US Army Combat Veteran Reacts to Templin Institute: Imperium of Man (Part 1)

hey guys it's paul combat veteran mma fighter youtuber and today we are checking out a much requested video this is the templin institute's warhammer 40k lorvid on the imperium of man supposedly this is pretty essential watching to understand a lot of the warhammer 40k or at least the human side of the warhammer 40k universe and of course before we get started if you two know that the emperor protects but you're not entirely sure how he does so given that he's probably dead hit that subscribe button and of course hit like on the video to let them know that i am not making click bait and be sure to check out my second channel military history gear review right got the link right there down below and follow me on instagram which is just recently created right i think i have like less than 10 followers so you should absolutely come and join us over there now having done all that let's get started in the grim darkness of the far future the worlds of mankind stand on the precipice of destruction beset on all sides by predatory alien empires and threatened from within by heretics mutants traitors and worse yet even in this dying galaxy in a time when peace has been forgotten and every hope seems lost there stands a great bulwark between humanity and that which would destroy it it is a power of unimaginable scale in command of inexhaustible armies that hold back the eldritch terrors that await beyond it is a regime built on benevolence and cruelty repression and stagnation irrational superstition and bureaucratic corruption a nation tempered in the fires of endless war it is the 41st millennium and rising from the light of ancient terror stands boldly the great work of the emperor the imperium of man it is commonly said that the imperium presides over a million worlds but the truth is far less simple every year its dominion waxes and wanes as new systems are colonized or conquered and lost worlds are brought back into the fold well elsewhere across the okay i'm here to chime in and just say that given that there is no ai in this in this universe just tracking a million worlds would be almost impossible right for for a regular person just to understand what's happening in all of them right in a holistic way the galaxy planets are isolated and lost taken by xenos or brought to ruin by rebellion the imperium carries on only through the weight of its own immensity ever expanding and ever declining to think of it then as a single realm of defined borders and united territories is a fallacy against the enormity of the universe even the imperium is spread thinly and its worlds might be separated by hundreds or even thousands of light years planets within the imperium are separated as much by technology as distance even within a single system one world might be home to advanced industries and enriched with great wealth brought about by interstellar trade while another might exist in squalor its medieval population worshiping imperial administrators as divine emissaries this disparity so this reminds me a little bit in a way of when i was in afghanistan one of the things that was so interesting is that we think of afghanistan as being controlled it has either controlled by the government or controlled by a force like the taliban right but the reality is is that it's hard to control anyone without a really high level of technological sophistication and honestly people being compliant right people respecting that authority and so what you would more likely see is nominal control of a region or an area but in practice it was run by the tribal or authorities the cultural authorities that had always run that area right and they sort of begrudgingly would align themselves with the government or uh the taliban and the level of control they would exert looked more like a negotiation you know it was common for example to have two tribes go to war with one another and despite both being part of the federal the government of afghanistan the government would be unable to step in because they had to appease both sides and neither side wanted the federal government to end the conflict because each side thought it could win right so maybe it sounds like this may be something very similar where the central government is not actually as strong as it appears right and instead it has to just sort of manage a feudal confederation of of unhappy or unlikely as much by allies as by circumstance there exists a great fear of technology that borders on superstition and planetary governors might insist on restricting certain knowledge in order to keep their populations docile and subservient the disparate and widespread nature of imperial holdings makes cataloging them completely unfeasible although entire armies of administrative staff spend their lifetimes attempting to do so instead the imperium is divided into five administrative zones known as segmentum the segmentums of the imperium span the entire galaxy with the only limits to the imperial domain imposed by the range of the astronomicon an immense psychic beacon projected by the emperor of mankind from within the golden throne the beacon provides the means for the ancient families of the navis nobleite to plot a course through the otherwise incomprehensible dimension known as the warp this nightmarish realm is the okay so i'm assuming it sounds like there's a little bit of some uh of some frank herbert dune in there where there's a type of person right maybe a little bit psychic or telepathic who is capable of taking and navigating a ship through faster than light space um but it sounds like it depends on sort of a universal gps for lack of a better term and that is the astronomicon projected by the emperor let me know in the comments if i'm understanding this correctly this is is obviously just a fire hose