Lava Handlers

The Swamp Kids were a political organization founded in Vaamū in the year 4149. The founding members of the party were men who worked manufacturing weapons and were so efficient that all other weapon manufacturing businesses went bankrupt. Thus, they had achieved a monopoly, and therefore had the power to overthrow their own bosses and face off against the Army if the bosses pled to them for help.

In some ways, the Swamp Kids strongly resembled the Zenith. Like the Zenith, the Swamp Kids believed that violence against women was an important pillar of their society and were suspicious of women who didn't have bruises. Like the Zenith, the Swamp Kids were founded near Paba but envisioned their people aggressively punching westward through the continent towards their goal of conquering Baeba Swamp. The Swamp Kids realized this, and stated that they were definitely not the Zenith and never would be. They arose at a time when

Early history

Background

The Swamp Kids were founded in a very violent time. Their nation, Vaamū, was currently being occupied by a foreign army calling itself Zakap. Much of Vaamū, previously known as Halasala, had been the pacifist empire of Paba for three thousand years, but late in their history the miracles of diplomacy that had saved them over and over from being conquered by their much more aggressive neighbors finally stopped. Paba's reaction to this was not to raise an army, but to submit completely to simultaneous invasions from all of its neighbors. The royal family had been in charge of declaring war, and they responded to the invasions by hiding out in their fortified castles hoping that they would be spared from the invasion.

For the next two hundred years, Halasala changed hands from one abuser to the next as no outside army was willing to let any other outside army have total control. The only positive change was that racial conflict in Halasala had entirely stopped, as the many different invaders had come from many different ethnic groups and all had agreed to abuse only the natives and not turn against each other.

In 4143, the leaders of a group of Vaamūans called the Horses, who were one of the most powerful groups at the time, ordered a full reinstatement of the pre-Zakap government, but only for the Horses. All non-Horses, they said, would be killed. But the rank and file of the Horses would not agree, and instead they revolted and killed their leaders. This was the beginning of a trend in Wâmûan society, as the underclass came to realize that their leaders were not invincible, and could be overruled by large crowds of otherwise powerless people. Assassinations of leaders increased over the next few years until the leaders were forced to speak to their workers from a safe distance or use only written communication. This, however, served to decrease Wâmûans' confidence in their leaders, and the leaders of many groups responded with stricter discipline.

In 4145, a civil war erupted in Wâmû. The Horses, who now had come to believe that it was God's will for them to kill all non-Horses as soon as they could, had focused their attention on the Zakap, and a group of pro-Zakap Andanese called the Kakalakakamalila. The Horses outnumbered the Zakap, but the Zakap were viewed with much less suspicion by the other groups.

The Horses wanted to kill their enemies because they believed that they were all doomed to spend eternity in Hell, and that it was God's will to kill all those who are damned. There was nothing in the Kaa religion that would suggest this, but it had worked its way into their holy books just the same. Because this was a religious belief, the Horses would die for it, and indeed they were not afraid even when they found themselves facing an army more than ten times the size of their own.

The Horses were quickly eliminated, and the center of conflict shifted to a second civil war between the Zakap and another army called the Laaatalalatataaa, a former ally of the Horses. The Laaatalalatataaa believed as well that it was God's will to kill the unfaithful, but they believed that nobody could know who the unfaithful were, but could only make an educated guess. So they put all their followers through tests to determine as best they could whether they were faithful, and found that many of them had failed. But they were afraid to tell this to their people, so they told the people that only a few of them had failed, and that these people were not really Laaatalalatataaa. But most of the Laaatalalatataaa had already been reached by other political ideas, and they too turned against their leaders, and assassinated them, thus creating yet another victory for the Zakap.

The Zakap army saw that they seemed to have more popular support among the roughly 2 million Wâmûans than all the other armies combined, and so they declared war on all other armies, and claimed they were going to reunite the nation under Zakap principles. The war was fought in 4147, a date the Zakap promised would be relabeled as 0.

The Zakap army took over the weapons production of their territory, and killed the soldiers in opposing armies with terrifying efficiency. Just four days after the war had started, it was over, and two thirds of their enemies lay dead on the ground. The survivors were so terrified of the Zakap that the Zakap took the opportunity to abuse and overwork them. Meanwhile, they moved their weapons factories deeper into their territory, so that a rebel army would not be able to kill Xakaps the way Xakaps had just killed rebels.

