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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9858481" data-attributes="member: 18">I think the problem here is that the bolded bit is hard to support, and it's extremely easy to argue that in practice this is purely about protecting elites and allowing the targeted suppression of any dissidents, not creating "great quality of life" generally. The more closely you look at laws in both real-life and fictional surveillance states, the more apparent and certain this becomes.There are plenty of non-oppressive somewhat-collectivist states (again fictional and RL) which aren't creepy, but I cannot think of a single one which engages in mass surveillance. Speaking historically, the concept of the panopticon is a good example of "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", and basically every attempt to construct an RL <s>torment nexus</s> panopticon has proven that it's incredibly deleterious to mental health of the people subjected to it (and people have tried) and absolutely fails to achieve any objective beyond making prisons cheaper to run at the expense of the well-being of the prisoners (and there are a million ways to do that, if that's your clearly non-Good goal). Humans simply aren't intended to be surveilled at all times, they're not psychologically equipped for that. I imagine the same would be true of most D&D races, because most have fundamentally human ways of thinking.The closest I can think of with a society that isn't just trying to protect elites is the fictional The Culture in Banks' novels, but that doesn't engage in totalitarian surveillance, it just de facto has an awful lot of surveillance because of all the technology and Minds and so on bumping around. Canonically Star Trek's society doesn't usually have a very high level of surveillance, even on paramilitary vessels like the Enterprise. Rather the sensors tend to be intentionally directed at certain places at certain times (which is definitionally not continuing "surveillance" in the same sense).Krynn is interesting here too because they could have had the gods desperately want to take out the Kingpriest for two totally legitimate reasons:1) Genociding entire races and virtually everyone who disagrees with you is not Good and is generally bad for everyone.2) Putting yourself and your indoctrinated psychopathic religious war followers as the sole determiners of who gets to live and who gets to die in your genocidal campaign of mass murder is clearly not Good, and unlikely to work well in the longer-term.I remember when I first read about the Cataclysm, I sort of just assumed that was the motivation for the gods taking him out.But every single source that clarifies anything about the cause of the Cataclysm is like "Nah, nah, nothing to do with all the genocide, nothing to do with putting yourself above everyone, even the gods, and deciding who lives and who dies, that's all fine and cool actually", and it's instead it's all "weird bollocks" (as DCI Seawoll would put it) about "The Doctrine of Balance" or "challenging the gods" (in a rather different sense - i.e. doing something they don't like) or the like.It honestly raises some very large questions about how "thought-through" Krynn's setup was, and how much of it was just slapped on the page without even considering it. I feel like there's no way that say, Tolkien or GRRM or most modern writers would have missed those y'know, pretty huge issues with what the Kingpriest was canonically up to. Even writers who didn't want to make a moral point would probably have at least acknowledged that this kind of mass slaughter he was apparently engaging was y'know, bad. But it just never really comes up with Krynn. Perhaps because the response of the gods was a genocide (and it was unarguably a genocide, entire countries and peoples were wiped out, whereas others were largely unharmed, and the gods knew what they were doing) on a scale even larger than the Kingpriest, so it would obviously be hypocritical if that's the reason they used?It's funny because I think you could tell essentially the same story as Krynn, i.e. a nutcase decided to "wipe out Evil", and got so bad and powerful that even the gods could only shut him down with apocalyptic destruction, and then were so horrified they left for hundreds of years, and make it vastly more compelling and make sense, relatively easily. But perhaps that's hindsight because we've got this clear evidence of how far wrong you can go?</blockquote>

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