There isn’t a purpose. Most of those numbers were there to get their names on a killmail, people latching on to it because their self-worth is determined by being able to associate with something “great”. Trophy kills, flags on a map, blood lust, feelings of historical relevance. Territory gained through war in order to make more money to pursue more war. There’s no ‘empire building’, or honor, or anything else that could be conceived of as a positive.
The answer, such as it is, is greed. And not just from us. We’re just the monsters set loose from the lab bringing havoc to the countryside, seeking glory. Capsuleers are made to be weapons, and only feel fulfilled when their trigger is pulled. It is our modern society that creates us and gives us more tools and power, because of their greed. Groups like Upwell, and the capsule schools, and the SCC, and the corporations spilling out design licenses, and blueprints, and clones, they all keep giving us everything that we shouldn’t have, and they will keep on doing that until we destroy everything.
Maybe you should have regrets? You were one of them, someone going to war in servitude to mad eggers with grand designs. Seven thousand capsuleers (and many more in crew and occupants of the keepstar) with red in their eyes, and your decision was to be one of them. Regardless of whether there were innocents or not (and with those kinds of numbers, I’m sure there were some, in crews or unevac’ed keepstar civilians just looking for opportunities in the worst places), you played a hand in supporting this culture of senseless violence. And you revel in it; that’s what disturbs me the most.
Now that’s what I like to see. A different perspective and viewpoint.
I can’t say I disagree. Still, the question should be raised so there’s opportunity to prove us wrong, no? If nothing else, the destruction and death tolls of the outer regions deserve a bit of recognition and thoughts spared to the subject. However, let’s assume we’re right and there is no justifiable purpose, what should then be done? This isn’t exactly a specter you can stuff back into its prison, at this point.
So in essence, we have unfathomable power and tools of destruction at our disposal… tell me then, Samira, what is the right and moral thing to do in this situation? Should it be used for what we feel is good and right, should it be used freely for whatever we enjoy or should we ignore the responsibility that comes with such power and merely hide from New Eden and said moral responsibility?
… this is of course a rather personal question, so don’t feel you need to respond in public.
Maybe I should? I can’t lie and say that I do, though. War is an integral part of my very being, and I am not going to apologize for that. As things stand in New Eden, that is not merely a valuable thing, it’s a necessary thing, as long as there are those out there who would inflict suffering upon me, my people and those I love.
Yes, I do revel in it. I get a primal joy out of it. Something is out there, something with guns and fury and ill will, and I fought it toe to toe. How can I not? Yes, there was a time when our blood was largely at peace. According to records, and what little remains of the Accords, it may have been the greatest known period of peace in New Eden’s history. Until it ended. Until war was a necessity, if anything was to remain of us. Until all we knew was suffering or war, and it became part of our very spirits and blood.
Oh yes, I revel in it, because while it may disturb you, it is a necessity if there’s to be even a hint of hope that any of our kin can ever hope to return to not having it be part of their hearts and life. With the Empire, the Angels, and so on and so forth out there… some of us simply must embrace what was forged into us if we’re to stand in that doorway and keep evil at bay.
Should I have regrets? Perhaps, but if I were to have any, it is that we have been excised from even being allowed to stand in that doorway. You know why I’ve been out there in the outer regions, submerged in wars and destruction. It’s because of the very same reason you barely undock these days. It’s because our nations, our people, those we fight for… doesn’t allow us to. In the service of the status quo, we are hobbled and neutered, surgically separated from the causes of our nations, ensuring that we can’t possibly tip any of the scales of New Eden.
So, I then pose to you this little conundrum: Are the wars in the outer regions purposeless and pointless because of capsuleers and their greed, being monsters, being weapons for a cause, supporting senseless violence and so on… or are we out there being senseless monsters because we have been denied purpose by those we are loyal to in our very hearts?
Out of all here on the IGS, you probably know and understand me the most, and I’m pretty sure I know your heart fairly well too. I think you would agree, after thinking a bit, that we aren’t monsters when we undock and start surveying New Eden as rookie capsuleers. We become them, as our very own nations disown us and denies us any path that isn’t monstrous.
There’s also a significant difference between reveling in the craft of war, and reveling in war. The one I suspected you to mean indicates a professional’s joy in the exercise of skills and abilities they work hard to perfect. The other… includes reveling in all of the bloodshed, misery, pain, and death, for its own sake.
That’s why I drew the distinction between what you intended, and how it reads.
