Bleak Cabal
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The Bleak Cabal are one of the factions, organizations based around a particular ideology or philosophy, headquartered in Sigil in the Planescape campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Its members are known as Bleakers, the Cabal or Madmen.
The Bleaker credo is "The multiverse doesn't make sense, and it ain't supposed to."
The faction's main philosophical position is that existence is just it seems to be. Therefore, there is no use and no sense in looking for hidden principles of existence in the multiverse.
For someone to join the Bleak Cabal, he or she (or it) must do three things: cease looking for meanings, accept what occurs, and look inward. There is no meaning in the external world, so the Bleaker's quest becomes a search for internal meaning.
The faction is headquartered in the Gatehouse, the asylum on the edge of Sigil's Hive district. Their primary plane of influence is Pandemonium.
Most faction members are believed insane for their views, which may be either the cause or the result of their immunity to magical spells causing madness or insanity. The price of this may be that Bleakers often suffer periods of deep melancholia. While Bleakers reflect in this fashion on the meaninglessness of their own existences, they typically refrain from any kind of action unless philosophically convinced by another that it's worth the effort.
Surprisingly, the Bleak Cabal runs the soup kitchens that feed the poor of Sigil, as well as taking care of the genuinely insane in the Gatehouse. This seems paradoxical, however many Bleakers believe that if there is no reason for anything, there is certainly no reason for suffering.
[edit] Philosophy
The Bleak Cabal believes there is no greater meaning to life or the universe, similar to the philosophy of Nihilism. The Cabal embraces the inherent paradoxes in the philosophy as further repudiation of their belief: if the universe is entirely meaningless, then even the idea of meaninglessness must be meaningless. Contemplation of this meaninglessness is said to cause the famous insanity and melancholia among the members, ultimately leading to the "Grim Retreat," a depression from which the leaders do not return (see The Factol's Manifesto).
The faction's assistance of the insane and the destitute can further be seen as an extension of their nihilism. The reason most do nothing for these social outcasts is a feeling of hopelessness in the face of such vast and incomprehensible suffering, paralyzing poverty and deep, dangerous insanity. The Cabal sees all of existence through this lens of hopelessness and futility, and so the plight of the poor and insane may seem, to them, to be the plight of all who live. Thus, they feel no less futile operating a soup kitchen or an asylum for the insane than they do not doing such things. At the least, a Bleaker may argue, the gift makes the eternal pointlessness of existence a little bit more bearable for some small segment of people, and helps to mitigate the casual cruelty of an uncaring, random, ultimately capricious existence.
This nihilism has a strong vein of existentialism running through it, holding that meaning is created by individuals, rather than imposed by a universe. The Bleak Cabal appears to reject notions of rationality (as put forth by Kierkegaard) and any notion of there being meaning in freedom (as asserted by Sartre). The only rational reaction against an absurd existence, according to the Bleak Cabal, is the abandonment of reason, rationality, and hope, resulting in their characteristic dark, depressing madness.
[edit] External links
- Brief description (150 words) on Planescape Torment's official site
