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[Rolepgeek]

some people have spiritual needs

Really? As in, genetically? I've always considered them as results of upbringing and lack of information.

Then again, do you mean spiritual needs or the need to worship, because those are very different things.

Kinda late to respond to this, but I mean spiritual needs, and psychologically. As in, you have to believe in something, to give yourself and your life purpose. Because we can think of and deal with the abstract, and some people are predisposed towards those things, it will tend towards an emotional and philosophical outlet of spirituality. But also some people are born to be zealots, yes.

A lot of people in the imperium suffer, true, but that's the price they pay so that many, many more people could lead decent lives. Not fantastic ones maybe, but decent. The price of living a peaceful civilian life protected from the aliens and cultists that'd like to rape your eyesockets and eat your children is payed with bodies and (mostly guardsmen) blood.

It could be better, of course, with a more efficient imperium. But it could also be a lot worse.

*coughTaucoughlessoppressivethanImperiumcoughhackcoughalsonotgenocidalcoughusuallycough*

Sorry about that guys, I think I have a Xenocold.

[Radio Controlled]

As said before, can't compare. They don't face the same issues an empire the size of the imperium does, so we don't know if their policies are even remotely usable on such a scale. Take a hivespire with a billion people in it. How are they gonna safeguard that from major cults inviting chaos into the world, without resorting to a police state at least as oppressive/invasive?

[Andres]

I just figured out how to fix the entire 40k universe.

Erryone smoke weed erryday.

If everyone had a little bit of weed once a day, they wouldn't be violent, they wouldn't fear death, they wouldn't be able to plan, and they wouldn't be horny. BAM! Chaos gods assassinated!

[Knit tie]

Plus, we have no idea how oppressive the Tau society actually is. For all we know, their empire can be all about obsessvely policing its citizens' thoughts 24/7, 1984 - style.

[Radio Controlled]

The method by which the Ethereals maintain control over their species is unknown to the Imperium, and possibly even to those they rule. Many assume such manipulation is a form of innate psychic ability; others feel that the faultless loyalty the Ethereals inspire has been contrived by some unseen technology, or is even the result of some pheromone-based reaction. The most primitive races Tau forces have encountered believe the Ethereals are deified beings, leaders of an advanced people chosen for greatness. Naturally, the Ethereals themselves help propagate and encourage this particular myth. As the Tau do their utmost to prevent any Ethereal from being slain or captured, there have been few opportunities to conduct tests, and those that have been performed offer no conclusions, and far more questions. Indeed, several studies have been undertaken by the Imperium, and the Ordos Xenos Deathwatch is even in the possession of a low-ranked member of the caste having captured him as his vessel passed through an unclaimed system near Tau-controlled space. Prior to the capture of this specimen, it was assumed that the Ethereals must utilise some unidentified method of biological, psychic or even pheromone control over the Tau. The Ethereals sport an unidentified organ in the centre of their foreheads, a smaller version of which is possessed by other castes. It was assumed that this organ must be key to the control effect, yet the specimen captured has been extensively examined and no functioning system has been identified. Either the captured Ethereal is a deliberate attempt to misdirect the Imperium, or the matter is far more esoteric than had previously been thought.

[Knit tie]

-wordz-

You don't need to have a special organ in your forehead to make your people doubleplusbellyfeel Ingsoc Greatgood, you just need a competent Minitrue and a good thought police.

Which would actually make the Tau Empire much more totalitarian than the Imperium as a whole, since the latter is stated to pretty explicitly not care what you do as long as you pay your taxes and and venerate the Emperor.

[Rolepgeek]

Just sayin', Tau don't have Commissars or Exterminatus.

Also they let you keep your religion and culture and shit mostly. Which also helps with avoiding Chaos worship, since there's an outlet other than Emperor(if loyalist) or Chaos(if not).

But yes, they are the ones based off Orwell. On the other hand, they are still better than the Imperium, which is the point of them. Saying 'well they could be oppressive' is useless. Are they going to still be an overbearing government? Probably, yes. Would they be considered evil in the real world? Certainly. But in 40k, they're the only race that really bothers with diplomacy(Eldar practice manipulation, it's different ) or asking questions before killing things. They aren't perfect and I'll never claim they are. But they're more efficient, they're nicer in a lot of ways, and so on. They have much better technology, which helps with security(the Imperium ignores half the people in it's hives, practically; besides the Tau not actually building hives since they're horrible slums of filth and squalor and not needing a tactic of 'throw more bodies at it', they would still certainly keep a watch on citizens' lives, particularly in the first years of assimilation. Cult activity isn't too hard to find if you know what you're looking for and have half-decent tech as well as drones. They'll still have to deal with the occasional incursion, but Chaos worship partially results from resentment, dissatisfaction, and crappy living conditions, since those are the sorts of things that drive you to such desperate measures in an attempt to improve your lot. Combined with safe(if slow) warp travel and psychic races that can be literal thought police?(what? I never said they didn't use them, but it's better than just getting shot in the head even when you'd done nothing)? And they don't overspecialize their worlds like the Imperium does(partially because they can't and still function but whatever), so supply breaks don't fuck everything over too badly?