Denies us that? Miners aren’t monstrous. PI-merchants, salvagers, haulers, traders… even relic-hunters can all do their job without becoming what we are. Sure, you can say ‘oh, but they all only contribute to the capsuleer economy of blood and war’, but whose fault is that? Just look over at the Intaki prosperity thread, and the answer’s laid out, right there: no matter how much they produce, they’d make nothing if there wasn’t a demand. But there is a demand, and because there is, we’d find a way to get the weapons, ships, ammunition we need, no matter what.
We choose to be the mess we are. Hold the empires responsible for the existence of capsuleers if you like… hold them responsible for the weak and unbelievably lax oversight placed on us by CONCORD once we step beyond their pleasant gardens even just so far as the galactic slums that are low-sec. But don’t go claiming there aren’t any other options. We choose to wallow in this filth. We justify it a hundred ways, from protecting those we care about, to trying to earn money to improve lives back home, or as a result of trauma and pain in our past… or feck, just to get rich, or even alleviate boredom. The reasons don’t matter. The excuses don’t matter.
Sometimes there is no going back; no way to forgive yourself; and all the bridges leading towards redemption were burned long ago. Then you realize if you have no path back, the only recourse left is to push on forwards as the killer you have become.
Life becomes simpler then, for there is just the next battle, and the next, and the next, because lacking any other purpose than war, at least there remains the most fundamental purpose: survival, from one moment to the next. Where there exists no glory, no joyful homecoming, just an endless battlefield of which the only question remains which one will be the final one at last.
That is another convenient lie you tell yourself: maybe there was a choice once, but there is not anymore, I am irredeemable. There is desperate nobility and honorable melodrama in my push to go on, in my life that has become naught but to survive another day.
Not so. There is always a choice. This holds even for a baseliner to some extent, even if the price might be high, but there is always a way to end it.
But for a capsuleer, there definitely always is a choice. If you just walk away, nothing much will happen. You will definitely not die; your survival does not depend on fighting. And not only will you survive: you will live pretty much as long as you like, in as much comfort as you like. You can spend decades in recovery for whatever past haunts you.
If you keep on going it is your choice.
Trust me; been there, done that, both ways at least twice.
I assure you I am both ignoble and live with little concern for honour – melodramatic or otherwise.
I choose to fight and to kill because I enjoy to fight and to kill. Equally so, if someone considers me horrible or terrible due to that, then all I can remark is that I am indeed a horrible and terrible person but that opinion won’t prevent me from going on.
It used to be more difficult once sure, but life is a journey and one day I just reconciled with myself and accepted what I am.
Yes, I could stop if I wanted to – but I don’t. Because I’m fine with what I do.
You do realise there is still the option of just stopping and let the consequences take you, right? Or just leave it all behind and pick up the plough and allow the consequences to catch up with you some day.
There’s no logical thing stopping you from doing all of these. What reason you can produce are conjured from your imagination.
No, I fight for purely selfish reasons, because I enjoy it and because the act of finding new enemies to overcome is satisfying.
The alternative, a life of ease and complacency afforded by the wealth I have gained has little interest for me. I want the struggle and thrill of violent confrontation, and frankly a life of peace is more likely to make me want to put a bullet in my end to end it all than all the blood on my hands ever will.
I find it fulfilling being what I am – even if others might disagree with my choices.
I let that happen once, and the consequences were mostly substance addiction and the sadism of sexual violence inflicted upon those no one would care about.
What I do right now feels like an lesser evil compared to that.
I think I am just the product of a different era, Mr. Egivand.
I was fifteen and assigned to a Youth Battalion when I made my first combat drop. For the next twenty and more years I fought in a war that my father had fought, and his parents before him, and their parents before them had also fought. I was already approaching my forties when peace with the Federation came.
It has been many decades since then and the truth is, I still do not know how to disarm. Some people say, war is the abnormal made normal and so I guess that makes me abnormal, I suppose? I do not know. I tried to live in peace, but I can’t. It was better in the early years, when peace was fresh and new, and I could still talk with fellow veterans but as the years went on I just became a stranger, a foreigner in my own land.
I just couldn’t even recognize the people I called my fellow citizens, and their concerns or problems that felt trivial and asinine to me. I hated them for looking up to me, asking me what the war was like and I’d tell them, “Yeah, the war was pretty ■■■■ most of the time.” I hated them and a lot of things as the years wore on and I just ground my teeth in silence.
Mmmm, so much “Oh but you can just lay your guns down and… plow them into market shares” or whatever the saying is.