of information that i'm sort of doing my best to try and understand primary method used by the imperium for faster than light travel and remains so vital that should the emperor fail and the light of the astronomicon be severed then the imperium would quickly collapse into chaos and darkness the emperor of mankind remains the formal sovereign of the imperium although in the millennia since his body was shattered and entombed within the golden throne the rule of mankind has fallen instead to the council of the high lords of terror entrusted to interpret and enact the will of the emperor the high lords carry out the day-to-day decisions necessary to govern the imperium so here's what's interesting that of course has a lot of historical precedent it's extremely common in totalitarian countries or countries where there is a singular ruler who consolidates power totally for that ruler to frequently become incapacitated due to age or illness or in some cases with hereditary monarchies that ruler is actually too young to meaningfully govern and in that case it's often either designated something like they have here like a designated high council that serves as regent or sometimes a um a a a sort of air a a well a regent who functions and the stead of that king queen or dictator or of course sometimes it becomes the informal power brokers right where you see individuals who uh have exerted a lot of influence before the ruler became incapacitated and then once they are then that uh that informally powerful individual becomes the de facto leader of the country i'm trying to think of a good example of that um an example might be when in the brief period when stalin had died or was had fallen ill but had not yet died right the uh informal power brokers the heads of some of the major organizations within the soviet union were the ones who were effectively trying to govern the country sort of even as stalin was incapacitated because he had never really designated a formal successor something similar may have happened in cuba right as as fidel castro became extremely old and extremely incapacitated his his high council effectively took over running the country but those were often men as old as he was who were still you know part of his original core group of guerrillas uh who ran the revolution judgments of the high council affect the lives of endless trillions but the nature of the imperium prohibits any centralized governance from being universally enforced right this is exactly what i talked about you can say whatever you want but without the the two things that a central government needs to exert its influence is one credibility right people need to believe that the federal government has either the strength or the moral authority to exert its laws right because ultimately i mean think about it depending on when you are um in your neck of the woods but in almost every developed country there isn't enough for example police or judges to enforce every violation of the law a person could make and instead it simply relies on the fact that most people either respect the laws of land or fear the system enough to live their lives in general compliance right we're not out there i'm not kicking down my neighbor's door stealing from them right but if i didn't believe the central government's laws were valid or i didn't believe that they could effectively prosecute me right then okay i still like to believe i'd be a good person and wouldn't go robbing people but a large portion of people may not consider that valid or tax for example if you didn't believe this this federal government could enforce tax law or didn't morally deserve it then you may just stop paying your taxes and if enough people stop doing that then you do have these like system collapses right so that's sort of the struggle that governments have in terms of exerting influence right they have to find that ability to convince or coerce their population to self-regulate their behavior in compliance with the law instead the imperium makes use of countless organizations to keep the wheels of bureaucracy and war moving perhaps the largest of these is the adeptus administratum teeming with countless scribes and petty officials it administers the imperium at every level collecting tithes and taxes performing censuses and determining which threats to the imperium must be dealt with and by which of the imperium's myriad of military forces alongside a thousand other chores and duties i mean truly well let's finish this the administratum is a maze of subdivisions departments and offices some conducting programs that are no longer needed while others may have been abandoned entirely it's clerks doomed to perform a menial task that's purpose has been forgotten so okay this is funny because this looks a lot like any sprawling uh bureaucracy in the modern world right in which we have it an un inconceivable volume of programs and initiatives and uh agencies and sub-agencies and offices and it's a real tremendous struggle for governments to get them to all work together right and to all have a unity of purpose right and to put every dollar to its best possible use this is a huge struggle and the bigger your bureaucracy gets the harder this can be and so they they describe it here but in fact everything they're saying happens routinely even in the united states federal government that has a relatively transparent spending system and a relatively transparent uh you know execution of its budget right and it's pretty strictly governed you still see routinely programs that have very obviously outlived their use get funding decade after decade uh the classic example being something like voice of america right which was originally meant as a as a western propaganda and also like legitimate news source for individuals with radios behind the iron curtain well the iron curtain has