Can someone explain to me the logic of the rank and file followers of Chaos?
Why choose to follow the Dark Gods? Are they happier doing so?
How is their quality of life being part of a society that loves pain and suffering? Where do they sleep at night? What sort of food do they eat?
>why choose to follow the dark gods, happiness?
Life is shitty, somebody tells you that you have a chance of something better.
You hope they tell the truth so you serve chaos.
>quality of life?
Depends on the individual 'cult' or 'warband'. Some might live on the floor in a hazardous industrial zone, feeding on rats and shit.
Others might have secured a luxurious home with quality sustenance.
They might care for each other (and help each other out), or they might hate each other.
I think the key is that people see it as the only alternative to life as a loyal servant of the Emperor. The Imperium would create a lot of people who hate the Imperium and don't give a fuck anymore.
I mean, what kind of person would do heroin or take pain pills on purpose? Its a kind of suicide, you do it when you don't give a fuck. That's why cults go after the addicts, the rejects, the mentally ill, people who don't have a lot to live for. People are malleable when they don't give a fuck.
>Why choose to follow the Dark Gods?
Imperium is pretty much a socialistic shithole where if you weren't born a noble or potential spehhs muhreen, you'll probably die in shithole. Of course you can work for the good of the whole Imperium, but that won't affect you personally at all. I think chaos is more individualistic which allows talented/smart people to release their potential while Imperium does not.
>why choose to follow the dark gods?
Same reason why gangs form IRL, there can be an expectation of joining one as your entire area is full of them, the need to escape a difficult situation in life via bonding with like minded individuals with similar experiances, and sometimes it just happens out of sheer happen stance.
My guess is most cults start off as normal gangs in the 40k universe until some outside force( an apostle, intervention by dark gods, warp shenanigans) puts them on the course with getting a bolt shell to the cranium via inquisitor
If you read the descriptions of planets in the Black Crusade supplements, you see that a lot of people follow Chaos simply because they are born into it. If you grew up on a Chaos planet, you probably don't even know that the Imperium and the Emperor exist. And if you do learn about them, why would you choose to worship a god that does not offer you the chance to escape mortality by ascending to daemonhood?
>-Slaanesh.
Pros: Your life will be constant ectasy, and none of your friends will judge you for what you’re in to, mutations will be helpful, get laid like all the time, cool dubstep guns and combat drugs
Cons:If you die your soul will be tortured for eternity by Slaanesh (But I guess you might be in to that sort of thing…..)
>-Nurgle
Pros: The only chaos god that truly loves his followers, you won’t feel pain, nurglings as pets, you can play extreme “got your nose” with your friends
Cons: No summer body, hygiene will be futile, will get laid literally never.
>-Khorne
Pros: You will be the best at killing stuff
Cons: Every heretic can kill stuff so you aren’t that special
>-Tzeentch
Pros: Magic powers, be really smart, can alter the fabric of reality, good foresight
Cons: You will be discarded the second your god decides you are no longer useful, you’ll only ever be a pawn, rampant random mutations, your weakness may be a vacuum cleaner (see, rubric marines)
>-Minor Chaos gods
Pros: idk I don’t know literally any of them
Cons: everything
>-Malal
Pros: Cool armor, edgy even by chaos god standards
Cons: May or may not actually exist
>Why choose to follow the Dark Gods?
For daemonettes, obviously
But it's like having sex with a black widow, no?
Last fuck of your life?
>Last fuck of your life?
Best fuck of your life too. For some I guess it would be worth it since life in the grim darkness of far future is shit anyway.
find a path to immortality somehow, its the warp afterall.
Power. Why else? The imperium tells its citizens that they must follow, Chaos tells its followers that they can lead. It's as simple as that.
If you're their victim, sure. But there's no reason a moderately powerful chaos cultist couldn't call upon slaanesh for a quick fuck. And if you manage to reach daemonhood? You can have as many as you like without worry.
