The Myth of the State

Social Philosophy according to Sergeant Marn Oggblood, Orcish Sociologist of the Iron Marches

“Civilization is the longest war ever fought — and the enemy is always within.”
— Marn Oggblood, The Law of the Fist and the Banner

I. The Origin of Order

Marn Oggblood, once a commander turned sociologist, argued that the state is not born from peace but from exhaustion — the moment when tribes too weary to fight decide to build walls instead of graves. For the orcs, this was revelation: war created unity, but unity demanded hierarchy, and hierarchy bred myth.

He called this The First Lie of Law: that peace is moral. To him, peace was merely a negotiated pause — a tool for rearming, rebuilding, and restrategizing. Civilization, therefore, was not the absence of conflict but its refinement into systems of control.

II. The Banner and the Blade

Oggblood’s famous analogy compares society to a two-handed weapon:

The Banner — symbol of shared identity, faith, and purpose.
The Blade — instrument of enforcement, coercion, and punishment.

The banner without the blade invites collapse; the blade without the banner invites tyranny. The state survives only when both hands act in rhythm.

From this principle arose the Doctrine of Necessary Cruelty — the belief that every just society must contain an element of violence to protect itself. To disarm is to forget what forged the tribe in the first place.

III. The Machinery of Belief

In Oggblood’s writings, faith, law, and language are not divine gifts but weapons of consensus. A banner must be believed in to function; therefore, myth becomes the mortar of nations.

He called priests and politicians “engineers of obedience” — those who forge loyalty through story rather than steel. The myth of divine right, the illusion of destiny, the rhetoric of unity — all are tools to shape instinct into cooperation.

“Every oath is a leash,” he wrote, “but the trick of civilization is to make the hound kiss the hand that holds it.”

IV. On Freedom and Fracture

Oggblood did not despise freedom; he distrusted it. “Freedom,” he said, “is the noise made when the gears of duty loosen.” Left unchecked, freedom corrodes cohesion — yet he conceded that total order breeds stagnation.

Thus he proposed the Cycle of Fracture: every society must, at intervals, be broken to renew its strength. Revolution is not failure; it is maintenance. Just as a blade must be reforged after dulling, so must empires break before becoming brittle.

V. The War Within

The Sergeant’s most haunting concept, the Inner War, describes the struggle between the instinct for unity and the instinct for dominance. In every leader lies a tyrant; in every rebel, a conqueror.

Society endures only so long as these forces remain in tension. Collapse occurs not when the strong dominate the weak, but when the strong forget why they fight — when the will to dominate replaces the will to endure.

VI. Death and Legacy

Marn Oggblood’s body was found on a battlefield long after his tribe’s last war. His journal, soaked in rain and blood, contained his final note:

“The banner rots. The blade rusts. But the hands remain.”

Among orcs, his words transformed the old war chants into political philosophy. Among humans and dwarves, his treatise became required reading in war colleges and courts alike.

To this day, generals, kings, and revolutionaries quote him for opposite reasons — proof that even in peace, his war never ended.