IS EVERYONE In 40K EVIL? | WARHAMMER 40K Lore

so in the warhammer universe the lines between good and evil get incredibly blurry even the good guys are capable of some pretty dark stuff the imperium of man will bombard a planet into oblivion if somebody so much as sneezes and heresy the tower generally accepted to be good but they still utilize a caste system and aren't super big on individuality but what about the orcs or the tyranids i mean surely if somebody's good or at the very least neutral it would have to be them i mean they're just doing what they were made to do so let's get to the bottom of this and talk about what it means to be truly evil in the context of the 41st millennium oh and by the way i fixed the audio issues from my previous videos now without getting super technical and bogged down in the details because sound design can be pretty dense stuff i will say that it was an incredibly complicated problem to solve [ __ ] microphone was turned around backwards and with that resolved let's get into it [Music] the concept of evil to us seems incredibly simple but the reality is it's actually incredibly difficult to define philosophers and literary experts have been trying to nail it down for centuries and within the spectrum of right and wrong there are some acts that are just so horrific that we need a concept that truly encapsulates the true gravity of their impact we need a fundamental understanding of what it is to be evil now the warhammer universe is deceptively complex on one hand it's bombastic and over the top and at times can actually seem pretty dumb especially to those who are unfamiliar with its source text while at other times it can be deeply philosophical and much more complex than people tend to give a credit for now when speaking on the various factions in warhammer a franchise that makes war crimes a daily occurrence and seeks to cultivate a grim dark cautionary tale about the future often the community tends to latch on to very simple ideas one or two sentences to explain very complicated intricacies you often hear people say things like everyone in the 40k universe is evil or there are no good guys only survival truly horrible acts are justified against the ramifications of inaction now for a pretty good example of this we can look to the humans in this universe now it is not an uncommon occurrence for the imperium of man to abandon a planet besieged by say tyranids to its fate if its efforts are deemed better used elsewhere a world with 20 billion inhabitants will at first be defended but as soon as a tipping point is reached that is to say where resources being used to save lives become not cost effective in comparison to the resources that that world will produce in the future when this happens a decision will have to be made and often that world will be left to burn now one could argue that with the sheer massiveness of the 40k universe that this act would be justifiable that sending more soldiers to their death in an unwinnable conflict is not only a waste of resources but could be justified as evil through a stubborn refusal to admit defeat there's actually a really interesting example of this in the warhammer plush show angels of death where the blood angels are defending a world from a tyranid invasion in the middle of the conflict they receive a distressed call ordering them to return to ball as a tyranid high fleet was on a collision course for their homeworld after a few moments of deliberation it is decided that they will retreat and return to ball leaving this world and all of its inhabitants to its fate before the order is given the captain of the blood angels makes sure everyone is fully aware of the gravity of this decision that in doing this they are condemning billions to their deaths with great remorse the call is answered and the fleet retreats now this may seem cruel but from their perspective if ball was to fall trillions more would die in the future now i use this example to emphasize that the universe that 40k is set in is one of necessity with the cleansing of a planet through exterminatus because a gene stealer cult has spread too deeply or a chaos cult has gained too much power that the threat can no longer be reasonably contained that the planet's destruction is deemed as necessary to prevent its spread cutting off the gangrenous limb to save the body these decisions are not made without rigorous consideration or out of malice but out of control and to save more lives in the future so whether this is right or wrong we can at least understand the imperium's thought process we can understand why they make such horrible yet necessary decisions and although convenient simplifying such acts as right or wrong rob us the audience of the great nuance of 40k that these are intentionally gray areas in dark times however despite this within the community there are several factions that we as readers view as inherently evil and some that we deem is inherently good and if you're new to 40k the ones that fans genuinely agree are the good guys may actually surprise you now i've already covered the tau pretty in depth in the last video that i've done but even still with how inherently good they may seem to be if you just check the comments on that video you'll see that that is still pretty hotly debated within the warhammer community so check out that video if you want to hear my thoughts on the tao but for this example we're going to focus on some other races and though chaos is normally considered to be the primary antagonist in this story we're gonna go ahead and leave chaos to the side for now because chaos is infinitely complex and varied with a whole bunch of different nuances and honestly it