How does a "society" based on murder, cruelty, and back-stabbing not simply implode over-night?

I dunno, ask all those thousand year old civs from the bronze age.

What bronze age civilization held cruelty towards your fellow citizens as a virtue?

Because there are around 200 other countries for America to ruin before it goes full self-destruct mode.

>How does a "society" based on murder, cruelty, and back-stabbing not simply implode over-night?
IIRC, there's two factors that prevent that outcome in regards to the Drow.

#1 Most of that murder, cruelty, and back-stabbing happens in and among the noble houses, the militia, and the priestesshood. The larger fraction of the society, that is the peasant class and the merchant class, is far more pragmatic. The still cruel, but they're far less likely to murder and back stab each other because they depend too much on each other to survive.

#2 The demon/goddess Lloth actively intervenes to prop up Drow society. She likes her toys to much to break them permanently, so she actively manipulates things so that murder and back-stabbing never happens at so great a rate that society can't manage and tolerable it. Lloth cracks down on violence when it becomes to excessive (although she likes to push the edge).

I think there were a couple times in Forgotten Realms history were Lloth actually stopped intervening for one reason or another, and in each time Drow society actually did collapse.

Fear.
You know, most civilisations are based on that. You just need to keep everyone afraid of the current rulling piwer

Drows makes a lot more sense when you realize their the result of a Veeky Forums poster with a sadistic sense of humor playing Dwarf Fortress.

"Gosh, why would dwarves ever build a lever to drench their homeland with lava?" Because the player put them up to it.

"Gosh, why do the drow have a sophisticated system of gears that people into the pit of terrifying death spiders?" Because the player put them up to it!

Marxism does always implode eventually.

>Op posts picture of a Dark Elf from Warhammer Fantasy
>aside from one or two posters everyone opts to talk about shitty Drow in FR

Malus books?

All dark-skinned fantasy races are exactly the same

except the Druchii aren't even dark skinned, they're pale

>OP-pic
>dark-skinned
Did I miss the joke?

They're niggers at heart

Nah, they just americans

Canadians, technically

Hollywood has been doing fine for decades.

>how does politics work
Wew

I don't know how capitalism is still a thing either

>erases you sovietly

The guy who was erased from this picture was a real sick piece of shit. He looks like it too, rat-like people like that are always evil.

Drow society on the lower levels is pretty much just normal society with more violent hobos, more petty theft, and heavier-handed methods of dealing with shoplifters. Nobody's got time for backstabbing their neighbors, a nigga's gotta eat and he needs to get back at Z'dar for convincing him to bet on the female slave in last week's gladiator games. Folks have simple, mostly selfish goals that work together thanks to the massive amounts of wealth the Houses have that may sometimes trickle down into the warrens.

NAGGARS GET THE FUCK OUT

ULTHAN SHALL REMAIN PURE AND WHITE

Druchi ARE white

I thought they controlling the whole non-NorthAmerica except of Chaos Alaska

Goddamn that pic. Drizzt is chaotic, not lawful. A sneaky endorsement from Lolth in the cause of chaos is kinda neat.

Yeah, they control all the way from where the Canadian mainland would end, all the way down to fantasy mexico

It's inherit to the system. Murder requires a victim, so be fruitful and multiply. Only then will you have enough people to kill. Cruelty is actions of evil done for there own sake, With the populous as defined above, some must be worth being murdered, thus being cruel to them has no meaning as they will be dead. This results in a class based caste system or meritocracy needed to maintain the populous for murder victims, with back-stabbing a means of establishing cruelty based dominance and affirming who belongs in the murdered caste. Note that back-stabbing isn't betraying, as betrayal requires trust and belief that aren't there. The system is fed by Xenophobia, as any other culture rightly fights against these monsters and they must work together to survive. This helps focus these traits to outside the community, at least enough to generate a stable population of these saddos.

The thing about Dark elves in Warhammer is that they were essentially the elven version of Prussia. They were a highly militarized with a very centralized hierarchy where nobles were allowed to scheme and plot but still expected to toe the line when it came following Malakith.

Thus in Naggaroth their entire society is built around preparing for war, were the common people generally spend most of their time training and they get slaves to do all the work, similar to Sparta.