I'm just pointing out, 'last, best hope for humanity' needs the addendum 'if you want to be ruled over purely by other humans'. After all, Gue'la, the Greater Good is open to all.

[TempAcc]

Tau ethereals use partial hive mind control on the lower castes of their own race, and use mass propaganda campaigns and huge promisses to add less developed races into the fold of their empire, which are always inserted in minor military roles (read: cannonfodder) while the commanding roles are always taken by the Tau... Which are likely being mind controlled anyway.
So yea, you get to keep your culture, except you're just cannonfodder with a flashy gun who's never going to get enough status to question anything or have any real liberty. Living on your knees while fighting for a species other then your own.

Also the Tau suck :v

Sure, the imperium has comissars, but at least you can become a comissar yourself with enough effort. In the tau, unless you're an actual tau (and even then, you're limited by the caste system), you're destined to be mr. cannonfodder for life.
And the imperium actual has retirement programs akin to the ones used in the roman empire. With enough years of service, you can get yourself some land in a peaceful planet in the imperium and farm away your last days or do something else, several novels actualy mention it, mostly imperial guard ones since spess mahreens live for war.
Retirement on the Tau is an unspoken and likely inexistent thing, you likely just wield your flashy tau gun for life until you drop dead.

[Xantalos]

Advancement in either civilization is purely a matter of luck to be honest. You're most likely gonna live your life either toiling away in a factory, dying on a battlefield as chaff, or both. Because grimderp.

[Rolepgeek]

Tau ethereals use partial hive mind control on the lower castes of their own race, and use mass propaganda campaigns and huge promisses to add less developed races into the fold of their empire, which are always inserted in minor military roles (read: cannonfodder) while the commanding roles are always taken by the Tau... Which are likely being mind controlled anyway.
So yea, you get to keep your culture, except you're just cannonfodder with a flashy gun who's never going to get enough status to question anything or have any real liberty. Living on your knees while fighting for a species other then your own.

Also the Tau suck :v

Sure, the imperium has comissars, but at least you can become a comissar yourself with enough effort. In the tau, unless you're an actual tau (and even then, you're limited by the caste system), you're destined to be mr. cannonfodder for life.
And the imperium actual has retirement programs akin to the ones used in the roman empire. With enough years of service, you can get yourself some land in a peaceful planet in the imperium and farm away your last days or do something else, several novels actualy mention it, mostly imperial guard ones since spess mahreens live for war.
Retirement on the Tau is an unspoken and likely inexistent thing, you likely just wield your flashy tau gun for life until you drop dead.

None of that is true, actually.

Tau have retirement for actual Tau, they're gonna have it for auxiliaries, as a recruiting practice if nothing else. Probably work in a similar way to the way Fire Caste members 'retire' (that is, you become good enough to become a Shas'O and then get the option of joining a special council of Fire Caste members). You aren't actually forced to join the military either. Sure, you can sign up for the auxiliaries, but the Tau don't throw away lives without a damn good reason. Cannon fodder...well, that's true for humans, but Tau cannonfodder still have higher lifetime expectancy than the average guardsman.

Plenty of assumptions about how Ethereals work there(do you think the Water Caste does nothing?)...plenty of races are assimilated into roles that aren't military (you just happen to see the military ones, since 40k is a wargame), and the Demiurg, for example, were more advanced than the Tau. They actually learned a lot from the Demiurg, such as ion cannons.

Also the Tau don't suck.

And don't pretend like questioning things in the Imperium won't get you killed. In the Empire, it gets you a pat on the head and a note to watch this one on your profile. Supreme command roles are typically taken by the Tau, yes. It's the Tau Empire. You don't expect to become a Lord General when you're a conscript from the Hives either, now do you?

Finally, how does one become a Commissar other than being an orphan and going through the Schola Progenum? I was fairly sure that was the only way, and it involves killing your fellow man because they aren't getting themselves killed fast enough.

And if given a choice between living on my knees with a gun to my head for my species, and living on my knees with a leash around my neck for a different one...would you really choose the gun?

[Radio Controlled]

Again, the tau can afford to be nice because they don't have the same size an empire. You cannot expect a policy that works well on a small scale to work equally well on a grander scale. Hundreds of real life examples.

