> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://model-philosophy.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Death Guard: When the Alarm Stops Meaning Anything
- URL: https://model-philosophy.com/death-guard-when-the-alarm-stops-meaning-anything/
- Published: 2026-09-30T15:00:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T15:00:12.000Z
- Description: We investigate a threshold in the human relationship with catastrophe: what is the point at which repeated warning ceases to interrupt life.
- Author: James Rickard
- Tags: theme:calm-after-horror, game:warhammer-40k, faction:death-guard, faction:chaos, game:buried-under-plastic, game:buried-under-plastic-2026, philosopher:walter-benjamin, philosopher:gunther-anders

## I. When the Alarm Stops Meaning Anything

I can remember when getting an email on a phone felt clever.

It was early in the 2000s when someone gifted me my first phone that connected to my email. In hindsight, I had the freedom because work was never busy enough to keep me connected 24 hours a day. Now, email rolls into my phone at an alarming rate, constantly seeking connection, feedback, information, or my support to solve a problem. Somewhere in the last quarter of a century, that little “mail bleep” became something with urgency.

Nobody really decided that; we just got used to it.

We see this in other facets too. Airport security changed after September 2001, we had some forms of security, but now we have generations of travellers who have never known that belts could stay on or liquids could go into bags. We have used examples of the clock changing how societies work or the printing press changing how we remembered things.

Change is not always bad. Change is mostly good. But change has a strange habit of fading from *abrasive* to *everyday* far quicker than we would expect it to. Something shows up and interrupts us. Sure, we complain about it, but over time that change becomes normal.

When Facebook makes a user interface change half the world cries out in anguish as buttons get moved, and learned clicks turn into habit-based errors. Two weeks later, there are a few grumbles. And two weeks after that, everyone has moved on.

In everyday life, people rebuild after fires, learn the new road after the bridge closes, work out where to put the hospital appointments. Life has always required a certain ability to absorb what has happened and keep moving.

This human ability to adapt to change works for us when the change is good, but also when we are adapting to something bad.

For the Combat Patrol challenge this quarter I have been painting the Tallyman of the Death Guard. He carries books and scrolls across his armour and spends his existence counting things that most of us would probably prefer not to count. Wounds. Shells. Bodies. He is not blind to any of it.

It doesn’t matter what we have to adjust to, it can be good or bad. Something has simply happened often enough that it has started to become a normal part of who we are, and what we do.

## II. The Man Who Keeps the Count

The Tallyman[\[1\]](#fn1) is an odd figure to find in an army. The Death Guard[\[2\]](#fn2) have warriors carrying plague knives and rusting bolters, surgeons who treat disease as craft, sorcerers dragging the Warp behind them, and enormous engines built to move through battlefields. Then, somewhere among them, is a man with a book.

His work is counting.

The Tallymen are part priest, part quartermaster, part keeper of records. They preach Nurgle’s Sevenfold Path, but their devotion is expressed through numbers as much as prayer. Ammunition spent. Wounds inflicted. Enemies killed. Flies gathering around the dead. Seven appears again and again, then multiples of seven, patterns inside patterns, until the battlefield itself begins to look like something that can be written down. Mortarion trusts the order with more than battlefield arithmetic. Tallymen also hold numerical codes to some of the Legion’s hidden stores of disease and biological weapons, which gives their bookkeeping a practical authority inside the Death Guard as well as a religious one.

Chris Wraight gives us a look at this through Philemon in *The Lords of Silence [\[3\]](#fn3)*. Philemon is a Tallyman serving Vorx and the Lords of Silence, and he is not portrayed as some vacant zealot wandering through the background. He is thoughtful, calculating and useful. He advises Vorx. He watches the people around him. During the attack on Sabatine, he is alert enough to warn of possible betrayal from their Word Bearer allies. His outlook is described as mathematical and fatalistic, but that fatalism has not made him careless. If anything, he appears to notice more than most.

By the time we meet Philemon, disease has become weaponry, corruption has become culture, and the things that would be catastrophe somewhere else have acquired jobs, ranks, rituals and storage codes. None of this appears temporary. Nobody is waiting for the Legion to recover.

Although Philemon is surrounded by the horror, he is not pushed away from it. The Death Guard have become accustomed to the poisons, the mutations, and the casual violence. Philemon has learned to operate inside of the changes that have occurred since the legion fell to Nurgle.

And, in the same way, we adapt to the things around us. Usually that adaptability is useful. Sometimes it is probably the only reason we are able to survive.

## III. The Emergency That Becomes the World

Walter Benjamin was writing On the Concept of History[\[4\]](#fn4) in 1940\. Europe was already at war. Fascism had spread across the continent. Benjamin was Jewish, displaced, and trying to escape the Third Reich. He would die later that year while attempting to cross the border from France into Spain.

What he distrusted was the way we find comfort in history after it has passed. We arrange events into periods, attach names to them, and draw lines between one thing and the next. There was a crisis. There was a war. There was a depression. Something began and, eventually, something ended. That language defines the edges of catastrophe.

Benjamin was less certain.

“*The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this.*”

His writing was about oppression and fascism. He was asking what the word *'emergency'* looked like from the inside, while the emergency unfolded daily around him.

“*Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.*”[\[5\]](#fn5)

In Part nine, Benjamin imagines the angel looking backwards across history, even as it is pushed helplessly into the future. Where we might see events following one another, the angel sees a single catastrophic event piling up below him. And now a storm is pushing the Angel into the future, with catastrophe removing his control.

History normally pushes us toward progress. We expect the world to become something better than it was. Benjamin did not hold so much confidence that we always improve as we move into the future. If we are sure that humans always improve as we move forward in time, then we never quite see catastrophe for what it is when it appears.

