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[EmperorSahlertz]

CybAnt1 wrote...

All which simply proves what I said. Qunari are allowed to love.

Their friends, yes. But they cannot take romantic/sexual "lovers". Those relationships are not respected by the Qun. 

Nor do they have family or relatives to love, as, per se, they do not have families, or relatives (at least that are known to them, anyway). 

No. They do not have family units. Does that mean they are incapable of love? No. They do not have sexual relationships. Does that mean they are incapable of love? No.
Qunari quite simply value different social bonds than we are used to. It is hard to imagine a world where we couldn't have sex with the one we loved. For the Qunari it is hard to imagine a world where sex has another purpose than multiplication.

CybAnt1 wrote...

Qunari can make a distinction between each other when they feel they need to. 

Well, clearly they have idiosyncratic physical appearances, all Stens do not look alike, all Arishoks would not either, nor would all Ashkaari or Ben-Hassrath or Tamrassans. 

I'm sure they can tell each other apart. There must be circumstances where they need to. 

Of course they can make a distinction. However, such distinctions are often irrelevant. A Sten would be as good as any other Sten, so making a distinction between would be futile, unless for instance, you need to make the disinction between them based on experience. For example, any Sten could not deliver the Sten in Ferelden's report, for obvious reason. So in this case a disinction would be made, most likely: "The Sten recently returned from Ferelden".

[The Hierophant]

just noticed

Master Warder Z wrote...

Possible but they failed in Mainland assualts against the Imperium before hence why both parties have been content to just fight over an island for a while now.

I doubt they would open another front, perhaps bypass it but i doubt the Qunari would fall into the same trap that saw them defeated before.

True. Though i put emphasis on their spies as there's no telling how far the Qun has infiltrated Tevinter society or their plans for sabotage once they feel they're ready for an invasion.

The reason the last qunari war was ended was because the Qunari couldn't fight successfully in four diffrent fronts, An invasion of the Thedas proper would have to be done with care or else it turns out the same as last time, every one and their brother jumping them right out of the gate.

Again true. Plus any prospect of a successful invasion hinges on them being untouched by the veil crisis, while the rest of Thedas recovers from DAI's various conflicts.

[Annihilator27]

The Qun can never be weak!!!

[Master Warder Z_]

The Qun can never be weak!!!

 

Except when it is?

 

It falling flat on its face after two centuries of warfare was nothing if not weakness.

[Zered]

This bas refuses to see.We will make him, and then he will be grateful.

 

 

 

It falling flat on its face

 

And still they were able to land a well organised sneak attack on a city deep in non-qunari landsl( and lost only because of Hawk) Ahh a shame I couldn't side with the Qunari in DA2. Kirkwall was such a mess.

[Master Warder Z_]

This bas refuses to see.We will make him, and then he will be grateful.

 

And i am certain that their defeat wasn't so horrible that it didn't prompt any serious military action against Thedas for near three centuries so far

 

No doubt the oxmen honored that writ because it was the "demand of the qun" Aka the petty justification for them not invading for fear of fleeing like cowards again. Which their possibly current Arishok is by the way How that cowardly field captain got anywhere near command is a mystery to me.

[Bluto Blutarskyx]

I think the parallels between communism and quanri society are too glaring to miss and largely intentional to paint the quanari as an alien society to our normal modern notions, and on some level (for those who remember) raise cold war era memories of the "reds".

 

now, they do try to make the quaniari a bit more balanced and fleshed out beyond the whole notion of them being merely "commie scum", since the game is supposed to be about grey areas.

 

but I think they made the comparison very obvious for the simple fact that they wanted a "knee jerk" reaction from the fans that at first glance gives you the same attitude most in thedas would have against them.

[Dean_the_Young]

It's less communism (which had an extreme class-centric perspective the Qunari lack) and more the general authoritarian collectivism crushing of individualism (in which the identification of the individual and their desires is placed over the collective) and the family unit (the historic enemy and frequent target for infiltration of authoritarian ideologies and states).

 

Since western liberalism practically reveres individualism and still greatly reveres the ideal family unit, the Qunari are essentially ideological heathens to the normal audience.

[Senya]

Personally, I don't know how the Qunari aren't starving. Centrally planned economies have had the tendency to produce famines thanks to faulty calculations on the part of the planners.

[Eveangaline]

If The Tevinter Imperium could dry up the Qunari's rivers, they cripple the farming it halts the progress of the farmers, as well as limit's their food supply. Which will take a while if Sten is the norm.

 

Better idea, since all the farmers are ladies, send a horde of very attractive shirtless men to just lounge around the farms stretching and making sexy poses. The farmers will be too distracted to farm and all will be lost!

[Aimi]

It's less communism (which had an extreme class-centric perspective the Qunari lack) and more the general authoritarian collectivism crushing of individualism (in which the identification of the individual and their desires is placed over the collective) and the family unit (the historic enemy and frequent target for infiltration of authoritarian ideologies and states).

