At the very least I don’t believe the Empires dictate our purpose.
I’m not really saying that they do, sir-- not specifically, at any rate. But, our legal status is a very strange one, and on-its-face absurd for individual citizens: in many contexts, we’re literally allowed to get away with murder. We may suffer consequences up to and including destruction of assets (and the personnel crewing those assets, not that this seems to bother us much), but generally speaking nobody drags a capsuleer in irons before a court they haven’t volunteered to appear before.
Basically, we’re tiny authoritarian nation-states. It’s weird. And it’s only possible because of the legal rights we’re granted under agreement by the empires-- which also seems to affect us in a pile of ways we hardly ever notice.
Like: why did we need ground-based authorization and targeting to launch orbital strikes in the first place? Why can’t we do this anymore? Relatively rare as we are, why do we see each other so much and general civilian traffic so little?
And so on.
If you want to claim we’re a new class of interstellar aristocrat, I won’t disagree with you, pilot. But aristocracies don’t rise only under their own power, and definitely we did not. Someone gave us these privileges we enjoy.
If we want to keep them, we possibly ought to do the job we were made for, yes? Unless we want to find out what it means to be dismissed from service.
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Fundamentally, as you say, we are nations unto ourselves. As such, by making us so, the respective Empires that have done so have chosen, knowingly, to release us from their grasp and into whatever corner of space we please. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, obviously, but because they are quite happy to pick up whatever scraps we don’t bother with on the short term, and to benefit from our continued development of the further reaches of space, and so on. Because they have granted us the ultimate freedom, there is fundamentally nothing else they can lay claim to.
What purpose we serve is in my belief up to us each individually in full. Yet, don’t misunderstand me. I have founded my corporation, and in turn alliance, for the benefit of Empire space. Not because this was a job given to me, but because it is a job I chose to take. I obviously do not hate the Empires. What I do hate is that those in charge are perfectly willing to waste lives and resources fighting each other, rather than actual threats to their domains and citizenry. And from this position of having taken up that fight by choice alone, I feel justified in leveling this critique against the Imperial powers that be.
Well … they can always maybe take it back, though?
Ah, how many times have we as a community heard that?
Please don’t misunderstand: it’s a totally reasonable thing to complain about, pilot. Only, there’s no agreement over what the biggest “actual threats” are. Before the Triglavians appeared, the clearest candidate was the Drifters; before them, Sansha’s Nation. The Blood Raiders are a constant threat to the Empire (and everyone else); the Angel Cartel is the biggest and most powerful criminal syndicate in the cluster; the rogue drones are at least somewhat working with the Triglavians and because of their self-replicating capability might put all other threats to shame if they decided to maximize their industrial potential. None of these threats has been getting smaller.
What’s more, we can’t even agree that ANY of these is the worst. The Matari often argue the Amarr are the biggest threat-- not just to the Republic, but to everyone. The Amarr can’t very well stand down with the the Matari feeling that way, and might not anyway (House Sarum does have the most say over the warzone after all). The State and Federation might not look at each other with the same … intensity … but neither of those will lower their guns first, either.
I agree: Zorya Triglav is probably laughing at us in triplicate. But that doesn’t make the rest of this something that’ll just go away.
Maybe it’ll change if the Triglavians really do steal a system or three, or do something similarly attention-grabbing. Until then, well … they wouldn’t be intractable problems if they could be resolved easily, you know?
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Nation-states unto ourselves? We’re nothing of the sort. We’re trained hounds, let off the leash to go feral, to one degree or another. Shoot at CONCORD. See how fast your ‘nation unto itself’ remains at all sovereign. You’ll get squished and another egger will wake up to step into your life.
And that’s not even getting into CONCORD’s ability to just shut us down. 2 days. 2 days of 100% shutdown of the fluid router system, and see how many of us even remain, and how many are in hiding. The first time people start to see people get podded without the burn scanner making a new copy possible, they’ll come to heel.
And I fully expect that, as soon as they decide we’re no longer useful, that’s exactly what will happen.
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Don’t think we even really disagree. Itty-bitty nation-states have a history of getting swallowed by something that doesn’t respect their autonomy for whatever reason, good or bad. Whatever dynamics create them can always shift.
So. Yeah.
(But can we stay on topic?)
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