I wish I could use text to sigh when I type the words “Gallentia Primacy.” Not because I can condemn them off-hand, but because I know where this road can lead.
I grew up on a Caldari world that I don’t care to specify for the protection of folk that might still live there. My father was a sailor and my mother was a musician. We traveled with a troupe from port to port, trading and performing. I didn’t know many other Gallente, but most of the Caldari treated us decently enough. Some of them called us swindlers and thieves while others said we were a degenerate influence on their youth.
One day, while we were paying a docking fee just outside a large city, a group of men in masks threw stones at us and shouted to go away. Later I asked my dad “How can they be so cruel to us?” He said he would show me. The next day we took a raft through a sluice gate where the industrial runoff turned the water a revolting grayish brown.
We disembarked at the base of a large pipe. We climbed it until we reached a great gate with a small metal door. Dad opened the door and to my astonishment there was a cramped settlement built from sheets of tin and steel. Groups of people huddled around steaming vents and scraped condensation from the walls. I’d never seen such destitution.
“This is where we’d be if they were truly cruel to us” my father said. The shanty town was for Caldari that didn’t fit into the Caldari way of life. These people had two options. 1) Suffer. 2) Die. I wasn’t really sure how to process that. Maybe I still don’t know how. Point is: There were enough good and honest people to protect us from the folk that wanted to throw us in a gutter. My family skirted its edges and made a decent living, more or less by grace alone.
If the roles were reversed would a Caldari family be cast into a pit with the Gallentia Primacy’s undesirables? Do they truly care about our peoples’ values of egality and freedom? If not they are fools. They can not survive the wrath of both their own people and everyone else’s.
Even that’s not really them being purposely cruel. … Well, maybe a little.
The tradition has its root in the practice of expelling those who can’t help support the community out into the snow when the alternative is to all starve together. They’re supposed to be dead, and the honorable thing to do if you find yourself in that situation is, in fact, to die.
So, an outsider is just an outsider, not “of us” but neither inherently good nor bad (though reactions will vary, as you saw). A Nonentity is more of a clear problem: a dead person sticking around when they’re supposed to have gone to join their ancestors. (Historically this would often have meant turning bandit to survive, easily as troublesome as a more-literal haunt.)
Reactions ranging from pity to “Why are you still here?!” are on the socially-approved menu, and a lot of Caldari lean towards encouraging “departure.”
I learned some of that later in life, specifically during my time working for Ostrakon. It wasn’t unusual for me to work with a Caldari or two. Mind you this was during Heth’s time, so you can probably imagine the general choice of topic. Some of them hated Heth, some of them admired him. Later most of them hated and admired him which was quite interesting, but paradoxical political sentiments are pretty common among mercs working on the fringes.
Before I made the choice to become a capsuleer I thought about why the Jove gave immortality to the Caldari before anyone else. The State, like their ancestors, live as if they were in a cosmic winter. Snow is deadly, but with labor it becomes shelter from the cold. That labor costs warmth and food and there often aren’t enough of either of those things to go around. Ergo, you can’t save everyone. So it is with the capsuleer: An immortal that stands eternal while those who perish pass into history.
Even though that stands as a tenet of their culture the Caldari still value life and remember their humanity. They proved that to me as a child and they proved it to the cluster when they stripped Heth of his iron fist. Time will tell if the Gallentia Primacy remembers too. If they don’t their Gallente brethren are sure to remind them.