 

Since western liberalism practically reveres individualism and still greatly reveres the ideal family unit, the Qunari are essentially ideological heathens to the normal audience.

Riffing off of this: the anti-individualistic bent arguably places the Qun closer to Italian Fascism than any other notable modern human ideology. This being in a real, historical, ideological sense, not the lazy modern usage of "fascism" as a blanket for all authoritarian right-wing stuff.

 

Fundamentally, Fascists believe that there is no "self" whatsoever, and that it is impossible to conceive of any individual without society, therefore the individual is essentially irrelevant (or, in some cases, an actively harmful construct). Lines up pretty neatly with the Qun, like Dean said. The sticking point is the issue of the "national will".

 

For Mussolini, Fascism's end-state was to be achieved through the creation of a state directed by a Leader, who would act as a conduit for the national will. This was, incidentally, very distinct from the "will of the people", because for whatever reason the nation and the people weren't the same thing. On the other hand, anarcho-fascists believed that the state was unnecessary, and that the best way for the national will to be expressed was simply by being [Italians].

 

The problem here is that it's not clear that qunari divide the world into "nations" as a concept with meaning similar to the Nation in a Fascist framework. Although, apparently qunari recognize the existence of other societies, they do not view these societies as being inherently distinct in a way that can't be overcome through, mmm, education. Does that fit with Fascism? Well, kinda. Italian Fascism didn't possess the blatantly racialist ideology that the Hitlerite Bewegung had. (And yes, they were distinct ideologies, and emphatically so, despite what Allied wartime propagandists or Hannah Arendt would have had people think.) Italy's attempts to establish an African empire were overlaid with standard paternalist-colonialist rhetoric that seemed to indicate that the benighted Ethiopians and Libyans under Italian rule would eventually become "civilized". That could fit easily enough.

 

Does this lend itself to any insights about the way qunari society functions - or if there is a weakness to exploit? Meh. If you look at real, human history, it's very difficult to find any meaningful objective weaknesses on a societal level, weaknesses that prevent a given state from functioning properly and lead to its downfall. The devil is in the details: of implementation, of personality, of random coincidence and chance. The qunari are more likely to fail with a run of bad military luck, or due to the leadership of incompetent arishoks, than to inherent individualistic tendencies among their people. Likewise, qunari ideological success will probably be down more to context than to intrinsic strengths or weaknesses of their program.

[Bob from Accounting]

Not really. There been plenty of meaningful weaknesses pointed out in such ideologies.

[Aimi]

Most of the time, those weaknesses have more to do with the context than with the ideology.

[Bob from Accounting]

Err...what do you mean? 'Context' as in the practical implementation?

[Aimi]

Among other things, yeah.

 

The thing about ideology is that it's necessarily contextless. It's a vision, a set of ideas or guidelines. Individual people taking that ideology and turning it into action requires interpretation on their part. They inject themselves into the process, sometimes consciously and obviously, sometimes implicitly. They adapt it to circumstances on the ground, again requiring interpretation. This is why the Abrahamic religions have clergy as interlocutors and interpreters, and why there are conflicts about the way to figure out what the heck their holy books actually mean; this is why the CPSU kept an ideological theorist on the Politburo.

 

What's intrinsically objectionable about the Qun, in its broadest strokes? From what I can tell, there are two primary criticisms: "well, people would never go along with it" and "anti-individualism is philosophically abhorrent to me". I can't really argue with the second one, but that has more to do with the critic than with the Qun. The first one, though, is more interesting. Well, why wouldn't people go along with it? Isn't the purpose of qunari society to educate those into understanding/following (same meaning, apparently) the Qun? Some people can clearly be "educated" into following the Qun; why not others? This is where the qunari might break down: on how to educate the rest of the world, on the willingness of specific people to be educated or desire to avoid being educated, and suchlike things. That's context. It's mutable, and has very little to do with the ideology itself. 

 

That's the sort of thing that I was thinking of when I read the OP.

 

"What happens if the military is defeated?" Well, they'd be screwed, Qun or no Qun. There are not many societies in history that can deal with the complete collapse of their military with equanimity. Doesn't have much to do with the Qun itself.

 

"What if they're not adaptable enough?" Again, very little to do with the Qun itself; individual qunari have shown that they can be extremely adaptable to circumstances. Furthermore, there is a great deal of merit in harmonizing, say, military doctrine (the primary concern of the OP); a lack of harmony can prove catastrophic in that area. I can provide historical examples if necessary.

 

"What if their culture does not assimilate or evolve?" Doesn't it? The qunari are all about "the nature of the world" and on the individual as part of a whole. None of that militates against assimilation or cultural evolution. One might argue that the nature of the world rests on change, and that societies change over time, and being true to the nature of things requires change. Or they might argue that the Way Things Are is immutable. Either would be, as I understand it, an ideologically valid position to take. 