As such an environment is created where you have the nobility constantly jockeying for power, scheming and backstabbing, but society still functions because for your average dark elf life is mostly spent preparing for war against Ulthuan or raiding, while living in a militarized state where their sadistic urges are generally meted out onto slaves.

Because people like to buy and own things

Social norms.

Even if it's based on that you can still rely on the core majority to atleast be somewhat pragmatic. By keeping yourself a reliable asset to people you'd basically aquire protection by the fact that you are worth more alive than dead. As such it's in the interest of people to keep you alive. Any would-be assassin would find him-/herself with a lot of new enemies if they took you out, making the effort counter-productive.
This system would produce extremely driven members of society. The worst danger to its stabilisation that I can see would be the rampant nepotism, but that could be balanced by heartless capitalism.

>How does a "society" based on murder, cruelty, and back-stabbing not simply implode over-night?
You think it doesn't implode? It's in a constant cycle of death and rebirth.

Thats why the big Frog Mazdamundi had to build a mountain Wall towards Mexico to keep the darkies out.

What did they mean by this?

TFW no not!mexican Delves

Cause they push out thousands of ratlings per hourt.

Just like Argentina, huh.

Author favoritism

>Malakith
Why people always names him like that, wasn't he Malekith?
>What did they mean by this?
Kek standing for "build the wall"
Lazy and fat?

Why would the people in the upper class waste their time by murdering the lower caste? Excluding any religous or pseudosexual desires it makes no sense.
Seems to me that the conflicts would be mainly limited to within your own class as a way of increasing and maintaining your own personal power, with murders left to the few times were a person has played all his/her cards wrong and is disposable without too much of a backlash for the assassin.
On the commoner level this would take the shape of trying to stay ahead of your business competitors and one-upping the neighbors, while the nobles would have their local, regional and stately game of thrones.

>Lazy and fat?
Yeah and mustachioed.

The Soviets stopped purging after only a few years and even then they basically considered it the biggest mistake they ever made.

They keep creating plots and counterplots and contingency plots before they start acting it usually takes them about 50 years to set the plan in motion.

Speaking of Drizzt, what do you guys think of the classic trope of "that one guy who is from an evil race but is actually good and teams up with the good guys to fight his own kindred?".

The concept may have been interesting at some point but it almost invariably results in a snowflake or mary sue character. Happy to hear about any counterexamples.

Hey!

Mexico has great food!

Yeah, Drow society is effectively Lolth playing a DF/Sims game where she pruposefully engineers a horrible an nonsensical society that would never arise naturally and would fall apart the moment she stops micromanaging it.

No idea how WHFB DE society stays functioning, though. 40k Dark Eldar at least have the excuse of keeping their numbers up by speed-growing new DE in artifical wombs (plus the fluff implies most DE on DE violence is either gangs/kabals fighting each other, or an archon's second-in-command going Starscream on the current leader; a random kabalite killing his fellow will likely get him kicked out, as killing your own guys weakens the kabal as a whole).

Ask Detroit.

I dunno, but it seems to work for the Chinese

...

>"I guess in hindsight we shouldn't have murdered all of those people."
Well when you put it that way, they almost sound reasonable.

Well one of the players in my Warhammer campaign is a Norscan berserker, but he converted to the cult of Sigmar when he was young. He's a swell guy and most would just assume he's a regular guy from Ostland or one of the other northern provinces.

We've established cruelty as a staple of society. While it isn't directly mentioned that Drow or similar societies murder the servile, lower castes, they are treated with passing cruelty. I took it as somewhere between 'Is it murder if they aren't people to me?' and a 'How many breads have you eaten?' situation. Rather than the poisonings, stabbings, and assassination of the upper class, I figure the upper on lower class murders were gladiatorial fights, fatal beatings, and orders that will result in the death of the servant (i.e. eat this poisoned meal to show off it's poisoned). These are less direct, but still murder.

>xaxaxaxa yes comaraden, kulaks are not real, there has never been kulaks, kulaks are made-up western pig-spy propaganda )))))))))))))))) praise stalin

>stop due to rising german threat
>win war
>do it the fuck again
>this time to vetarans, pow and the undesirables of the other Soviet Republics

By having sufficiently high population growth to maintain a stable population despite the constant murders and backstabs.
Also it would help if they never figured out how communicate.

that's very anti-semitic of you

Edgy.