been gone for oh going on 30 years now and yet voice of america continues that it's not entirely clear what they do you know for example a typical one of my videos actually gets more views on youtube than many of voice of america's uh productions and again this is probably a function of the fact that that ultimately the the need right the large swaths of people who really do need legitimate news sources they're just not they're just not out there in the age of the internet it's sort of silly right but these are the sort of examples that happen in again one one country on one planet with 380 million people now can you imagine multiplying that by oh we'll say 200 million i mean you would indeed have these programs that would run into each other probably actively work against each other in a lot of cases um initiatives for that were someone's idea that have long since faded into obscurity um and this is sort of again why i say that you can't have these sort of administrations without an ai because an ai that can do it doesn't have to be a general ai but an ai that can look and say hey show me every initiative that is in you know that deals with this that deals with agricultural development and it can go through and understand what all the different names are but it can learn enough to understand okay i know what agricultural development can be i know all the words and all the things that could be in that program and then again a strong ai would be able to immediately look and say hey here's five or six that have duplicative missions and here's four more that are actually uh attempting to achieve a mission that's either no longer relevant or been superseded right and then you can make a decision to start to close these programs right and it's easy to do when you have 10 agricultural programs but when you have a hundred thousand or in this case a million plus right it would take a you couldn't have human beings do it right not even a not even a ton of human beings right because you you would just create the same problem among the 10 000 agricultural program review offices and it really wouldn't you wouldn't be able to achieve that efficiency without something like an ai on mars dwells the headquarters of the adeptus mechanicus an ancient priesthood of technicians and engineers responsible for the construction and maintenance of all imperial technology and equipment granted a level of independence unequaled within the imperium the mechanicum is viewed with suspicion by the rest of the imperial administration their forge worlds operate without oversight and their religion is viewed as almost heretical above all the priesthood of mars covet knowledge and they guard their discoveries with jealousy binding the imperium together through yeah this is another classic uh classic straight from the real world political situation in which two people two sides that are in vehement opposition to each other end up playing and batting on the same team again the classic example of this is the us and the ussr in world war ii right you got to remember in the 1910s and the 20s there were tremendous red scares in the country right and you know america was vehemently anti-socialist and his governments were vehemently anti-communist and worked tirelessly to subvert efforts by international communist organizations to take hold in the united states right and there was a lot of ink spilled in both sides in the ussr and in the united states about the evils of the others system right so it's ironic then that when world war ii rolled around the united states government and the soviet government turned on a dime and said nope these are our valiant allies we us and them are not so different right because you need the people obviously to believe in what they're doing otherwise you risk having this very demoralized fighting force that if they believe they're allied with uh the forces of of evil so again it can create these very strange you know they say politics create strange bedfellows out of necessity right but that's again polled it's so believable completely a thing that happens in the real world faith is the adeptus ministerum the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the imperial cult which spreads the universal worship of the god emperor of mankind known commonly as the ecclesiarchy the organization wields considerable power for it derives its authority from the common belief in the emperor's divinity even by imperial standards it is a complex and baffling hierarchy of priests confessors cardinals and dozens of other ranks and titles all across the imperium its agents guide the soul of mankind purging heresy and inspiring true devotion of all the imperial organizations however the sanctioned psychers of the adaptus astra telepathica the guardians of imperial law and the adeptus arbites okay so let's talk a little bit about this state religion right now in in modern developed countries we've really gotten away from the idea of a state religion but that is a fairly modern development in terms of humankind right the even you know modern nations like for example north korea maintain that their leader is also uh has godlike or divine like abilities and powers right it's tough to say if that is really believed by the people in general there or if it's sort of like a a divine cult or like training people to have great deference for the leader um but historically it's even much it's much much much more common it's almost it's if you i would venture to say that if you totaled the the humanity at large most civilizations had a religious and bureaucra like the religious and bureaucratic structures were combined like this think about the pharaohs right who were divine considered uh divine god kings right and their orders carry both the force of secular law and also the orders of divinity right they their will was the will of the