition led by the T'au), the natural state of these empires is war - either openly or covertly, to try and carve up territory and resources between them. And that's just using two factions as an example!

Obviously this even more strongly applies to species like orks, which are basically constantly fighting in some form or other - though even then the fluff indicates that Blood Axe orks have worked as mercenaries for unscrupulous humans before and others have blackmailed human worlds for guns, so even in that scenario it's not like you're dealing with a hungry bear!

As such, communication between some factions does happen, and even very temporary cooperation occurs in limited cases, but at root the factions' aims and interests mean that this is almost always a case of "the enemy of my enemy..." and precludes any serious peace talks or permanent coming-together. Throw in that these empires are being invaded constantly by interdimensional nightmares and/or extragalactic super-organisms AND/OR mechanical terrors from the dawn of the universe, and the fact that everyone is being driven insane by both, and... well, you've got the state of play in 40K.

In the new Tyranid codex, there's a fluff snippet (so glad those are back!) about how the Tau have teamed up with craftworld Lugganath and have a joint operation going off to clean up the remnants of a defeated hive fleet.

So I imagine something like this is the closest we're likely to get to what the OP described. That is, some tau and eldar stuck with nothing to do during a roadtrip or at base camp, and some casual conversation kicks up between curious corsair or ranger and some tau. Maybe an earth caste is curious about how "eldar mind science" can be used to operate eldar machinery. Maybe a water caste is eager to flex the eldar linguistic skills he didn't think he'd ever get to use in person. Maybe they share a moment talking about how they each respect the preservation of lives in their own way or how tragic the tyranoforming of a previously-beautiful world is. Maybe the water caste asks about a reference the eldar makes to one of their dead gods, and the tau mentions how some of their alien helpers have started worshipping the Tau'va as a god.

What I'm getting at is that there's a lot of potential for relatively "casual" conversations like these in the events that factions are willing to team up (or chat with prisoners).

Conversations where one faction tries to convince the other to make a fundamental change to their beliefs or way of doing things seem less likely.

(As an aside, I wonder how the eldar and tau ships are traveling together. Are they both just going at sub-light speeds via conventional acceleration? Are the eldar piggy-backing off the oldschool tau "warp skimming" engines? Are the eldar using the webway and just rendezvousing with the tau? )

 YeeeMako wrote:

I don't think these comparisons actually work, although I get the point you're going for. Most animals are not sentient, and simply act on instinct or to fill immediate needs. In the setting, humans aren't usually dealing with the equivalent of hungry bears or mosquitos however, but various other sentient species - albeit decidedly alien ones - which are in fact shown in the fluff to be consistently capable of communication with them.

The word you're looking for here is "sapient"(the ability to think and gain wisdom), not "sentient"(the ability to feel). There are a good number of sentient animals we interact with(we even have a scale to measure how sentient they are), it's sapience that separates humanity from them and how sapient a species is would be the qualification for how we interact with other alien races for this topic. It's a very common misconception because "sentient" is so often misused in science fiction and media.

I bring up the difference because it's relevant to the conversation. Tyranids(except the Hive Mind itself) lack the sapience but very much meet the sentience quota, while arguably, Necrons definitely meet the sapience but most Necrons below Cryptek/Nobility level actually wouldn't meet the sentience levels we'd expect beings of their intelligence.

Yeah, fair - that's a good point, I imagine that's a common misconception but even so it does clear it up to make the distinction. Thanks for clarifying!

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:
Not everyone in 40k is limited to that kind of animal instinct.

I don't mean to imply that the problem is limited capacity (a lack of sapience), I mean perception/worldview.

Orks, for example, love to fight. Good luck convincing them to stop doing that, or only do it amongst themselves. They can produce highly intelligent individuals, but the culture as a whole wants to brawl.

Among the minority of races that don't have an innate "kill them all" mentality, there is some cooperation, but here again the problem is that we see things that would make no sense within their worldview and universe.

Put another way, I don't think any faction regards "peace" as a virtue, or even understands what it is. When have they experienced it?

Even here on planet Earth, how many cultures actually celebrate peace? The Romans closed the doors to the God of War's temple exactly three times in the entire history of the Republic and Empire. They understood the concept, even considered it desirous, but there was all this plunder and domination just waiting to happen, you see...

There are philosophical discussions within the setting, but one thing should be remembered as to strife between factions:

It is the internal talk that usually matters. To rally support and resources, to justify the war and keep war enthusiasm up. This is the realm of propaganda. Most talk will be heavily coloured by a millieu of propaganda, and an environment of warfare. Very few indeed will be able to truly think outside this box, and fewer still would dare to express such deviant thoughts.

Likewise, talk directed toward hostile sides will usually be propaganda as well, even if the effort is more wasted than the internal jargon. Talk toward hostiles would revolve around territorial claims, or claims to superiority and natural rulership, or claims to the inherent foulness of the enemy species and likewise claims to the righteousness for exterminating all their kind.

Historically, conflicts between humans rarely involved much in the way of philosophical discussions. But they did involve propaganda campaigns. Herodotus, for instance, touches on learned Persian men laying claim to the righteousness of invading Hellas because the Greeks attacked Troy in the east in the first place. The Greek legend of the Trojan war on the west Anatolian coast would have mattered very little to any Persian, but sharp Persian wits engaged in spinning tales against the recent enemy would still have picked up on it and made use of it as a dishonest argument. Anything to score a point.

Here, the discussion the touristing Herodotus had with learned Persians boiled down to cherrypicked points used as bludgeoning tools against the enemy side. It was not a balanced discussion, it was a rhetorical fistfight. And it should be remembered that extremely few would have been interested in seeking out the other side's reasons for going to war, as the curious Herodotus did.

There is a place for philosophical discussion within the setting, but most talk should definitely be driven consciously or unconsciously by agenda-hunting propaganda.