>it's another episode of "fantastically long-lived race paradoxically chooses to engage in incredibly lethal activities including armourless warfare on a frequent basis"
At least the Dark Eldar have their infinite respawn hax to circumvent this, but what the fuck are the Dark Elves doing?
Judging by the shit they get up to about 95% of them must die before reaching even a tenth of their potential lifespan? What kind of species-wide retardation grips them?

three means, firstly they possess a high enough pop growth to replace the mountains of corpses they build with there own dead, they are in a constant state of conflict against foreigners to keep their people focused outside of their own society, and they need a brutal minded and arbitrarily powerful autocrat ruling them all and keeping them somewhat in line to prevent total war in the streets.

of course even a society literally based on murder cruelty and back-stabbing won't necessarily have such things going on at all times, theirs always room for a small quantity of kindness in these societies just like our society will always have room for cannibals and rapists and gratuitous violence

>but what the fuck are the Dark Elves doing?
They are outcasts,surrounded by enemies.

So why did the Drow start worshiping Lolth in the first place?

My preference is for such societies to be in the process of collapsing, with their instability resulting in lots of problems both their neighbors and for travelers trying to get things done in their domain.

IIRC, Drow were the elves who supported Lolth in the war between her and the other elven gods. After the war, they got banished to the Underdark where they only survived due to Lolth's blessing. Because they would've died if Lolth abandoned them, she could dictate all the rules of their society as she pleased. It's pretty clever, actually. At the present time the Drow society has developed enough that they could survive in the Underdark without Lolth, except that she's manipulated their society to the poitn where it would completely collapse on itself without her, ensuring that they still remain dependant on her.

>Well when you put it that way, they almost sound reasonable.
Hey man, you can't take over a country without have to kill a few thousand people.

Perpetual mexican standoff.

Of course, it all falls apart the second an outside influence arrives and starts a domino rally.

>The tailor makes everyone's clothes one size too big or small

Divine backing.

One of Beria's buddies?

>Slavery.
>Ethnic cleansing.
>AIG
>Capitalism.
Pretty well, thabks.

No, no, it's

>the tailor makes one of the spikes on the bikini inward pointing so it always pokes the wearer if they turn a certain way

Fear and laziness.

That's a feature

Why don't you ask the many contemporary real-world nations to which that description accurately applies

All Muslim ones.

>Islam
>Bronze age

>when you make and contradict your argument in two sentences
shiggy diggy

>t. doesn't know anything about any Islamic country
>t. doesn't know anything about any Islamic culture
>t. doesn't know anything about Islam

They are micromanaged by a god.
The same god was too edgy to change their nature so to be relevant it got cursed with handling the entire race.

To work, you'd need a system of power, like a Caste system. Someone who killed the last guy puts up and air of power and strength, then scares the rest into line. However, that only last as long as everyone else believes in that power.

The WHFB Delf society works because the actual killing via backstabbing is confined to a handful of noble families in charge of each of the Black Arks/fortresses. The lower ranks just torture slaves and get in fights. This means that you do get the strongest to the top, and when they go to war, everyone is terrified of Malekith so don't fuck shit up while on campaign.

This is mostly the case with the Druchii. Skullduggery is largely within class, and cross-class betrayal tends to be in pursuit of revenge, restoring fear, sacrifice to Khaine, or opportunistic gain.

Fear. Most people are so concerned on not getting murdered that they can't forum plans to murder others. The rich can plot and all the poor are either obedient or mentally broken.
Also murder societies exit in the real world, they don't usually last past a generation, but they do exist.

youtube.com/watch?v=YUCiADFjQG0

These man-thing have the good-right idea, yes-yes!

Gonna claim credit for more things done by India, Ahmed Ahmed?

>Townsend argues that the Chinese may be the only people in the world who are completely unable to comprehend the basic human impulses of sympathy or gratitude toward other people. Because the Chinese feel no empathy toward others, they behave in an unbelievably sadistic and cruel fashion toward one another, and they view altruistic foreigners as targets to be mercilessly taken advantage of. Other traits Townsend identifies as being typically Chinese are cowardice, lust for money, lack of a sense of personal hygiene, lack of critical thinking skills, insincerity, and obsession with hollow rites.

So absolutely nothing has changed in China for the past 80 years. Interesting.