deserves its own video so in this analogy we're gonna use a couple of more easy to understand races where we're going to examine the drucari the orcs and the tyranids now the drukari are a race of pirates and slavers a legion of sadomasochistic dark elves whose only purpose seems to be inflicting suffering on others this is a faction whose primary goal is to take slaves raiding forces will descend on unsuspecting worlds in the dead of night to wreak havoc and spread terror through unprotected populations they have no interest in fighting honorably only in spreading fear after the raid they return to their dark city with their living quarry the humans they have captured are subject to unimaginable horrors torture and experimentation is the norm here and they will be made to live for as long as possible to endure the most horrific and grotesque acts that drewkari can come up with so that being said if you had to pick a candidate for an evil faction there really would be no better choice than the dark eldar now they are truly sadistic and show no mercy and literally delight in inflicting suffering on other sentient species however this wouldn't be warhammer if we didn't have a whole bunch of asterisks all over this concept for you see the dark elder do what they do out of survival since the birth of slaanesh and the fracturing of eldar society the eldar as a species were pushed to near extinction their vast empire was obliterated in an instant with the birth scream of a chaos god the survivors fare no better as the chaos god slaanesh seeks to consume their souls even to this day nearly 10 000 years later so the dark eldar do what they do as a means of survival they basically overfeed slaanesh by committing blasphemous and horrific acts that satiate the dark gods need for debauchery hedonism and suffering now they refer to it as a curse but the reality is that slaanesh is constantly siphoning their souls and through inflicting pain on others they are able to let that mental anguish sustain slaanesh and thus the soul drain stops for a period of time a member of the dark eldar who has gone some time without committing such acts will appear physically gaunt and frail their eye sockets sunken in their pale skin translucent they will appear old and withered as if aging incredibly rapidly in this way suffering sustains them because through inflicting pain the dark elder would appear to be rejuvenated and revitalized decades of age being undone in moments and like all eldar natural breeding is incredibly difficult and takes a very long time so most new dark eldar citizens are background clones and to say the drukari looked down on them as not being true kin as they put it this would be a massive understatement their society is inevitably collapsing and they are headed for extinction so through the deeds that we would consider evil they ensure their species survival so if a species commits horrible acts out of a drive to survive would they be considered inherently evil does the existence of a cause dismiss the wickedness of their deeds now although i believe there is an argument to be made here and this would make for a pretty interesting albeit uncomfortable dinner table conversation i feel that personally that from their perspective their actions are justified but that does not in turn free them from the label of evil they are fully aware of what they are doing and yet continue to do it i'm sure a great many evil people in reality felt justified in their actions as well yet we as a society have rightfully labeled them as evil and my lukewarm take is that this is no different with the dark eldar that the desire to not go screaming into the void may give purpose to their actions however those actions and their perpetuators are without a doubt evil as their survival depends on not just going to war but through a need to inflict misery and that's a whole nother level over just being a warlike species but what if there was a species that committed extraordinary acts of violence well seemingly having no fundamental concept of its consequences what if there was a species out there that did horrific and terrible things with a seeming moral indifference that is a commonly held belief amongst warhammer fans that if any faction could inherently be considered good in this universe would be the tyranids and the orcs as the former is just a group of animals and the latter a species that was bred specifically for violence so some brief history on the orcs for those of you who are new to warhammer the orcs were created by an ancient race known as the old ones during a period known as the war in heaven and this is a topic we will cover more in depth in another video but for right now all you need to know was that the necrons in the catan were in a massive galaxy spanning war against the old ones approximately 60 million years ago the old ones created the orcs and the eldar to combat them and the elder and the orcs were pretty different from one another the eldar were all potent sikers while the orcs were massive in hulking brutes so it's as if the old ones had basically created a race of mages and a race of warriors to help them fight back against the necrons and their dark gods and don't misunderstand from the literal beginning of the orcs they were made to fight everything about them has been tailor-made in the image of perfect violence take for example that the orcs have an organ system much like you or i do however each one of these is not critically important to sustaining life so they can take grievous injuries and keep on fighting if an orc gets stabbed in the spleen it's no big deal they didn't need it anyways they reproduce through spores and grow to maturity in