Birth of the Swamp Kids

The Zakap army was now far more repressive than they had been before, and they managed to stay in power for nearly two years before a third civil war broke out. This time, the conflict was between the Xakaps and their workers; the more than 500,000 workers who were still alive claimed they were being abused and wanted to take control of the government themselves and have a direct democracy.

The Xakaps were terrified. Their workers were mostly much too young and dumb to run a government, and they knew that if they did not win this war then Wâmû would be doomed. The Xakaps were strong enough to take on their whole nation, however, and they were prepared to do just that. In mid-4149, the Zakap army attacked their workers directly.

But what they didn't realize was that their workers were not quite as dumb as they had become convinced; it was the Zakap who had made the most stupid move here. The workers had become so efficient at producing weapons that all of the other companies had gone bankrupt, and they know had a total monopoly on dangerous weapons. Thus, the Xakaps could not turn to any other supplier to defend themselves against their workers. While the Xakaps were busy discovering they had been tricked, the workers' army, called the Swamp Kids, seized power in a well-planned scheme.

First Swamp government

The Swamp Kids at first called themselves a name best translated as Tinks; the original Tink governors were some of the oldest people in their nation. They claimed that their age gave them wisdom, and that they were the only ones old enough to remember what life had been like when they had just defeated AlphaLeap. However, they realized that their children and grandchildren were much more powerful and more numerous than the original Tinks, and planned to hand over power to a newer generation as quickly as possible. They planned to restore a government they referred to as "the Empire" (milikihu). This was a term that had previously been used by organizations such as STW as an insult, but the Tinkers considered it as praise for a government that had been much stronger and yet more peaceful than any of the many governments that had followed.

The Tinks were much weaker, per capita, than the Zakap, but had the advantage of a total lock on supplies of weapons and armor. Most of the Tinkers were descended from Pabap people, and therefore had difficulty wearing the armor that they themselves were producing, but they had an easier time holding swords and spears. But even so, they immedately set forth producing smaller-sized versions of the weapons and armor that they had previously been making for the Zakap. Some Tinkers defected to the Zakap, noting that the Tink leaders were protecting themselves at all costs and not participating in the fighting. But the Tinks eventually conquered both the Zakap and the few pro-Zakap Tinks, and created a new nation they called Anzan after the Andanese people that made up much of its population.

This was the first time in all of history that the Andanese people had had their own nation. Previously, they had always lived in nations founded by other people, always as an underclass. However, Anzan was very diverse at the time of its founding, and people living there had to be encouraged to consider themselves Andanese.

By this time, Anzan had lost complete control of its territories in Atlam and Tarwas. The Tinkers were curious to see what had happened there, as they saw that on these continents, conditions were even worse than in Anzan. They discovered that Tarwas was winning its war against the Andanese, and that the Crystal party in Atlam had been thrown completely out of power by a new party that had arisen in just the last few years. The Tinkers wanted to avoid a similar situation in their own country, but had no plan.

Dissent from within

Less than a year after Anzan established its power as the successor state to Vaamū, a fourth civil war erupted. This time it came from women and girls who objected to the treatment they were given by the all-male government that the Tinkers had established. The Tinkers believed that feminism made men weak, and that weak, submissive men were responsible for the many repeated opportunistic invasions of their territory over the last 400 years. Although many men in Anzan considered themselves at peace with their wives, the Tinks actually set up meetings for men where the men who had not yet forced their wives into complete submission would be punished by those who had.

The feminist Andanese rebels were helpless to attack the Tinkers, but promised that they would win in the end because all babies need soft women to survive, and the more the Tinks oppressed them the less soft they would get. In the end the Tinkers surrendered, thus violating their promise to never deviate from their original philosophy. These rebels renamed themselves the Crystals, saying that all other parties were false and that only they were the true Crystals. Thus the oppression of women stopped, and the entire government was opened up to the Crystal leaders.

Once the Crystals got into power, they ordered all Tink governors to kill themselves and turn over their weapons to the girls. Enough Tinks complied with their orders to put the power of authority firmly in their hands. The new Crystals were almost completely uneducated, and they had no plan for their government. Weeks later, they were attacked by the Tinks.

Immediately the Tinks ordered the killing of all "Crystals" and the return of absolute power to the Tinks. They did, however, allow the very few pro-Tink women to have some power in their new government, which they called Loporomo 3.