Should the imperium take quite a few lessons from the way tau do things? Heck yes. Should they wisen up and realise they really should ally (not join or subjugate to, ally) with this particular xenos to better combat the truly vile xenos? Yes. But subjugating to another species, of which you know next to nothing? Sounds like a bad idea. Who's to say the ethereal caste won't decide to start mass purges/sterilisation once they were in control? They don't have to do any such thing right now, if for the sole reason they aren't powerful enough for it (they are so utterly small on galactic scale, they can't afford but to take any ally or advantage they can get). But you have no guarantees.

Humans should stay in control of humanity, as long as that is reasonably possible.

For the record, I'm getting the feeling you might be underestimating the insidious power of Chaos a bit. Sure, better living conditions and such would go a long way to stemming cultist activity, but there will still be cults popping up every day everywhere. The imperium has a harsh police state and an entire organisation dedicated to detecting and purging chaos. And yet they often fail. What would the tau, or anyone else, even really do to combat that without using the same methods? After all, these massive hives are already here, so the issue is real.

Finally, sure the imperium has a bloated population, needs a lot of able hands. Getting rid of their fear of technology would help alleviate that somewhat, but still. They need to keep producing that many men, weapons, materiel, because they keep the forces of chaos and a lot of the aliens at bay.

Who holds the Cadian gate? Who fought back the three major tyranid incursions? Who keeps a lot of the orks down? Humanity, via the Imperium.

[Knit tie]

Rolepgeek - That entirely depends on wheter you are an Abnetist or a Codexist when it comes to your vision of the Imperium. I am an Abnetist, so for me, Imperium is a state that is forced into brutality and ruthlessness by its circumstances and doesn't really care what culture or religion you have as long as you acknowledge the Emperor as your (highest) god and dont worship Chaos. It also doesnt shy away from diplomacy, if only for realpolitick reasons.

The Tau Empire, meanwhile, are pretty universally acknowledges as a nation where you are always happy solely because the Big Brother doesn't let you retain enough capacity for independent thought to comprehend the possibility of you having a better life, and that's during a period of their history that saw humanity as a noblebright-as-fuck quasi-Star Trek Federation. Tzeentch only knows how awful will the Tau Empire become when life starts sucking for them like it does for the Imperium.

Radio - Also, the Tau Empire doesnt have to fight for its people's very survival against several existential threats every goddamn day, and as such can afford to care about the living conditions of its citizenry (which we don't really know much about, they might full well be really awful for the common drones) on an interstellar scale.

I also have to say that it's a very interesting topic, whether the AdMech are a bunch of idiotic cargo cultists or actually competent engineers and scholars that have to deal with the fact that they are dealing with technology that they are 20-something thousand years of peaceful advancement short of being able to understand.

[Grim Portent]

There is also the issue that unplugging the Emperor's life support or failing to feed him psykers would more or less kill all humans as daemonic possession rates increase, and the Tau aren't the sort to keep him alive on the principle of keeping him alive and it's not like many people in the setting have worked out that 'the Emperor Protects' is literal. So if the Tau ever actually reach Terra then humanity will become a giant gateway for daemon hordes.

[Tack]

I wouldn't say 'Daemonic possessions would rise' as a result of the Emprah dying.
I mean the chaos gods were around during the Dark age of Technology, when there was no emperor, and all of the ships still traveled perfectly well.

[Grim Portent]

I wouldn't say 'Daemonic possessions would rise' as a result of the Emprah dying.
I mean the chaos gods were around during the Dark age of Technology, when there was no emperor, and all of the ships still traveled perfectly well.

The Emperor has been around since 3000BC or so, he just didn't sit on a psy-enchancing chair at the time, and human ships navigated really badly pre-Emperor, small ships without navigators still function the way they did pre-Imperium and it's slow, dangerous as hell and not reliable at all. The old civilization of Terra engineered navigators to try and fix their logistics problems.

Anway, the 5th ed rulebook specifically mentioned it as I recall, don't remember if the 6th and 7th ones do, I'll pull them off the shelf and take a look.

EDIT: Page 101 of the 5th ed rulebook, 137 of the 6th ed one, and 9 of the 7th ed Dark Millenium book, all say some variation on

5th edition rulebook

His immense psychic powers envelop and protect Mankind across the entire galaxy. His consciousness wanders through Warp space, warring against the Daemons that inhabit it, keeping closed the doors between this world and the next.

If the Emperor falls, then Daemons of chaos will flood into the galaxy. Every living human will become a gateway for the destruction of mankind and the stuff of Warp space will submerge the galaxy. There will be no physical matter. No space. No time. Only chaos.

There is a slight change in the wording in the 6th and 7th, neither mention him warring against the daemons, though enveloping and protecting humanity is still there, and so is the warp-ocalypse.