How Imperial Life Is Worse Than You Can Imagine
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Call no man happy until he is dead.—Thought for the day
They say that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, but they never mention that those who continually repeat history are destined to live a life of abject squalor and experience horrors beyond comprehension. So pay attention for Emperor’s sake.
In many stories we often we overlook the little man, but for good reason. In an alternate universe composed solely of gargantuan war machines and men larger than most trees, who among us can blame our diminishing attention spans? Statistically, a fourteen foot Goliath armed with a chainsaw tends to draw somewhat more attention from the general public than an unknown cobbler named Bob, that’s just a matter of Science™. Just like trying to draw the gawking attention of a group of teenage boys from a Titsplosion, or asking Michael Bay to not film said explosion, some forces in the universe are just irresistible by law.
But besides the continuous toil of countless wars and the perpetual threat of a Xeno invasion, in which humorously, the majority of the civies would care very little about due to the amount of Imperium propaganda that makes it so that every war is a victory, what’s so bad about your life in the Imperium of Man? You live on a cushy planet orbiting a stable star in the midst of the Segmentum Solar, the most heavily garrisoned and highly prized quadrant in the Imperium. You live in a nice house with a nice normal family and a regular job. What do you have to complain about?
#5. Overcrowding
Many Imperial worlds are designated solely for the use of agriculture. With any luck you’ll spend the majority of your life sowing seeds, harvesting corn, sipping Moonshine in the afternoon sunlight and breeding with your Cousins who will no doubt be attractive beyond compare on a planet populated by just a few million custodians. Then again, you could be the citizen of a hive.
As the name suggests, Hive Worlds are city-planets that possess extremely dense populations measured in the upper trillions, with each hive being essentially an individual nation composed solely of vast Megacities that extend from the bedrock to the stratosphere, urbanizing the entirety of the surface from pole to pole. Of the species present in the universe, only the humans of the Imperium are known to live on such worlds, since living in your own filth and squalor is apparently below the standards of the other races (Snooty Eldar and their “standards of living”). Even orks prefer to smash hives than try to inhabit such things, unless they hold some manufactorial ability. The world outside the hives is usually a heavily polluted cloud of smog, debris and toxic waste, desolate of all but a few Mutant forms. In fact most hivers live their entire lives without ever having seen the outside of the tunnel network of their hive.
The vast majority of hive citizens will never once witness natural sunlight, breathe unpolluted air, touch a real tree or never once comment that their homes don’t stink of hobo crotch. Breathing through your mouth is always recommended. Whilst to many here this would seem to be a hermit’s dream, there’s a reason no one opts to live in a cramped domicile beneath the feet and backsides of billions upon billions of other humans on trash day. But then again, Hive Worlds are an uncommon curiosity, with Civilized Worlds composing the majority of the Imperium's domain, so if you are born in a Civilized World then life goes on like normal, if you're born in a Hive World then you deal with it.
#4. The Adeptus Arbites
"There is no such thing as a plea of innocence in my court, a plea of innocence is guilty of wasting my time. Guilty." - Fyodor Karamazov
As an addendum to the above point, who here has ever thought to themselves “Gee, I wish someone would clean up the filth in this town.”?
Well someone out there in the vast universe agrees with you, except they would rather use an Imperial Officer armed with a Laser pistol and a license to kill on sight rather than an animated disposal unit dispensing cautionary advice on littering. Meet the local (albeit unfriendly) Arbitrator of the Adeptus Arbites.
While administrating justice and the prevention of crime in a complex civilization is a no-brainer, the Imperium, being the sharing and caring types that they are, somehow always manage to push the envelope beyond the conventions of sane earthbound law. Think of Judge Dredd on even more steroids. Incite a minor soccer riot? You and everyone else involved can expect immediate execution without trial. Steal a hand bag? Expect a laser diode pressing against your temple faster than most can pass bowel movements. Commit murder? You’re promoted as an Officer in the Imperial Guard.