gods and again you see for example caesar another really good example where there was a state religion right a a the roman state religion basically lifted wholesale from the greeks right unapologetically a religion co-opted to enforce and ensure cultural compliance for the state but when caesar seized power he made himself a god he installed himself as a divine figure in the existing religion and that like we talked about earlier was done to enforce and consolidate state power right it was to make sure that provinces that he could not control or coerce by force that they had this additional element pulling the people together enforcing compliance and that was a state religion that gave caesar both the administrative rule over them and also the religious authority guardsmen of the adeptus custodies or even the vaunted killers of the officio assassinorum no single institution holds greater power or instills more fear across the galaxy than the imperial inquisition so here is an interesting fact in a lot of modern totalitarian governments right and i'm thinking things like um world war ii era germany um saddams iraq iran one of the very common tactics for strong men to maintain power is to create similar but competing agencies with influence right and what i'm thinking of you know another example might be like modern russia right in which you have so a danger to every strong man to every authoritative figure is that someone else in his organization will command more loyalty from basically the the troops let's be honest they they rule by force and will command more loyalty from armed forces than the actual figurehead right so this would be like something like a kgb uh uh leader you know commanding more loyalty and authority than nikita khrushchev for example and so to prevent this what you have is uh you take you make sure that your armed forces are consolidated enough so that they can be responsive that they're effective right that you have an effective military but you don't consolidate them so much that you can that they can coalesce around a single leader and you ensure that they have active competition so you'll have for example your secret police your military your military intelligence your air force your air force intelligence your rocket force your nuclear intelligence folks right secret police internal state security your external uh intelligence arm you know you have all of them and they are all siloed and you try to minimize the amount of times they talk to each other and their only central authority is you the strong man and you can do that and that means because they're actively working against each other they will try to curry favor if they see one person gathering too much authority and strength right so if the army starts to grow too large and one particular general is is you know inspiring loyalty in his troops to him not to the strong man then maybe the air force will go hey hey hey big boss uh looks like your general's getting a little too big for his britches there i think i think you should uh you know keep him under you know squash him a little bit maybe disappear him right and that's the kind of of power consolidation that a lot of organizations use or a lot of countries especially authoritative countries use to maintain power inquisitors are charged with protecting the imperium against the malevolent influences of the galaxy whether they be the allure of alien philosophies or the machinations of the ruinous powers its members may pass through doors that would be closed to all others and there are very few in the imperium who can refuse to execute their orders without complaint or delay the inquisition operates outside of the control of even the high lords of terror and answer only to the emperor and themselves while such organizations have wide reaching authority their direct involvement in the governance of individual planets and star systems is relatively uncommon yeah so this is another entity that has a lot of historical precedence right and it's common again in not just mo it's most common in authoritarian countries but exists in a lot of different types of countries where you have a secret police force that usually answers only to the central figure in charge a good example is of course the east german stasi in during the cold war right this was a secret police force that was implemented by the ruler of the day oh my gosh i should know who it is let me know in the comments below help help me out who was in charge it wasn't chochesku right that was a romania anyway the point is that these secret police forces right often were of really really powerful compliance arm for that strong man right and so it would sometimes they would be part of that larger network of uh agencies that were sort of working against each other you know so you may actually have like um you know mil german military intelligence investigating stasi agents right just to sort of keep them all accountable to somebody um but i think it's more common to see them be extremely small and extremely loyal to the strong man at the top right and that is usually a function of um you know the the effect of the power of those organizations is much greater than what they can actually do right again in a million worlds you know if the inquisition was even 10 000 strong right but what you may have that's even more powerful is the fear of the inquisition the idea that there exists something with total power virtually no accountability and the right to do anything to you is such a powerful coercive force to get people to comply and again it's about compliance rule is about compliance in this instance so having an inquisition again a lot of historical precedent right the stasi famously would go after labor union organizers academics anyone who expressed some level of disloyalty to the state that was deemed problematic by the