1. You're born in a hive world. You spend your first twenty years of life working the same machine in the same factory. You're hobbies are sleeping and hiding your food/cash from gangs you can't fight. You're life will never change. You can't work hard and get rich. You will die in the polluted trash like your mother dead, looked down on by the rich assholes who ride around your hab-level pretending to be gangers.
Then one day a guy offers you the chance to stop lying down and take what you deserve with people who will carew for you. All you have to do is stop praying to the Emperor who has never done anything for you.
Surely on their first week most chaos recruits would quickly realize they're not going to be moving up the ladder anytime soon, and most likely not at all. And yet they stay on?
whats all this psychology bullshit? They are literally corrupted by warp influence. Thats why they serve chaos
How is that socialistic? That's neoliberal capitalism if anything.
Which makes sense as it's made by brits.
So does the Mafia. They keep their grunts by giving out shiny things and making them guilty too.
In 40k once you sacrificed your first newborn or murdered in the name of the gods you can't really go back. Going back would either make you the next sacrifice of your cult bros or the imperials execute you.
Nobody who joins Chaos willingly actually knows what they're getting into. Shit sucks for 99% of people in the Imperium with absolutely no way out besides just laying down and dying. When somebody comes along offering you a way out most people will take it. And for a while things are good, whether it's by fighting, drugs and sex, the promise of forbidden knowledge, or even just being part of a group of people who accept you for who or whatever you are. If your successful in not dying immediately to Imperial retribution things are good. Then the blood rituals, torture porn, maddening revelations, and a million other things start to go wrong. By the time you begin to think this might've been a bad idea your already in to deep and just like before your only options are to keep going or lay down and die.
Chaos Undivided is more than a pantheon a philosophy, it is the Eightfold Path, it is the Truth behind the curtain and the sin of knowledge, the revelation and the secret, it is many things but not a religion as we understand it. Chaos is freedom, ambition, power and glory, it is damnation but also reward, it is the moment when you break your chains, when you dispose of your humanity and when you embrace something so unfathomable that dives you insane but also ecstatic with the knowledge that your destiny is in your OWN hands.
When an enlightened one exults For Chaos! across the din of the battlefield he evokes this truth, he utters in words what his eye have seen and what his soul has felt when he opened his mind to the truth for the first time. When marching under the banner of Primordial Truth the warrior of Chaos does not favor a Exalted Power in particular way, neither he favors them all, but he is the herald of the Truth, the Truth of which destiny lies beyond the skein, the Truth that follows death, the Truth that power and ambition are rewarded, the Truth where you as an individual can become a literal god, an immortal, a being of such utter power only if you will it, only if you dare it.
Chaos Undivided is not a religion; it is a philosophy, a philosophy of the self interest, of tangible power and the shattering dread of the ultimate Truth. This philosophy teaches a human that if he is ambitious enough he would be rewarded, it teaches him that if he kills with the name of the True Gods on his lips he would catch their eye and receive their boon, it teaches him that one day he can become a demigod, a mortal no more, and all this if he only wills it and dares it.
The Primordial Truth is also the philosophy of the metaphysical, where reality and dogma shatter, a philosophy that teaches its followers that the laws of physic do not exist, that any laws are artificial, that dogma and ad a closed mind lead your soul to be shattered by the dreaded dream predators. Chaos Undivided is a philosophy that teaches you that you have a soul, teaches you that with your dreams you shape the universe and it teaches you that nothing is impossible, everything can be done if only one dreams it.
That is why a chosen one bears proudly the Star of Chaos even if he pledged his allegiance to only a variant of this philosophy, perhaps to Nurgle's teachings, it is because once you pass over the skein of reality and you see the vast landscapes of infinite possibilities nothing can ever be the same and everything becomes possible, all that is required is a simple dream.
>Though the gates that stand between the mortal world and the immortal Realm of Chaos are now closed to me, still I would rather die having glimpsed eternity than never to have stirred from the cold furrow of mortal life. I embrace death without regret as I have embraced life without fear.
It is very, very simple.
