>>96403648
Eh, I see the foundation of the setting to be social decay.

At first people were forced to compromise their ideals for the good of future humanity. But ten thousand years of such compromises spread across a million worlds means by the time we get to 40k people have completely forgotten why they even do things half the time.

Like a room on Terra filled wall to wall with calls for assistance no ones ever going to read because the office that used to process them was moved who knows where during the age of apostasy but no one knows how inform the wider bureaucracy of the problem so you have generations of clerks shovelling urgent aid requests into a furnace to stay warm while billions die preventable deaths.

Grim shit like that is why I got into the setting.