uh by the strong man by the person or persons in charge and of course that's existed in um the united states as well there is uh you know in the 60s 50s and 60s the fbi at times would operate like this they would they would um engage in often extra legal behavior at the behest of the president against his personal enemies or at people he felt were threats to the state this this was something that honestly j edgar hoover um in the fbi probably did uh you know hoover actually served much longer than many presidents and allegedly had a large number of files on each uh prominent member of the government in order to sort of enforce their compliance and so in a lot of ways he would operate almost outside of even the executive jurisdiction again so maybe that's one of the core models of this inquisition is sort of the old school 50s and 60s edgar hoover era fbi for as long as the imperial tithe is paid and obligations and responsibilities are met the imperium is content to allow various imperial commanders and planetary governors to rule their worlds systems or even sectors however they see fit in this way the imperium resembles some manner of feudal confederacy with a hierarchy of lords and vassals stretching from the lowliest page to the emperor himself such a system while effective at maintaining order and enforcing imperial authority means that very few worlds are governed in the same manner and mobilizing these discordant vassals and feudal lords is often taxing and slow okay so that's sort of interesting because the original system of feudalism as it was so it showed up in both japan and in europe at around the same time in history sort of evolving independently but what made feudalism in europe really rise was in response to the raids by vikings and other um like seaborne shipboard raiders and the problem was is that when you had a singular chieftain or a singular king with a singular standing army or an army they had to raise it was really slow to stand that person up in contrast right a feudal system allowed a series of smaller armies that could be effectively what we now call modular right you so you could take a a duke's armed forces two duke's armed forces and consolidate them under a under a something else i don't know but but the point is you could respond more quickly to incursions by these vikings because you didn't have to reach all the way up to the king or chieftain and get the king to authorize his standing army to march all the way from his capital to the coast instead you could have this this duke or this i don't know baron wright respond much more quickly to reports of vikings in the area and rally himself and maybe his vassals up and meet the enemy with a reasonably sized appropriately scaled force so again so taxing and slow probably not the defining feature of feudalism but again if you're describing a centralized command from which a massive bureaucracy chooses to mobilize or not mobilize that's not feudalism that is actually a again a totalitarian top-down governance system and that is extremely taxing and slow right because in order to raise an army you have to have the whole bureaucracy run through it's all its rigmarole approve the raising of an army and then send the order all the way back down to stand up the army and then the whole army needs to consolidate and then they can go on the march right it's a totally ineffective system okay wow all right so i am already at a half hour of talking and we have eight minutes of of the video in uh but you know this is this is what i think people love about warhammer is that it it it feels so rich and real because everything is believable right i mean obviously not the warp demons and the the tyranids and the the tao and the psychic astronomicon but the response of human beings to it right there's nothing new under the sun you have spaceships traveling through the warp but we still have the same kind of crappy inefficient slow-moving duplicative government that human beings have always had right and you have the same sort of corruption and you have the same pretty limited menu of ways you can solve the problem of things like raising an army administering tax collecting your taxes right there's nothing new under the sun unfortunately nothing that we've found in 2000 years of uh or 4 000 years of human civilization and uh it really i think helps the the world of warhammer 40k feel real when you go hey we still really haven't found anything anything new right so we are definitely doing a part two because this has been a lot of fun i've really enjoyed this and i hope you guys got to learn some cool facts from my like weird uh uh you know panoply of historic knowledge about militaries and governance and that sort of thing um nice to put my master's degree to use so if you guys have anything else to add anything i missed anything i got wrong you see i'm kind of doing this from memory please let me know in the comments below if you have other lore videos you want me to check out definitely let me know if there's other templin institute videos and of course like this video so the algorithm knows i'm putting out good stuff subscribe to the channel and i will see you guys next time

Channel: Combat Veteran Reacts

Views: 21,477

Rating: 4.9107809 out of 5

Keywords: warhammer, 40000, games workshop, guardsmen, seige, astartes, primachs, sci fi, fantasy, sigmar, bolter, react, imperial guard, warhammer reaction, darktide, vermintide, original human, veteran, wh40k lore, horus heresy explained, military, reacts, reaction, army, sodaz, 40k animation, breakdown, chapter master, space marines, video games, warhammer 40k, warhammer 40000, astartes reaction, astartes 1-5, astartes 1-5 reaction, templin institute reaction, templin institute warhammer 40k

Id: jWe70oHg8pI

Length: 35min 41sec (2141 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021