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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9542397" data-attributes="member: 18">Yes, solely because the Imperium won't allow it. However there have been and still are non-Imperium human civilizations - the Leagues of Votann, for example. However, canonically, the Votann do exist relatively peacefully with the Imperium. There are few and mostly minor canon examples of them actually fighting the Imperium. But others, most of whom I forget, the Imperium has annihilated, or forced to flee, or occasionally "merely" conquered.The issue is that you're misreading the Imperium of Man as representing "humanity" and misunderstanding its behaviour as "avoiding extinction" for humanity rather than itself. Most of what the Imperium of Man does is push the humanity under its control towards extinction, in large part because as a whole, the Imperium places absolutely no value on human life as human life, only in how much it helps the Imperium. It'd be easily true to say the Imperium values humans less than the T'au value humans.The Imperium is fundamentally decaying, it won't permit change (or "heresy" as it calls it), it won't permit improvement ("heresy") is hopelessly oligarchical (democracy and indeed all non-totalitarian, non-dictatorial government is heresy, because it doesn't ultimately come from the false creed of the "Will of the Emperor"), prone to schisms and civil wars (even without the influence of outsiders), and doesn't seek to better the lives of the people under it, or even to really protect them, but rather just to protect and perpetuate itself at all costs. The Imperium is the organism fighting for its own survival here. Not humanity - humanity is just a species that it's parasitized as it were. If the Imperium could somehow exist without humanity, it absolutely would destroy them.Further, the Imperium is a theocracy dedicated to the worship of a man who, to his dying breath was like "DO NOT MAKE A RELIGION OUT OF ME!!!" and indeed spent his life destroying human religions/gods (including nice ones) to try and create a rational (in his view) and secular future for humanity. So it's based on the most pernicious of lies.When people say an organization is "institutionally X" (usually racist, sexist, or w/e) that doesn't preclude individuals within it, even the majority of them, being individually good or even heroic. It means that the way it operates overall is harmful. And that's the Imperium. It's the ultimate institutionally screwed organisation.As an aside, the relatively recent retcons re: the Space Marines definitely suggest to me that GW wants it to be possible to see Space Marines as "heroic" and "fighting the good fight" (including against the retrograde elements of the Imperium, to some extent), albeit trapped within this decaying system (this is particularly true of the Ultramarines and Salamanders, consistently the two most "good guy" Legions, and less true of say, the Black Templars, who are, unlike other Marines, "true believers").</blockquote>

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