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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5725948" data-attributes="member: 4937">The first thing you have to realize is "assume xenophobia".  The case of a cosmopolitan empire is in fact the unusual one that needs explanation.  People are xenophobic by default; probably because they realize their neighbors really are out to get them.  It requires a lot of cultural technology to change that.Again, you are making this harder than you need.  Trust of the divine is not default.  It requires a lot of cultural technology to achieve.  Have you ever read the Greek myths?  Polytheistic gods are generally concieved in very petty, arrogant, and manipulative terms.  The assumption of the Greeks was that the gods were continually harassing, mistreating, and abusing mortals for their own purposes and pleasures, just as men were continually doing the same to other men.  It's not hard at all to reach a point where you don't think that the gods are worth worshiping if you concieve of the gods in those terms.  It's not unusual at all to see the gods as something to be at worst appeased and at best avoided, precisely because they are real existing things.  There is no reason to assume that the best of the gods have the traits of ominescent, benevolent, unchanging, loving kindness, and mercy.  Even the best ones might be things you'd rather didn't exist.  And even if the best were that way, men might still prefer to be rulers over their own lives than to submit to even benevolent tyranny (as they deemed it).  Frankly, it happens in my game world all the time.  My current campaign involves a group of heretics that have decided to try to thwart what they see as the unfair will of the gods collectively.  While they are the 'bad guys' I also confess that, given the nature of gods in my campaign world, I have a lot of sympathy for their rebellion (hense the reason they make good bad guys).I would turn your questions completely around.  Virtually every human already sees themselves as the center of the universe.  Every human tribe already assumes that in some way they are the best of all.  The really unusual culture is the one that doesn't assume it has some moral basis for superiority and is snearing at all the others.   I mean, forget Nazi Germany and other trite obvious examples for a moment.   Virtually every tribe in the North American continent, despite the vast differences in their languages, had as its word for 'people' the same word as its name for itself, and conceived of every other tribe as being in some way 'not people' having had a separate and distinct creation from 'real people'.   From what little we can reconstruct of the history of North America, it's one dang genocide after the other.  The really ironic example for me is the Souix, favored icon of North American nobility in White folk's literature, drove the Pawnee from their native land in the Black Hills in historical times.  The Pawnee - facing extinction - allied themselves with the newly arrived White Folk, and for their trouble White folk have thereafter depicted them almost without exception as cowardly, dishonorable, quislings of less worth than the people who had murdered them and stolen their land.The answer to your question is I think very simple.  The people of your empire believe that they have been wronged.   When a people believe that they have been wronged, there is nothing that they won't do.   Because it requires complex social technology to not see the world as a place that has wronged you, and to not see everyone else in it as enemies, a nation that feels collectively wronged and humiliated quickly destroys its social technology and burns it on the alter of their rage.  Every nation, every peoples, and indeed every person is in my opinion only a few short steps from making war on the universe.</blockquote>

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