about a year and each one of them is a hulking mass of muscle and relentless aggression they literally get physically sick if they go too long without fighting and seem to require it basically as much as humans require food and water now when discussing the orcs they're often compared to being more of a force of nature rather than a species a massive gathering of orcs which is known as a [ __ ] can be compared more to a natural disaster like a tsunami or a tornado the raw incarnation of violence and destruction one with little thought or care for anything that gets in its way in this way the actions of the orcs by warhammer fans are often seen as morally gray they don't fight out of some type of malicious intent they are simply doing what they were bred to do and from their perspective they're just having fun in this sense they are about as evil as a hurricane and although i believe there's some truth to that i also think that this line of reasoning hand waves a lot of pretty horrific stuff orcs are responsible for the slaughter of billions of innocent people they don't care who you are what species you belong to or even the circumstances they find themselves in they will fight and kill anything they find men women children it doesn't matter the orcs are brutality incarnate they show no mercy and no respite for their enemies they are a thousand strong horde of billions of axe-wielding murderers that descend on a world like a green tide of violence leaving death and destruction in their wake now the orcs are normally portrayed as pretty stupid and i feel like this does a disservice to them as they are actually quite intelligent maybe less so than your average human but they at least understand the concept of fear orcs feel fear just like we do and will run for the hills if the battle is turning against them or if they see something truly monstrous and they understand pain as well and that injury is something to be avoided despite their ability to take a hit better than you or i and although they understand that they don't want to get hurt they have no problem hurting others it's less of the orcs don't understand these things and more that they have a complete and utter absence of empathy when orcs see their own brother step on a land mine for example they collapse in a fit of laughter they find it hilarious when other orcs get hurt and die just as with pretty much anyone else for that matter and with that fact about them being known the only way you can call them not evil is if your definition of evil requires that the perpetrator be fully aware that they are committing an evil act if they have no concept of evil and biologically have their empathy removed can they freely commit genocide on a galaxy spanning scale without donning the moniker of an evil doer now in the real world part of the definition of a psychopath is one who literally does not have any empathy a person who physically and chemically cannot relate to others and tends to have a violent tendency now as a literal axe-wielding psychopath that murders indefinitely with no ability to feel any remorse or much of anything at all evil and what if that psychopath finds the act genuinely enjoyable and hilarious so the only difference between the orcs in this hypothetical slasher movie villain is that one comes from a species that normally has an understanding of empathy while the other species has had it programmed out of them and i'm not making a genuine claim one way or the other here but i'll be curious to read what your thoughts are in the comments section as with everything in this universe things are more complicated than they initially appear to be now speaking of true neutral gray areas let's talk about the tyranids now if there was ever a poster trial for neutrality in this universe it would be the bugs as they are also a galaxy spanning threat much like the orcs but on the surface seem even less intelligent most of which basically possessing the intellect of at best a really smart labrador they are basically at their core animals and function on instinct and like all animals their primary goals are to eat and reproduce and thus they spread through the galaxy consuming everything in their path rendering down all biological life into a gelatinous substance known as biomass which once harvested can be used to make more tyranids now you can't really call an animal evil a predator does what it is programmed to do to eat and reproduce the lion that eats the gazelle is not evil it is doing what it needs to survive nature can be cruel and unforgiving but most of us would agree it's not evil so in this concept you can think of the tyranids as an invasive species they're quite similar to the cane toad in australia or the pythons in the everglades of florida they come from outside of our galaxy and our galaxy wasn't made to support them now an invasive species starts off small but after becoming the dominant predator basically reproduces out of control and ends up pushing most of the native species into extinction and although in the real world this is something that humans normally do their best to intervene in these animals are only doing what they were made to but here's the thing about tyranids and this is where it gets complicated all tyranids are technically the same organism and although we may see different variations in them from the tiny minuscule ripper swarms to the massive hierophant biotitans they are all controlled by an impossible intelligence known as the hive mind now the hive mind is a super mysterious godlike entity that exists outside of the borders of our galaxy we've not really been able to study it and we do not really know much about its objectives and what we do know