[Bob from Accounting]

But it isn't contextless.

 

The variability of people and the circumstances of implementation are certainly enough to create great divergences to ideology, but they aren't enough to erase it entirely into randomness. A collectivist ideology implemented over an aggregate is going to lead to more collectivist states and societies than an individualist ideology.

 

There might well even be societies that superficially 'believe' in a certain ideology but in practice use the complete opposite ideas as a result of enough interpretation and implementation circumstances coming together. But they would surely be far rarer than societies that practically embrace the ideology.

 

It doesn't have to be a perfect divide for a trend to be observed.

[EmperorSahlertz]

It wasn't so much that the Qunari weren't allowed to talk t the bas, but more about the Qunari having no desire to do so. Also, you need to remember that the common tounge in Thedas is a foreign language for Qunari, so it is probable that most of the Qunari soldiers didn't even speak the language, so they straight up couldn't talk to the locals.

[Jedi Master of Orion]

I think one of the devs or lore sources said that most Qunari either don't speak common or don't speak it well. And being unable to speak it well is humiliating for a culture that prides itself on mastering skills.

[Hanako Ikezawa]

It's less communism (which had an extreme class-centric perspective the Qunari lack) and more the general authoritarian collectivism crushing of individualism (in which the identification of the individual and their desires is placed over the collective) and the family unit (the historic enemy and frequent target for infiltration of authoritarian ideologies and states).

 

Since western liberalism practically reveres individualism and still greatly reveres the ideal family unit, the Qunari are essentially ideological heathens to the normal audience.

Exactly. They are an extreme case of a Collectivist society, where one sacrifices all individualism for the betterment of the group.

[Aimi]

But it isn't contextless.

 

The variability of people and the circumstances of implementation are certainly enough to create great divergences to ideology, but they aren't enough to erase it entirely into randomness. A collectivist ideology implemented over an aggregate is going to lead to more collectivist states and societies than an individualist ideology.

 

There might well even be societies that superficially 'believe' in a certain ideology but in practice use the complete opposite ideas as a result of enough interpretation and implementation circumstances coming together. But they would surely be far rarer than societies that practically embrace the ideology.

 

It doesn't have to be a perfect divide for a trend to be observed.

That's another part of the problem. History has very little predictive value. There is empirical evidence for this - e.g. the studies of Tetlock and Belkin. Trends may be visible, but they can only be retroactively imposed, and there is no guarantee that they will continue to carry on in the future.

 

So you might classify a new government as, broadly, a follower of liberal-democratic ideological precepts. That's a reasonable enough identification of ideological taxonomy. Okay: what does that tell you about its future? Not a whole lot, right? It might find economic success and internal concord; plenty of Western-style democracies have managed that. Or it might collapse into factionalism and be converted into some kind of dictatorship; plenty of Western-style democracies have managed that, too. History is the study of change over time, too: one of those things might happen for a while, then shift to another.

 

To know more, we'd have to go to the situation on the ground: this is where context enters into the equation. But even if you look at things like the Gini coefficient, the misery index, the various institutions of government and their development, the state of the military, the condition of the country's foreign affairs, and so on, you'll find that there are so many countervailing pressures in so many different directions that two equally laureled academics might employ equally sound methods of hashing out the data to make predictions, and they might come to radically different conclusions.

 

And then we get into the issues of determining what defines a successful state/society and blah blah blah it's a total mess.

[Dean_the_Young]

Saran- (what do you prefer to be called as a shorthand, anyway?), a question for what you preserve as societal weaknesses: just what would you consider a societal weakness, as opposed to one of context?

 

A common conceit in the west, for example, is that the Soviet Union's communist/state-run economy was an inevitable weakness, with economic inefficiencies being an inherent weakness in the socialist ideology and established culture. The Soviet Union could have conceivably have shifted to a more free-market economy via reforms like China, but doing so would have amounted to a signficant cultural and change of society. Would you consider that economic inefficiency a weakness intrensic to the society, or a matter of context?

 

Or how about the idea that segregated societies that oppose integration (such as American history with African Americans, or cultures that prevented women from being involved in the economy and workplace) deny themselves human capital and weaken themselves as a result. Is that a societal weakness, or context of implementation?

 

 

I'm not trying to snipe- I'm just interested if you would care to elaborate.

[Bob112211]

You're probably right. As each part of the Qun acts like parts in the body crippling one could jeopardize everything else. Yet wouldn't each part be strengthen? Wouldn't it be a matter of how long they can keep it up rather than what is?

[Cryptos]

The qun is heresy, the whole qun is weak

[SerCambria358]

The qun is heresy, the whole qun is weak

Weakness doesnt exist in the Qun, it only exists in those who refuse to submit to it