But within a few weeks, the Tinks received reports that women were beating up young boys as revenge for the men beating up women. The Tinks sent out observers to see what was happening, and there they saw that the reports were right. The Tinks realized they had been defeated once again, and swapped all their power to the Crystals.

The Creystals took power once again, but they could not understand exactly what it was they needed to do to keep the nationworking. They had thought that the governors simply gave orders and watched their workers follow the orders. This had been true when Anzan/Wâmû had been richer, but it was true no longer. The Tink governors in fact had worked even harder than the workers themselves; the Crystals had mostly never had power. So they surrendered power to the Tinks, who granted them total control of "women's needs", and partial control over some of the rest of the roughly 150,000 people still surviving in Anzan. They even allowed the girls to have some ability in Loporomo 4 to recall the Tinks themselves, because they were afraid that a new revolt was about to happen anyway.

This time the Tinks wasted no time in getting their agenda accomplished. They were running out of weapons, but they figured they still had enough to kill off all of their enemies. They had planned to kill all non-Tinks in the entire country, except for the Crystals. But they had to settle for instead going after only the Crystals, which they immediately set forth to do. The Crystals protested that most of them were females, and if the Tinks killed all the Crystals, then they wouldn't have enough women left to marry. This confused the Tinks, and some of them protested the killing of the girls, but the other Tinks reassured them that what they were doing was right. The girls were unarmed and could not defend themselves, and within a day most of them were dead, and the rest were wounded so that the Tinks would have an easier time raping them if they felt they needed to.

The Tinks realized that they had a population problem. They had killed so many women that their population was now mostly male. So they decided to start killing young boys; they wanted to completely wipe out the population of Anzan and start completely over again. So the Tinks, with virtually no opposition, attacked and killed all of the unarmed babies and young children that they could find. (They also killed the last few Xakaps that had been surviving by eating Andanese people.) One week later, only the Tink leaders, the captured female Crystals, and a small population of babies that they had decided to save remained alive in Anzan. At least the Tinks realized that they would have plenty of food for awhile, although there were virtually no workers left.

The Tinks realized they needed to increase their population madly to avoid an invasion. Soon, the Tinks established a power-sharing agreement with the Crystals, and they came to call both the girls and themselves Crystals.

Crystal secession

In 4175, a group of Tinks in the far "east" of Anzan seceded and formed a new nation hostile to the Tinks. These people called themselves Crystals. In 4180, they achieved victory in their war. However, they were immediately invaded by the Zenith.

Raspara-Swampy relations

For thousands of years, outside nations had assumed Paba was an empire filled with childish, simple-minded people who were obedient workers but afraid to stand up for themselves. They had survived as an independent country because of alliances with more aggressive powers, but eventually succumbed to simultaneous invasions by their many hungry neighbors. Under occupation, the stereotype remained that Pabaps were obedient slaves as they never seemed to fight back against their abusers. However, the Swamp Kids had broken the stereotype by killing all of the many invaders and then going on to kill most of their own people. The Swamp Kids had defeated every enemy, and were looking towards ever greater conquests as they prepared an army to invade Baeba Swamp.

But one outside army, the Raspara, believed that the Swamp Kids still had many fatal weaknesses. The Raspara were mostly descendants of Thunderers (the Thunder Empire had been conquered by AlphaLeap, then became independent, and then was retaken by the Swamp Kids) who had survived the many wars against their empire. In the 3900s, many Thunder people had moved into Paba, enslaving entire towns, and cutting all ties to the Thunder Empire. They did not then have the name Raspara because at the time they were not united even with each other. But the new Raspara party marched under a flag depicting a red sun and had a strong united philosophy and a desire for conquest.

Since the Swamp Kids had conquered all of the Raspara's homelands, the Swamp Kids claimed that they had defeated the Raspara. But some of the more optimistic Raspara people claimed that the Raspara were different from other peoples because they could rise to the top in any society they lived in, as they had in the past. Thus they claimed that the war they had lost against the Swampies was actually an invasion of Swampy territory, and that they merely had to wait for the Swamp Kids to start moving into Raspara-majority areas of their new country for a chance to start abusing the Swamp Kids.