is that it has god-level intelligence it is seemingly able to control quintillions of tyranids simultaneously able to synchronize hyper-advanced combat strategies and maneuvers across a million battlefields at once it would be like having the world's best starcraft player simultaneously playing a million matches of starcraft now even the most advanced supercomputers on the planet do not even come close to what the hivemind is capable of and if the rumors are to be believed then all of the tyranids within our galaxy are simply scouts as it is believed that all of our neighboring galaxies have already been consumed by the tyranids or at the very least they're in the exact same boat we find ourselves in so it's more like that starcraft player is playing infinite games of starcraft at the exact same time now for clarity there are times when the hive mind loses control over a group of tyranids when this happens they literally do act like animals they are uncoordinated and basically attack anything that gets near them they revert to a very primitive nature all semblance of intelligence and tactical decision making goes out the window and in this form we can view them as about as moral as a pack of lions however this is not the norm and there normally is a form of intelligence controlling them so now that we've established that the hive mind is incredibly intelligent if it continues to purge solar system after solar system of all biological life on a daily basis can we then label it with the moniker of evil now where this gets complicated is that from our perspective the actions and objectives of the hive mind are impossible for us to understand as this is certainly an entity that measures its iq in the millions so applying human morality to such an entity is basically an impossible task one of which philosophers in the real world have been attempting to do with god figures in modern religions for thousands of years we can only measure it against our own limited understanding of reality because our morality is different from the hive minds but within that parameter we can make a few simple observations whatever the hive mind's goals may be they involve the eradication of all species other than its own it would almost be fair to look at the hive mind like the humans in my invasive species analogy from earlier that we and all other sentient species are considered invasive to the hive mind's universe and it seeks to purge us from it so the common sentiment that the tyranids can't be evil because they do not think and have no more ability to rationalize and empathize comes into question when you understand that they are controlled by a super intelligence as we can assume the hive mind potentially has knowledge of such things yet chooses not to display them through its swarms now it's true that some tyranid species are capable of independent thought species like the brood lord hive tyrants and lictors are granted some form of independence from the hive mind in order to make their own tactical decisions albeit that they are still creations of the hive mind and still do its bidding like a general commanding troops while still following orders from someone at the top of the command line but it is worth pointing out that at any point the hive mind can still take over now the concept of evil is admittedly difficult to quantify but if the justification for something being not evil is that it's too stupid to understand what evil even is or in the tyranids case too intelligent for us to effectively understand its actions by this logic the only things that are capable of being evil fall somewhere in the middle of the intelligence spectrum like you or i do now i am no philosopher and this is a vastly more complex subject than i'm admittedly giving it credit for and i make no claims on whether or not either of these species is truly evil as i feel i'm not personally qualified to do so not to mention doing so would rob this thought experiment of its interesting nature but i will say this that we as the audience that don't actually have to live in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium have the luxury in debating the philosophy of such a bombastic setting and if we were to live in such a time and place i would strongly advise that you keep this discussion private otherwise you can expect a visit from your local inquisitor if you enjoyed this video make sure to give it a like and go ahead and subscribe to the channel i'm going to be putting out a lot more lore content soon and also let me know down in the comments what you think are the orcs in the tyranids evil or are they more of a moral gray area and what species do you think is actually evil or inherently good does good and evil even exist in the warhammer universe also i'd like to just take a minute to thank all of my patrons honest to god if it wasn't for you guys i wouldn't be able to afford to do this full-time i'm used to being over on tik-tok and they they don't really pay their creators much at all it's it's something like two cents per thousand views so uh again thank you all very much and if you want to support my content consider making a pledge on patreon you don't have to just you being here watching this video especially making it all the way through like this it seriously helps me out until next time everybody have a great night and happy wargaming

Channel: WesHammer

Views: 357,266

Keywords: Orks, tyranids, drukhari, imperium of man, space marines, 40k, warhammer, warhammer 40k, 40k lore, warhammer lore, warhammer 40k lore, orks lore, tyranids lore, drukhari lore, dark eldar, eldar

Id: ouBcutlwV4c

Length: 20min 6sec (1206 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 02 2022