Another behind the scenes meta-essay here, following on from the previous such on fictional political economy. This time I am thinking about political ideologies. What role they play in fiction, why recognisable ideological conflicts seem to play a surprisingly small role in 40k fiction, and what that means for my little setting. So, once again, if you want a little look "behind the scenes" on the sort of things I have been thinking about when writing stuff here, this overly long indulgent post might be for you! This one is going to be a bit more general though, more of a reflection on the use of political ideological (and, sometimes, the aesthetic or coding of things as such) in science fiction and fantasy worldbuilding and story-telling..

Let's begin by briefly saying what I mean by "political ideology" in this context. At a broad level I mean a set of ideas about how the world and society operate which guide people in evaluating their circumstances. So what's the world like and how does that compare to how I'd want it to be? My ideology is the thing that lets me answer those questions. In a bit more detail, from this paper by Tommie Shelby, I take the following characterisation of an ideology. It is a

I will add here that there is one more bit of structure that I think is peculiar to fiction - which is that fictional ideologies often have a kind of "baseline" vs "deviation". There's a clear "normal" for the setting, then fairly well defined ways people can deviate from that. Real life might have things approximating to this, but on the whole I think that this is much more common in fiction just because of how writers and audiences need to simplify to be able to engage - we anchor on a baseline of normality, then we understand character's quirks along a defined axis which people are known to deviate from the baseline. I will go into some examples of how these sort of things feature in fictional settings as we progress.

But first just a note on a contrast between this topic and the previous fan-essay on political economy in Warhammer. When I was writing about fictional political economy a difficulty was that, after all, writers often do not actually want to put much thought into political economy. It's, to be frank, kind of technical and dull - at most it is an enabling condition for the story one actually wants to tell. There can be exceptions (I have recently read the first of the Dragon's Path series precisely because it was recommended to me as a work of fantasy that takes economics seriously - it was a good read, I recommend it too! Excited to read on) but on the whole it's just not a frequent focus of fiction writing. So I had to extemporate, theorise on the fly somewhat.

Political ideology, on the other hand, is huge. This is for a very simple reason - stories thrive on conflict and very often, in the real world that writers are drawing from, political ideologies form the self-conscious basis for conflicts. As in, not only do they cause conflicts, but the people so conflicting actually understand themselves as motivated by, and in competition because of, those ideologies. It's a ready made source of tension to drive a plot forward, with a readily understandable motivational basis for characters to make sacrfices in pursuit of ends that drive them apart from one another.

And it gets better! Because ideologies are by their nature frequently moralised (that's the "normative" in point (b) above) the mere suggestion of them can quickly clue readers in to who the author wants them supporting and who resisting. You can think here of how the Empire in the original Star Wars films are just sorta kinda Nazi coded without really hearing much about their underlying philosophy. But that's all we really need to know. We know Naziism is a bad ideology and can be expected to understand lots of reasons not to want its adherents to have power. So we quickly pick up on who we should be rooting for and against. (And if anyone was still confused they helpfully blow up a planet a bit later, so, you know, that too.) So, in so far as writers either want to create a morality play, or at least to draw on the emotional energies of conflicts between heroism and villainy, ideological codings and aesthetics are extremely useful precisely because of their real world resonances.

All this to say -- I don't really expect to have to do as much to talk about the general point of having political ideologies in fiction. You are already familiar with it from near any bit of pop culture ever.

But, ok, to give some examples of media where a fictional ideology plays a big role, with the kind of baseline-deviation structure I am interested in, the kid's show Avatar: The Last Airbender is a nice clean simple case. The Fire Nation therein have a pretty straightforward imperialist ideology which is key to events in the show. The Fire Nation were fairly prosperous, showing early signs of industrialisation before the other nations of their world. So they decided that they were The Best, and as The Best it was right and proper that they be in charge of everyone else - indeed this would be to everyone's benefit, as they would reap the benefits of empire, while everyone else would share in their wonderful culture once it was imposed upon them. Most straightforwardly this expresses itself in the fact that they then launch an expansionist war against all their neighbours and install governors, and we see them actively try to suppress the cultural activities distinctive of other groups they view to be inferior. We also get a glimpse of Fire Nation education, which is very much centered upon instilling in Fire Nation children a sense that they are The Best and their wars are just. So that sets our baseline: the typical member of the Fire Nation thinks something like this is true, and most of the time when we meet someone from the Fire Nation their behaviour is consistent with the above.

But of course it would be a far worse show than it

Baseline set by the Imperium which goes in and out of being a satire (link to grimdark economics youtube video). Something of 80s British irreverant punk culture a la judge dread - authority is bad, the Empire is decrepidt and laughable but puffed up and believes in itself to the point of absurdity. At a high level "Imagine Catholic Space Nazis ran the British Empire and were slowly but surely losing a total war against Cthulu". So highly religious and theocratic, highly authoritarian, highly exploitative.

Deviations internal and external. External deviations that we have had some detail on are the chaos gods, the Necrons, the Tau (link to Ngyuen on worldbuilding for them). The recent Votann codex has gone into a bit with them but not as much. We barely get anything for the orks or the Aeldari, not sure its even coherent with the Tyranids. Though interesting matter on the coding of the Genestealer Cults.

In some sense it's more interesting what they do not in fact tend to do - they do not in fact tend to use real life ideological conflicts as the basis for their inter-imperium conflict. The genestealer cults are generally coded as scrappy egalitarian radicals, but a) tend to actually be a religious organisaiton - which makes sense in this setting and is something I use myself, and b) are not in fact egalitarian in their organisation nor ends. There is rarely any suggestion that the capitalists of the Imperium are chomping under the feudal bit, though you some hints of this with the Mechanicum (and evne then the clearest examples I can think of are in 30k - the Corax primarch book link here). So why not?

Doylean reasons: avoid controversy, in fact GW actively want to keep their fan base away from real world politics for good and bad reasons. Escapist element and to be frank too large a proportion of their fanbase would be awful it'd cost them money. And second ultimately the lore exists to funnel attention back to their most profitable part of the company which is the model sales, so if they are going to take the time to develop any ideology in detail it has to be linked to one of factions you can actually buy.

Watsonian reasons: it's 40,000 years in the future, magic is real, their economic system (link to previous piece) is extremely weird, superstition is somehow still rampant despite the fact that real magic is readily available - it should look weird to us, the axis of conflict should be as alien to us as the lines of ideological conflict in ancient mesopotamia are to me. I remember when I was a child once wondering why feudal people bothered to fight if you were just going to have a king either way. And that is closer to me in time and comprehensibility! Keep 40k weird.

(Does just good vs evil count as an ideological conflict? Think of Tolkien and link the Mills essay. Yes in the sense I have outlined and in some settings it is perfectly appropriate. It won't work in 40k though because we're not really allowed to have good. In fact most of the absolute worst things in the 40k fandom come out of the clash between fans desire for this and the nature of a grimdark setting. Link to my own piece on grimdark.)

(How about pure real politik grey vs grey? TV show version of Game of Thrones is an example of this done well. Can work for 40k, but is in fact not what they tend to do for the inter-factional conflict. When they depict the Noble houses fighting against each other it is just that though - House Stryder vs House Rao in Assasinorum are a good example, as are the sheaningans of the Nobility in Necromunda - link to Arbitor Ian video for this.)

From the book Dark Imperium by Guy Haley

the slave ideology

(And indeed destabilisation)

words