Like the Swamp Kids, the Raspara believed their home lay in the tropics. Their flag depicted a red sun, and they said that they would use the sun against the Swamp Kids by giving them severe sunburns. They promised to enslave and torture the Swamp Kids for the next 47,000 years. Every diplomatic meeting between the Swamp Kids and the Raspara seemed to consist of the Raspara representative threatening the Swamp Kids with mutilation followed by an apology and a request for more Swamp Kids to move north into the Raspara homelands.

The Raspara soon realized that they were correct about the vulnerabilities of the Swamp Kids. Even though the Swamp Kids had killed off nearly their entire population, they had such a higb birthrate that by 4177 they were already suffering overpopulation again. The Raspara, at this time hiding out in a nation called Tata, declared war on the Swamp Kids and invaded Anzan. They sent a very weak army into Anzan because they were intending to lose the war and therefore have the Swamp Kids settle much of Tata. Tata itself did not participate in the invasion, but was unable to stop the fake Raspara army because the Raspara were fighting badly on purpose.

The Raspara lost their battle, but managed to kidnap many Swamp Kids as they retreated. On top of this came the invading Swamp army, which faced off against the real Tata army and defeated it as well. They were able to do this even though they were already fighting a civil war against the Crystals in their own homeland because they had enough weapons to militarize nearly their entire adult male population. Thus many Swamp Kids now lived in Tata: some were kidnapped slaves, some were running the government. But the Raspara intended to soon make them all slaves. The non-Raspara Tataans believed that the Swamp Kids were party to the conspiracy, and had agreed to the plan because even though they knew the Raspara would put the Swamp Kids at the very bottom of their society, they didn't mind as long as there were also Swamp Kids at the top.

The Raspara were delighted when they realized that the Swamp Kids indeed were content to let the Raspara army hold on to their captured Swampy slaves as long as they obeyed the laws of the Swampies above them. The Raspara leaders declared that forever their home would be wherever the Swamp Kids had the reins of power, and that the Swamp Kids were even more eager to grant the wishes of their abusers than the Pabaps had been. But they knew that the Swamp Kids were much stronger than the Pabaps from whom they had descended, and that the Raspara would need to always have an army to ensure that they would not be eliminated along with all of the other enemies of the Kids.

The Raspara were well-educated about history, both their own and those of their enemies. They decided to build their colonies in the central heartlands of the Swampy territory, so that if an enemy invaded Anzan, the Swamp Kids would shield them in all directions from the worst of the conflict. This was easy for them to do, because for the most part, the Raspara were already living deep in the middle of Anzan because Anzan had expanded its way northward to meet them in the previous war.

The Raspara wanted the Swamp Kids to trust them. Although the Raspara leaders told their people that their destiny was to eventually betray the Swamp Kids, they wanted to remain military allies for as long as possible so that the Swamp Kids could keep dying in wars to help expand their empire. The Raspara also knew that in the event of a catastrophic war, they would be stigmatized if they did not fight just as hard as the Swamp Kids and for the same goals. Thus, the Raspara entirely abandoned their foreign policy and much of their politics, since the best interests of the Swamp Kids were the best interests of the Raspara, and most diplomats from outside nations preferred to meet with the Swamp Kids rather than the abusers of the Swamp Kids.

They hoped their empty political agenda would actually help them gain allies, as they were becoming more and more like Swamp Kids that merely had extra privileges in their society. Both groups offered to accept converts from the other side; very few Raspara people ever became Swamp Kids; quite a significant number of Swamp Kids became Raspara. However, the newly converted Raspara people did not automatically get slaves when they converted; they needed to buy slaves from the other Raspara.

Plans for war

Still, they hoped that they could make an alliance with the Swamp Kids in order to let the Swamp Kids fight most of their wars. Both groups wanted to reach and conquer Baeba Swamp. The Swamp Kids wanted to make Baeba an entirely Swampy city, with no power for any other groups. The Raspara wanted to let the Swamp Kids struggle and bleed as they marched through the tropics, fighting and defeating many enemy armies along the way, and then once the Swamp Kids had Baeba under their control the Raspara would move in and sit on top of them. They believed that they could do this because they were more intelligent than the Swamp Kids and had throughout their short history made quick work of many peoples that they had settled among.