“*The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical.*”

How can we say we are moving forward when there are still things that exist in the 20th century that should have stoppedan age ago? Why haven’t we learnt from our past wars? SHouldn’t we be learning from the past? Benjamin was astonished that this kind of barbarism exists, when we should assume that history should have moved beyond this type of human thinking.

Günther Anders was dwelling on Hiroshima, and it became a central event of his later thinking. Anders looked at the atomic bomb and saw something troubling: human beings had created something that had consequences greater than our ability to picture them.

He came to describe this as the Promethean gap[\[6\]](#fn6).

“*Your first thought upon awakening be: “Atom.” For you should not begin your day with the illusion that what surrounds you is a stable world.*” [\[7\]](#fn7)

It is possible for you to wake in a world where nuclear destruction was a probable event, along with getting breakfast or going to work.

Anders does not think that having all the facts allowed us to understand the devastation of such an event. We may know how the weapon functioned. We could estimate casualties, and explain what fallout is. But none of that meant that we had imagined the event.

“*None of us has a knowledge commensurate with what an atomic war could be.*” [\[8\]](#fn8)

Ten people. A thousand people. A million people. A number in an estimate, but difficult to picture when imagining the human toll of such an event.

Anders was worried that our ability to act was easier to trigger than our ability to understand the consequences of those actions. We may follow a procedure, press a button, or perform a small role as part of a larger operation, while the consequence of those actions are at a scale far beyond that which we can comprehend.

## IV. The Count Continues

What happens when something urgent stays long enough to become normal?

An emergency is supposed to have an ending. A brief focus on the event: something is announced, governments announce measures, people argue about what should be done. There are protests, statements and promises. For a short period the interruption occupies the news cycle.

Then it stays.

What was urgent falls from the front page of the news, consumed by the next round of headlines. But the initial emergency has not stopped. Sometimes the emergency continues long enough to acquire furniture.

Benjamin was writing about something far more serious than the churn of contemporary politics. His “emergency situation” belonged to a history of fascism and oppression. But what he noticed still plays out to this day. Something that is sudden, or urgent, can stay around long enough that we treat it as normal.

*The extraordinary can remain extraordinary in fact while becoming ordinary in practice.*

Like Philemon walking through the death, the pestilence and chaos is not concerned by the way his brothers have changed. He is focused on his job. He is capable of warning Vorx about danger. He can read intention in other people. He can recognise betrayal before it arrives.

Anders worried about something adjacent to this when he wrote about our inability to imagine consequences at the scale we can now produce them. A thousand people can become a number. A million can become another number. The digits still mean something, but they begin to fit too easily inside the same small space.

There is nothing inherently cruel about counting. We count because sometimes it is the only way to understand what is happening. Numbers expose things that would otherwise be hidden. They give scale to suffering. They stop memory from becoming convenient.

A number can be terrible the first time we hear it, then familiar the second, then simply the number we compare the next number against.

## V. What We Learn to Live With

I started this with email arriving on a phone. That feels very small after Benjamin, Hiroshima and a Death Guard Tallyman, but I think that is partly the point.

Most of the things we become accustomed to do not announce themselves like a detonating bomb. They arrive as conveniences, interruptions, emergencies, and temporary arrangements. We try a new app on the phone. We change a routine. We learn the new button.

We accept change and try to keep life moving. People rebuild houses. They return to work. They learn to live with grief. They make dinner while somebody they love is in hospital. We absorb things because life keeps asking us to be somewhere tomorrow morning.

And while that is good for small changes we invite, or large changes that we would rather avoid, there is also an ability for us to learn how to live after something terrible can also learn how to live while the terrible thing is still happening.

Maybe there is no distinction between those skills? Maybe that is what Philemon shows about moving on? He still notices things while the world around him is in chaos.

---

1. Original Link: [Tallyman](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tallyman?ref=model-philosophy.com "Tallyman")  
Snapshot: [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20260930053404/https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tallyman "Tallyman") [↩︎](#fnref1)
2. Original Link: [Wiki Death Guard](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Death%5FGuard?ref=model-philosophy.com "Wiki Death Guard")  
Snapshot: [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20260930054344/https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Death%5FGuard "Wiki Death Guard") [↩︎](#fnref2)
3. Wraight, Chris. The Lords of Silence. United Kingdom: Games Workshop, 2019\. [↩︎](#fnref3)
4. Benjamin, Walter. On the Concept of History. N.p.: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016\. [↩︎](#fnref4)
5. Original Link: [On the Concept of History](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm?ref=model-philosophy.com "On the Concept of History")  
Snapshot: [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20260930054548/https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm "On the Concept of History") [↩︎](#fnref5)
6. Original Link: [Promethean Gap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promethean%5Fgap?ref=model-philosophy.com "Promethean Gap")  
Snapshot: [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20260930054845/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promethean%5Fgap "Promethean Gap") [↩︎](#fnref6)
7. Original Link: [Commandments in The Atomic Age](https://www.scribd.com/document/236611706/ANDERS-1957-Commandments-in-the-Atomic-Age?ref=model-philosophy.com "Commandments in The Atomic Age")  
Snapshot: [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20260930055037/https://www.scribd.com/document/236611706/ANDERS-1957-Commandments-in-the-Atomic-Age "Commandments in The Atomic Age") [↩︎](#fnref7)
8. Original Link: [Philosopher of the Apocalypse](https://aeon.co/essays/gunther-anders-a-forgotten-prophet-for-the-21st-century?ref=model-philosophy.com "Philosopher of the Apocalypse")  
Snapshot: [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20260930055148/https://aeon.co/essays/gunther-anders-a-forgotten-prophet-for-the-21st-century "Philosopher of the Apocalypse") [↩︎](#fnref8)