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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 5557310" data-attributes="member: 41584">Both Anton LeVay's 'Church of Satan' and Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' heavily revolve around the concept that selfishness is the only honest moral virtue, and that stuff like charity, kindness and sharing are masks that we wear, just because we want people to think we are 'nice' or 'good.'  By stripping away the notion that selfishness or greed are 'bad' or 'mean,' the need to delude self and others by wearing these masks and telling these lies is stripped away, revealing the honest, selfish core of a person, who was not put on this earth to benefit or pleasure others, but only themself. [Note that this is not my philosophy, merely one that I'm aware of.] A gnomish culture could borrow from the philosophical notion of selfishness-as-virtue of either LeVay or Rand (both of which are pretty much in lockstep), to add some complexity to the base tenets of the church.  Both philosophies are inherently atheistic (with LeVay flat-out denying that there is a 'Satan' in the real world, just that his rejection of outside law or authority, to serve only internal initiative and ambition, is an ideal worthy of emulation), and focused on the self-as-center-of-the-universe, and with the tenet that the rest of the world, its resources, its riches and even other people, were put there to be used and exploited by the superior man.  Those that refuse to exploit others are considered to be morally weak.  Focusing on community or family or charity is considered to be foolish and worthy of mockery, as those who refuses to exploit others are fit only to be exploited like the sheep they are by the more 'morally evolved.' Following this sort of paradigm, the gnomes wouldn't just be concerned with aquiring wealth, but with proving the superiority of their beliefs by taking advantage of members of other races.  It's a 'moral necessity' for them to exploit others, to prove the rightness of their philosophy.  It one can 'game' a charitable endeavor or work project meant to benefit 'the little people' (such as a city wall expansion around a poor quarter), it's practically a requirement of their faith to 'prove' that such charitible works are for suckers and fools.  Any great charitible success story undermines their beliefs, and brings up the horrible thought that maybe they are greedy jerks, and the great excuse that 'everybody is like that' rings hollow, so it's pretty much required for them to continue feeling good about themselves to sabotage such projects, and, when one fails because of some sort of corruption, to sing it from the rafters, and make sure that everybody hears about it, since it's 'proof' that everybody is selfish and that attempting to do something for others is inherently flawed. 'Prime Directive' thinking can go into this sort of philosophy as well.  'We can't help the dirty backwards savages, because then they won't learn nuthin!  Save our knowledge / resources / wisdom for us, and if they deserve to be like us, they'll get there on their own, and be better for it (but don't forget to pillage every possible resource from their undefended land first, so that they can't possibly ever advance anyway, and then blame them for never developing metalworking, despite having mined every scrap of ore out from under them...)' 'Prime Directive' gnomes would expand into goblin, kobold, etc. held territories, and take advantage of technological superiority (alchemist's fire, crossbows, caltrops, etc.) to push these 'savage' races back, and exploit and develop their territories.  If their wealth suffices, they might even hire human mercenaries to do the bulk of this work, only moving in directly once there are some fortified areas.  The humans might be allowed to settle the land cleared afterwards, but it will still remain under the authority of the gnomes who financed this 'nation-building' project (and, depending on how rapacious the gnomes are, they may have clear-cut and destroyed and exported most of the local resources, leaving the 'settler' humans with a devastated ruin of a landscape, to which humanoids may soon return, as the gnomes move on to their next area to plunder, essentially 'rewarding' their human mercenaries with little more than a played-out boom-town, that is unsustainable and will fall apart within a decade or two (perhaps to be reclaimed by savage humanoids and nature within a few generations, in time for the gnomish mercantile organization to swing back and 'claim' it again!). With some truly clever politicking, the gnomes could even make the descendents of the humans lost in the last 'boom' think that it was a great tragedy, and that the gnomes only left because there was tension between gnome and human, and that *this time,* they'll do it right, and reclaim the township, and avenge those lost when the goblinoids took back the territories. Whipped into a frenzy with tales of revenge and reclamation of 'what is rightly ours,' the next generation of humans is sent in to clear out the humanoids, cut down the trees, dig up the ore, etc. to be sent off in gnomish wagons to benefit the same gnomish family-run business that ruthlessly exploited their great grandparents the same way, and is going to abandon them when they've pillaged the area to their satisfaction, once again. Such gnomes would be amused and / or offended to be painted as 'evil,' since they would almost universally think of themselves as beyond such labels, as more evolved, and ruthlessly fair.  If others deserved to be treated differently, they would be likewise exploiting others, and thinking only of themselves, and if they aren't, they are inherently dishonest and false, since, by their beliefs, *everybody* is selfish at the core, and that the people who claim not to be are just dangerous liars or even-more-dangerous fools.  The fact that someone is calling them evil or greedy or selfish, as if these were bad things, is just proof that they are unenlightened, and their opinions childish and irrelevant. Indentured servitude would likely be very popular among such a society.  With slavery, the onus is on the slave-taker or the slave-owner, but with indentured servants who are working off a debt, or serving as punishment for a crime, the slave-owner can place all of the 'blame' for the condition of slavery on the slave himself.  'Oh, he's a criminal, no doubt he's much better off working for me than he ever would have been on his own.  I'm doing him a favor, really...'  The gnome would get to not only have the benefits of owning slaves, but would get to feel all morally superior and smug about it, since, by the tenets of their faith, people are where they deserve to be.  If someone is poor, they deserve to be poor, because they refused to do whatever was necessary to not be poor, and so if someone couldn't pay their debts to the Gnomish Syndicate, it's their fault for refusing to engage in whatever immoral or unethical behavior was required to settle that debt, and, by that logic, they *deserve* to spend the next ten years working for the Syndicate...  That's the fate of the dishonest, lazy and unenlightened, to be perpetually exploited by the faith of enlightened self-interest. From another perspective, a wealth-obsessed society would seem the most likely to develop not just banking houses and money-changers, but to encourage the formation of regional currencies and banker's notes as mediums of exchange.  Coin and stones would go into their countinghouses, and paper notes and alloyed coins of lesser value that *represent* money stored in the local lords vaults would come out.  By controlling the 'market fluctuations' of coins from different lands, or even different fiefdoms or trade partners, they would be able to game the system that they have designed, to always come out a few coins ahead on any transaction. 'This note is from the bank of Westfeld, I can redeem it for 95% of it's face value, if you wish...' says the banker, knowing that he can hold onto it until he is able to redeeom it as the bank of Westfeld for 98.5% of it's value.  On a 100 gp note, the bank of Westfeld has now made 2.5 gp. profit, and the banker in the neighboring city has made 2.5 gp. profit, all for the cost of a scrap of paper and a hard-to-reproduce bit of writing. This is how a wealth-obsessed gnome (or human, or elf) would be best served to operate.  Not thieves guilds.  No bank heist or art theft or jewel theft can compare with the return on investment of owning a bank. Cutting a purse might feed you for a week, but having hundreds of clients walk into your place of business over a course of a week and put the contents of their coin-purses willingly into your hands, accepting only scraps of paper and promises in return?  That's where the action is!</blockquote>

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