The Raspara marched under a flag depicting a red sun. They said that this was the way they preferred to live; once they had Baeba Swamp, the Swamp Kids would work on plantations and suffer severe sunburns, while the Raspara would sit in the shade drinking cold water that had been laboriously carried to them from the mountains of Dreamland. Key to the Raspara's internal propaganda was the identification of the Swamp Kids as Pabaps; though Paba was long gone, everyone still knew of Paba as a pacifist empire that had fallen into the hands of abusers because the Pabap people simply could not bring themselves to fight back against the abusers. They saw the Swamp Kids as essentially militarized Pabaps, and claimed that they could be pushed back into pacifism again. The Swamp Kids, however, said that they had drawn in people from all nations, and that although they identified themselves as Andanese, and the Andanese were a tribe of Pabaps, membership in the Swamp Kids was open to anybody. Moreover, they said, many Pabaps did not support the Swamp Kids.

The Raspara people were skilled at propaganda, aimed both at their own people and at the Swamp Kids. In Swamp-majority cities, the Raspara proudly boasted of their success at achieving ever greater levels of abuse of their slaves, and Raspara slave owners held contests with each other to see who could abuse their slaves the most. They painted vast murals on the city walls showing Raspara people abusing helpless Swampy slaves, and then presented the pictures to the Swamp Kids as the city's greatest work of art. They actually enjoyed watching the Swamp Kids wipe away the drawings more than they enjoyed the drawings themselves.

Sometimes, Swampy slaves were brought into the city center where Raspara people could slap them and urinate on them all day long in public for no reason at all. All of this was intended to show how the Swamp leaders did not care at all what happened to the vast Swampy underclass. The Swamp Kids promised the Raspara that their rights would be respected, and refused to send police to arrest even the most hideous of the abusers, or to rescue the slaves they were controlling. The Raspara discovered they enjoyed the taste of human meat, and opened restaurants in Swampy cities serving the meat of Swampy slaves that had been abused a bit too harshly one day. The Raspara hoped that the more they enraged the helpless Swamp Kids, the more the Swamp Kids would try to defeat the anger by becoming abusers themselves.

The Swampy government's reaction to this was to open up slavery to their own people as well by creating a new class in their society that was below even the least of the Swamp Kids. Swamp Kids were encouraged to start eating people, and claimed that a pregnant woman would be the most sought-after dish of all. They imported a new underclass of people, mostly from defeated nations such as Thaoa, that would be slaves for everyone else. These slaves were also given to the new Raspara people, however. But the government still refused to take any action against the Raspara.

Matrix-Swampy relations

Meanwhile, some Raspara, emboldened by the total lack of any violent reaction from the Swamp Kids, decided that the time was ripe for them to attempt to conquer the Swamp Kids and enslave even the leaders. These people were a minority within the Raspara, as the majority preferred to sit back and let the Swamp Kids' empire grow furiously to the west in its quest to conquer Baeba Swamp. In 4177, the Raspara who favored war announced the creation of a new political party, the Matrixes. Their name referred to their "complex" philosophy, which required thinking in two dimensions instead of one. THey claimed an alliance with what was left of Nama, and that Nama had submitted completely to them. They launched a sixth civil war now, planning to subjugate the Swamp Kids under a new Matrix government with no power for Rasparas. Thus, the Rasparas refused to participate in the war.

The orthodox Raspara questioned the sanity of the Matrixes, who had apparently just resolved to fight a war against the Swamp Kids using soldiers from Nama, which was an ally of the Swamp Kids. The Matrixes responded that they would do some fighting of their own, too, but preferred to have the Namans take most of the hits in their war. They claimed that their alliance with Nama was partly a means to increase their population, since they were outnumbered by the Swamp Kids, and that once they had won their war they would enslave Nama.

The Matrixes announced the creation of three slave armies under their command: the Crystals, the Swamp Kids, and the Bubbles. That is, any slaves the Matrixes managed to capture as they spread out would be forcibly adopted into one of those three categories, even if the mainline parties would not accept them. Some Matrixes would occasionally marry into the slave pools, figuring the slaves would be less likely to revolt if their own relatives were their targets.

The Matrixes traditionally hated the Swamp Kids much more than they hated the Crystals, but the Swamp Kids were stronger, so they managed to establish a strong organization with a powerful military early in the Matrix War. (By contrast, the Crystals and the Bubbles had virtually no army.) The Swamp Kids in fact agreed with only some, not all, of the Loporoman laws. Like the Matrixes, the Zeniths, and the Crystals, the Swamp Kids did not believe in judicial organizations. However, in their case, it was often assumed that they held this belief because they wished the right to commit crimes without having to answer to an authority, rather than because of the traditional "forgiveness" policy upheld by the other two groups. The Swamp was composed of many different groups of people, as its campaign appeal was much broader than the Crystals'. The Swamp detested the Crystals greatly.