Jokes aside, the Arbitrator is legally employed to uphold Imperial doctrine by any means necessary, by utilizing an arsenal that would give even a cybernetically altered Commissar a raging erection. Arbites are mostly concerned with crimes against the Imperium, like heresy, sedition, consorting with xenos, or minor tax evasion. Everything else is handled by the enforcers answering to the planetary government, and odds are pretty good that they're corrupt.
Worshiping Chaos in any way, trading important secrets with Xenos without superior authorisation, defaming the Emperor, shitting on the Aquila, caught making intense love to a hot lusty Xeno or fapping to heretical orgies (trying to say "But it was just accidental Spam!" are not excused – so stop asking) and obscene body odour (then again, everybody in the Imperium has obscene body odour) are all considered punishable offenses in Imperial society; with sentences ranging from the execution of you and your family, lifetime imprisonment on a slave labour planet to serving a suicide penal battalion in the Imperial Guard, where you are offered the opportunity to redeem your stinking hide in the eyes of the Emperor (what the pamphlet usually fails to mention is that redemption mostly comes at the price of an Ork-driven battleaxe to the face). Although on the other hand, if you're caught stealing a loaf of bread just to survive, you might just get a slap on a wrist and get told "Nu-uh! you're not allowed to do that!".
#3. Big Brother
In 1949 George Orwell conceived the most commonly cited tale of government totalitarianism in the modern zeitgeist, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The novel has become widely renowned for its portrayal of pervasive government surveillance and control, and government’s increasing encroachment on the rights of the individual. Since its publication, many of its terms and concepts, such as “Big Brother,” “doublethink” and “Newspeak” have entered the popular vernacular. The word “Orwellian” itself has come to refer to anything reminiscent of the book’s fictional regime.
Although this might be 1984's whole gimmick and slick. Surveying humans at a distance has limits, after all intent and emotion can be hidden rather easily behind a blank expression or a graceful act of duplicity, while the government admits that they just ignore those stupid poor who aren't part of the government; but what if the fragile barrier that transcends thoughts could be read? What if they betrayed us?
Miles above Imperial worlds, legions of Psychic agents pervert the minds of the human populous, detecting and recording the subtle or sometimes overt thoughts and feelings of billions of citizens in a single sweep, and just generally forgetting to wipe their feet as they mess with your mind. Where the vast banks of data are processed remains a mystery, but one can only imagine a Planet out there in the Imperium of Man dedicated solely to cataloguing, indexing and transcribing this stuff on a constant basis. One can only imagine how many failed undergraduates moved to this sector following the failure of their first novels. Knowing that your every thought is being monitored by the Government is certainly bad enough, but what if you mistakenly harbour a minor hatred for the regime even for a brief second, what if you don’t love the Emperor as much as you say you do?
On the plus side, the amount of humans in the Imperium in comparison to Psykers are momentously huge, so the chances that your entire way of life would be monitored and psychically read by human dog-apes is relatively slim. And given the Imperium's "Don't care so long as you do your shit" attitude, the only time that specialized Psychic agents would be used on normal civilians is on worlds where the Imperium doesn't trust for damn. But hey! although the concept of having your inner thoughts/lust being read by a bunch of Psychic man-dogs like they are watching inner-mind PR0N might sound uncomfortable as fuck, it's at least not as uncomfortable as:
#2. Planetary Defence
We've all heard the slogans over the years, if you love your country; you fight for your country…With taxes.
Taxation in the modern context is the simple and convenient solution of imposing a financial levy upon individuals so that the government may expend national treasure on brainwashing education (when they see fit), the enforcement of law and public order, protection of property, construction of economic infrastructure and war; although in the case of a galactic scale civilization bound to a perpetual holy conflict with dozens of advanced sentient races, the latter takes a rather depressing precedent in the social order.
Nothing is sacred to the Imperial war machine (except the Emperor) and everything is expendable, therefore all resources available to a planet are frequently diverted away from the hands and mouths of citizens and right into the pockets of Imperial armies, kicking ass in the name of the Emperor as they go. Therefore, under Imperial law, a planet is indoctrinated to bequeath (without second thought) all material goods where necessary, which can include food, local currency, private property, the planetary treasury and even their own lives, in service to the Emperor.