Of course it’s a choice. We’re ironically enough both the least limited class of people in New Eden, and still being completely hobbled and neutered by our very own nations. I have never been shy of pointing out that every evil a capsuleer indulges in can never be justified by “I was told to”. Of course we are responsible for every single thing we do, but is that in any way a reasonable expectation? That those of us with war in our hearts deny ourselves who we are, when by the very same token everyone we can possibly go to war with have made their own choices of going out to the wild lands of violence and destruction, for either greed or their own satiation of that desire?
I would say it’s a rather ridiculous idea.
Our Nations know who we are. I don’t know about you people, but I assume the same levels of aptitude, mental health and psyche profile testing happened to you as to me. The program I went through had years to weed out our kind if that was at any point their intent. They know what’ll happen long before we do, when they unleash us upon New Eden.
“Go do PI management”? Sure, that’s what we’re for.
So what do we have here in New Eden then? A rather random distribution of archetypes and mental profiles, all given the same standard education and tools to begin with, sent out into New Eden and then surgically cut off from any kind of purpose they might have tied to their nations of origin.
Sure, we’re responsible for our actions, that can never be taken away from us… but our nations are just as complicit, knowing exactly who we are, what our likely paths would be, then giving us all the tools to do so in spite of that knowledge, while denying us any path that could put such monstrous potential to good use.
Every one of our nations signed off on this. Deliberately setting up the potential paths any capsuleer have available, through the limitations we live under.
My question then is this: What the hell else can you expect in such long runs as this, other than capsuleers following the paths laid out before them? Is it not rather unreasonable to expect capsuleers to just stop, and cease being both who they are and stop using the tools at their disposal?
… and is it not about time that the nations of New Eden made some changes, if the current situation where monsters outnumber the goody two shoes by an order of magnitude is undesirable?
I’m willing to bet you’d see a whole lot of capsuleers return to the embrace of their origins if there was a path for them there, that isn’t a blatant and bloody pointless pendulum pretense that achieves even less than the outer regions and their ‘empire building’.
So if there’s such antipathy towards the outer regions and the staggering horrors of it… well, decrying us violent capsuleers is rather pointless, I can assure you. As I said, I have no regrets in that regard. There aren’t any innocents out there and it’s about as fair a game you could possibly hunt. Perhaps it’s time to demand more of those who unleashed us to begin with, though.
However little they might heed such demands, I can assure you… that’s a wall more likely to crumble, than you are likely to stem the tide of blood from the outer regions by appealing to capsuleers. Add more paths for capsuleers to choose from… and you might see choices made that are less horrifying in the end.
Oh, and a quick edit to add that I wonder what kind of trauma would be endured by all these apparent bleeding heart pacifists if I were to get hardcopies of their killboard and smack them over the head with them. Some of them are rather weighty for people this judgmental of warfare.
I read somewhere, that Navy capsuleers outnumber the independent ones by a considerable margin.
And that the “independent” capsuleers are actually almost entirely the washouts, dropouts, and dishonorable discharges from the Navy training programs, given this pseudo-immortality as a consolation prize in the hope of the Navy recouping some of its investment in them.
Of course, I am different, having paid for just the spaceship licence test, rather than undergo the full tuition.
Speaking of suppositions; just because someone doesn’t like war it doesn’t make them “bleeding heart pacifists.”
Since people can change, people can also get tired of war. Of endless, pointless conflict. I can only speak for myself, that once I understood the futility of it and got tired of “killing” those who cannot be killed, I have abstained from aggression. But I would be stupid not to defend myself or my crew when someone is aggressive towards me, and the Empyrean way of life being what it is, there is every so often someone trying to shove my nose in the dirt.
And I hope I don’t need to explain why I also don’t think twice about stopping slaving raids in to Republic space or similar situations with extreme force. They’re free to turn tail and flee when they see a capsuleer battleship in their scanners. In the case of Sansha it is also an act of mercy to kill them.
What I’m trying to say is that one can hate war and killing, but still do it when they have to; In order to protect others, for example. And those who hate war and killing are those who ultimately want to see it end, so I don’t particularly agree with people who just decide to revel in destruction.
Edit: And I fully expect that by making this statement I’m entering in a catch-22 discussion where people will inevitably try to ■■■■ on me by saying for example “well if you don’t think you’re doing anything wrong, why take time to excuse yourself, clearly you’re a damn hypocrite piece of ■■■■” or something like that. You’re free to think so with my permission.
Everyone has got their reasons in doing what they want, but a lot of people want to strongly imply that their reasons are the best reasons. Does it matter? Not really. Beyond opinions they’re really not going to be able to change however you choose to be an egger, so go do you. It is a two way street however, and if they can’t respect your choices then quite frankly ■■■■ them who cares? Equally so, if you can’t respect theirs then yeah, probably ■■■■ you too.