There were a lot of armies in this war ... Matrixes (3EE), Rasparas (PEG), Crystals (CRY), Swamp Kids (EE3), Zeniths (XLG), Bubbles (BUB), Dreamers (DRM), plus all the people in all the other nations in the world. The whole world was involved in this war.

The Matrixes were mostly former Rasparas who wanted to ensure a bright future for their party, even at the expense of polluting their ideology with ideas nearly opposite from their own; the Crystals were people who had admired the earlier Crystals and accepted their invitation to join, and were composed mostly of disempowered, formerly Cold people and others who had allied with the Raspara during the Loporoman government but gotten little power in return; the Bubbles were also followers of the Kakaka (Pupup 4) Crystals, but of a different caliber; these people tended to be poorer and more apt to be seized by zealous fundamentalism than the Crystals.

Zenith-Swampy relations

The Zeniths were friendly to the idea of an army sitting in the middle of Anzan abusing the Swamp Kids while benefiting from the Swamp Kids' military successes. Many Zeniths living in Anzan considered converting to the Raspara party in the hopes of becoming slaveowners themselves. They developed their own weapons factories, which the Swamp Kids were afraid to attack. This led many Raspara people, in turn, to envy the Zenith and convert to Zenithism even though they realized the Zeniths did not generally offer weapons to converts. Even some Swamp Kids converted to the Zenith, and they were generally treated better than the Raspara because the Zeniths saw them as more innocent. These Swamp Kids supported slavery even though they were not allowed to participate in it themselves because Rasparism did not allow even the converts from the Swamp Kids to become slaveowners. However the Zeniths (but not the Raspara) were warming to the idea of allowing Swamp Kids to become slaveowners, figuring that it would lead to a massive wave of conversion to the Zenith party.

Soon, the Zeniths and those whom they had attracted began to feel superior to both the Rasparas and the Matrixes, and began to consider calling for the killing of all Matrixes and Rasparas. The Matrixes objected, and began to prepare for war against the Zenith. The Zenith had become a full ally of the Swamp Kids now, even though the vast majority of Swampies had refused to convert to Zenithism, which meant that everyone in the country except some of the Rasparas had turned against the Matrix. The Rasparas had been nearly destroyed by internal debates, but individual Rasparas found safety in various ways.

Further civil wars

In 4178, the Raspara army declared war on the Swamp Kids, joining the Matrix invasion but fighting for themselves and not promising to help the Matrix. This was only one year after the fake war they had fought in order to attract the Swamp Kids into their homeland, but this time they were fighting for real. Nama also now invaded, hoping to grab back some of the territory it had lost over the years. The Zenith switched sides and also declared war on the Swamp Kids. Meanwhile, the Swamp Kids were still at war with the Crystals. Thus, Anzan was fighting four simultaneous civil wars (Raspara, Crystal, Matrix, Zenith) and one foreign war against Nama. However, as the war was drawing in participants from all of Anzan's neighbors, the enemies of those neighbors also joined in, and thus the Swamp Kids at least had the help of some soldiers from Laba.

Some Swamp Kids began to spread northwards onto the icecap, which they called Xema (also Xama). They soon lost contact with Xama, however, and abandoned this project as well. Meanwhile, the small population of Xama developed a society of its own. Xama was independent, not allied to Anzan, Dreamland, the Matrixes, or any other army on the planet. Their only alliance was to each other. The Zeniths established agreements with some of the people in Xama, but they were not able to make a true alliance because Xama didn't believe in alliances with foreign powers. Some Zeniths went to Xama, where they began to work planning out a war against the Swamp Kids. Some Zeniths didn't even realize this was happening, and continued to support the Swamp Kids. Some Zeniths joined the Swamp Kids in their worship of Hahaa, the spirit of anger. They practiced a religion that combined extreme asceticism with extreme hatred of all who did not meet their almost impossible ethical standards. Being ascetic made their hatred much more powerful because they were clear-minded and would not be distracted by worldly pleasures, and also because they would be less vulnerable to pain. Pain satisfied these people and made them believe that their lives were justified.