If you choose to follow the Dark Gods, you might someday become a Daemon Prince. This is an extremely difficult goal, but it is 100% possible. It's actually more achievable than getting a high post within the Imperium. (Obviously, 99.9% of people involved die, but you don't even have to be a Chaos Space Marine to do so.)
Most are just fanatics. Some are tainted from birth, raised on Chaos worlds. Others are insane. Some people ended up 'backsliding' into Chaos when they couldn't live within the Imperium. Obviously, this doesn't justify their actions, but all of them have reasons for doing what they do.
Look to this one, sons of the word, for in such a short time a mortal has grasped what took demigods a lifetime to see. This one is a true disciple of the Primordial Truth, with unflinching eyes lit with the dark light of the Immaterium, who carries the Eight-pointed star in his soul. In him I see a true Champion of Chaos, or even, a prince!
I was so excited when I read this, thinking it was from the file, but realizing it was just a bloke with excellent writing skills
I report the guy and will move up on the Imperial ladder.
As befitting a loyal citizen of the Imperium you are then executed for consorting with heretical elements.
>Where do they sleep at night?
Upon the ground, perhaps in a bed if they've raided a house for a night.
>What sort of food do the eat?
Whatever they can scrounge, sometimes human flesh if need be.
The chaos gods all promise good things, and as any good cult does tey even give out some significant short-term rewards. Khorne promises strength and success, Tzeentch promises hope, change, and intellect, Slaanesh promises eternal pleasure and happiness while Nurgle promises an end to pain and also happiness - Also family, depending on which hype you're listening too.
So you get drawn into a cult that promises things will get better and gives you things the Imperium has never bothered. Maybe you're an orphan who has never had a family, and Papa Nurgle's promise that you will be free of pain eternally and become one with a family... forever... Maybe you're a bored aristocrat who's never had the option of making a real decision because of the family business, your life decided by arranged marriage to someone you've never met and your entire life spent in shelter atop the hives when you're offered an experience you'll never forget.
But then you're in, and things get worse. The pleasures are only offered for your fealty - Something you give without question, as why would you not? It's the only time you've been given something so nice in your life. But then you have to prove it. First you're running drugs, or helping lift weights, or taking 'care' of the sick and the dead, and then you're bringing alchemical regents to your masters and slowly you're ingrained in the cult. And if you back out? Most probably just let you stay a tertiary member, just as heretical but maybe your friends or your children will be more interested.
It's an insidious thing, hope and kindness. But in the end, the Chaos Gods aren't as friendly as they pretend, and the kindness is all honey for flies. All their followers will die or become a monster, all because they just wanted the best space cocaine.
...
you get extra rations that month for being a loyal citizen which are then stolen by a local gang. You go back to work and die in polluted trash.
>logic leads to happyness and quality of life
Not always and especially not in 40K.
All kinds of regular humans will shit in someone's oatmeal if they can get away with it, let alone grimderp 41st millennium ones. Their quality of life is bad. They are not very happy. No one is. That's the deal. Some may have flickering moments in isolated cases, but the norm for humans, chaos or otherwise, is a bad time more about base survival than quality of life. Quantity of life maybe.
>Can someone explain to me the logic of the rank and file followers of Chaos?
Usually some supressed agressions against their own parents and seeing the "edgy-ness" of the Chaos faction as a vent for said emotional problems.
What has the Emperor done for you lately?
Wast majority of Chaos followers have little to no interaction with their deity. It's just a religion that happens to be one the promises better stuff than the current system. To ones in charge, it provides them with power.
Read something like Daemon World or Pawns of Chaos, where the planet is fairly stable with various societies living their lives like normal, only it's Slaanesh and Tzeentch, rather than the Emperor, and nobody is coming around and purging you for your heresies against the Immortal God-Emperor. In Daemon World it's mostly politics on the planet, as some dude was happy with the planetary leader and was marching an army to dethrone her. In Pawns the people merely made sacrifices (not even human, just stuff) to their god and lived their lives regularly, raising kids and shit.