In fact Imperial Guard doctrine dictates that all draftees (over seventeen – so pop that Space cherry while you still can) are to be transferred to off-world assignments without exception, where they are bound to never return to their home worlds for as long as they live. Although the Grimdarkness might go down by a few notches once you realize that they're so many humans in WH40K that they would most likely volunteer themselves willingly in the trillions, which in turn makes the whole force-conscription thing a moot point. Despite what the Imperium tries to tell you, as said before, the whole thing on force-conscription (depending on where you live) is quite useless really, being more of an optional job then anything else in the rather mundane life in the Imperium.
Of course on the other hand, many scientists (E.g. not us) would logically come to the conclusion that this is most likely a means of propagating the dominant human genome throughout the galaxy in an effort to avoid genetic stagnation throughout the colonies. We just see it as an effective means of dicking with their heads. That’s right, we said dicking.
#1. Everyone hates you
At several points in your life, you’ll look up at your cubicle wall (Or the Strip club/Brothel/Janitorial closet many will find themselves working in) and realize that our lives have so far been a futile endeavor. As Pink Floyd correctly surmised “All in all you’re just another brick in the wall”; little do we understand that in the context of the Imperium of Man, you’re less than a brick in the wall. In fact, if the Imperium was represented by a brick wall stretching from one end of the galaxy to the next, you’d be less than the molecules of granite and mortar between the actual bricks themselves. In comparison, you and your entire genetic lineage is no greater than a single fingernail sized scraping of said mortar. I bet you feel pretty small now. (Except that famous Pink Floyd line is actually about how an abusive teacher was part of how Pink eventually isolated himself from society by building a metaphorical "wall".... but that's beside the point)
Yet despite the crippling anonymity, each and every day for tens of thousands of years, Imperial citizens will work twelve to twenty hour shifts in facilities that they may never see the entirety of; such as the several hundred mile expanse of their cubicle floors, in office complexes larger than most small countries and employed under a managerial hierarchy measured in generations rather than rank. If you work on a data relay planet, you spend your remaining days crunching numbers with billions of other drones. If you work on an industrial world, the factory line will most likely be your station for life, in which you’ll most likely marry the person beside you out of convenience alone; even if his/her name is Boris and their staggering list of hobbies includes “growing hair”. If you’re assigned a position on a porn/alcohol/pet store planet, then you are one lucky son of a bitch who quadrillions of fellow drones would willingly murder to replace.
Each day you are ground down to a literal stub, working to the bone for the loving Emperor until some poor bastard gives birth to an even poorer bastard who will inevitably replace you for the remainder of their lives. The worst part of Imperial citizenship is the absolute futility of duty itself, and knowing that tomorrow you will wake up to do it all over again.
Unless a heretical/mutant/xeno or even Imperial warrior you have yet to meet shoves the butt of his heaviest weapon through your face and delivers you unto the sweet release of death, of course. Hey, it might be time to start looking into that whole Weeaboo Space Communist thing- it could possibly suck a little less.
… Oh yeah, hail the God Emperor.
But let us not forget that for all the horror and injustices of the Imperium, it is the last and best chance for humanity to survive as a species in the 41st millennium (Or so the "God-Emperor" says. And before anyone asks if they tried anything else, they did a long time in the bygone era now known by Imperial historians as the Dark Age of Technology, which led to the War of Iron Men and was promptly followed by the horrific time known as the Age of Strife. The tl;dr version is that humanity, despite being at the height of its power and usage of hyper advanced technology, was nearly annihilated by Xenos invasions, Chaos corruption, and internecine warfare, not to mention the massive robot uprising that led to the destruction of virtually all the scientific and technological knowledge humanity accumulated up to that point, turning Terra and countless other planets into shitholes until the Emperor showed up. There is a reason why multi-system human states were so rare during the Great Crusade, heretic.
Grimdark, bitches.