Group conflicts

When exploring the origins of a conflict and how it played out, I will use a fictional example based on the lore of the game Warhammer 40,000. This event is called the Horus Heresy and in simplest terms is a war between demigods and their armies who either chose to remain loyal to their father or betray him. Each major individual grew up on a different world and thus had radically different and often conflicting values and morals, leading to rivalries and a general hatred for each other. This was compounded by two major events. The first was when their father, a man known only as the emperor, had one of his son’s and his army burn down another’s greatest achievement and force him to kneel to destroyer, all for worshiping the emperor as a god. The second was the emperor abandoning his children during a crusade he was leading to work on a project he refused to tell anyone about. This paved the way for half of his 20 children to doubt him and rebel. I will now explain these events in more detail as well as point out how this situation could have easily been resolved. 
While the emperor could not change the circumstances that his children grew up in, he could have been a better father figure to them once he found them. Rather than taking time to get to know each of them and intervene to reconcile differences between them, he instead ignored them or showed blatant favoritism. Some children and their armies were forced to do nothing but thankless sieges while others had more praiseworthy and recognized roles. This lead to extreme resentment, especially when one child’s only wish was to build things and hated only making tools for war. The fact that he was often passed up on huge honors or his contributions were ignored did not help matters. This resentment could have been mitigated had the emperor simply given him more glamorous assignments every now and then. 
Worse still is his absolute atrocious handling of how one of his sons, Lorgar, worshiped the emperor as a god and encouraged others to do the same. The emperor knew about this son’s religious fervor and had first met him when he was in the middle of a sermon worshiping the coming of the emperor (although he did not know the emperor was his father at the time). Despite this he still gave that son an entire legion of super soldiers and the power to spread his faith, then one hundred years later, made another one of his children burn down Lorgar’s greatest achievement and forced Lorgar to kneel before the army and the brother responsible. This entire situation could have been avoided if the emperor had at any point just told lorgar not to worship him or make a religion around him.
Finally, the emperor seemingly abandoning his children was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After placing his favorite son Horus in charge of the others, The emperor went back to their home planet and refused to give any explanation as to why. Many took this lack of trust as a personal insult after all they had done. This also led to Horus becoming vulnerable to the manipulations of very evil individuals who would trick him into destroying everything that he and his brothers had accomplished for the past 10,000 years. Once again, The emperor is at fault due to keeping needless secrets. If he had been honest about why he left, improving humanities space travel capabilities, than Horus would not have been manipulated and lead half of his brothers in a rebellion. The fallout of this rebellion was the imperium of man that the 20 children and their father had been working to create devolving into a rotting husk full of its former self with corruption, ignorance, superstition, fear and misery infesting it like maggots. Ironically, this ruined imperium now worshiped the emperor as a god. 
It cannot be stressed how much of this could have been avoided. While something was bound to go wrong when so many people that were fundamentally different were given enormous power and influence. That said, the lack of any attempts to reconcile the differences between them, the atrocious treatment certain children experienced and the cold detachment and lack of trust from the emperor, the person they all respected and valued more than anyone else, led to an absolute disaster that ruined any chance of humanity returning to even a shadow of its former glory.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanNovember 15, 2019 at 5:52 AM

    Hmmm. Conflict in games and movies may be needed as a plot device to provide motivation to the characters. Are there lessons from these stories that might be applied to real situations? If the answer to that question is yes, you might have drawn that out in your post. In contrast, if the answer to that question is no, then I'm not getting why you used this as an example, as it doesn't seems to connect to our course.

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  2. Tjalling koopmansNovember 17, 2019 at 10:42 AM

    I apologize if i was not specific enough in my example. The short answer is that it is an example of a particular type of group conflict, exaggerated to a grand scale. The emperor is an allegory to the types of people who say that they know the correct way to do things, everyone else is wrong and MUST do whatever he says. The conflicts between the demigods are meant to be coworkers at the same level competing for a managers approval, to the detriment of the project that is collectively being worked on (in this case, their intergalactic empire). The lessons to be learned is that compromise and an open mind to different methodologies is a must for successful group work and that a competitive mindset should never be allowed to manifest within group members. Finally, there must be a mediator in groups that can act as a neutral party to help resolve disputes between group members, (kind of like an Human resources devision).

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