I don't know...
Death is death. Your loved one is gone forever. It doesn't matter if they were slaughtered in a bloody mess or stepped into a "virtual elevator" and never returned. It's still a horror.
In our culture, yes. But different cultures raise their children with different sets of priorities. There are cultures that teach that an honorable death is something to be welcomed yet a dishonorable death is to be avoided at all costs. And different cultures can define those very differently. For instance, European cultures have often taught that dying or killing in battle is honorable, but that dying as a tortured prisoner or inflicting death and torture on a helpless captive is shameful; but many Native American cultures believed the exact opposite, that there was no honor in taking or losing life in open combat and that the honorable path (both for the killer and the victim) was to take prisoners and ritually torture them to death. So when the English settled in Algonquian territory and began getting into conflicts with the locals, the two sides found each other's approach to warfare and killing to be monstrously dishonorable and uncivilized.
If even humans can differ so profoundly in their values, we can never assume that our own personal beliefs about life and death would be universal.
In the Eminian case, the "honorable" kind of death, the one to be welcomed without fear, was a
useful death -- one that served the greater good of Eminian society by preserving peace and order and ritual norms. But a death from unplanned violence, one that wasn't properly catalogued and carried out in a way that would preserve the Eminian obligation to Vendikarr, was a wasted death and therefore not the kind to be met stoically and willingly.
Think about it... these people are intelligent. They have a modern civilization. Heck, they even have a clean and distinctive fashion sense. Certainly the idea of just walking into a chamber to your death clashes with such a civilization.
Does it? Plenty of "modern" civilizations condition their citizens to be willing to march into certain death on the battlefield, or to work themselves to death in service to the state. Heck, more Americans die every year in traffic than died in the entire decade-plus of the Vietnam War, and yet we Americans step into our cars just as blithely and casually as the Eminians stepped into disintegrator booths. "Modern" civilizations are just as capable of lemming-like behavior as any other civilizations.
Otherwise, life would be meaningless... you wouldn't even bother to shower and shave, if you knew that the "death lottery" could easily take you away at any moment.
Same answer. Anyone could get killed in traffic or catch a fatal disease or choke on a chicken bone or otherwise kick the bucket unexpectedly, yet that doesn't keep us from going about our lives. And people who grow up in war zones, with even higher probabilities of death, do exactly the same: they go on with their lives. In college I knew a young woman who'd been a child in Vietnam during the war. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like to grow up surrounded by such horror and danger. But to her at the time, it was just an everyday thing and it didn't bother her much. People can adapt to anything, especially if it's all they've ever known.
The Eminians had been living like this for 500 years. None of them would have any experience with any other kind of life. So they wouldn't be living in despair or terror. It would just be normal, everyday life to them. They'd take the risk in stride the same way we take the risks of traffic accidents or choking on our food in stride.
If these people were so detached from life, why would Anon even care if the treaty was violated?
Because they weren't detached from life. They simply had a society that, like most Asian societies on Earth, valued the peace and order of the whole society over the well-being of the individual. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Most Eminians lived in comfort and security, and the cost for that was that a very small percentage of them had to give up their lives. Statistically speaking, the odds that any given Eminian would be declared a war casualty were acceptably low -- a few hundred here or a few thousand there ensured that the rest of the billions of inhabitants would be safe and comfortable.
But if the treaty were broken and genuine, unregulated nuclear war broke out, then the death tolls would skyrocket -- millions or billions would die, and the survivors would suffer from radiation poisoning, famine, crippling injuries, etc. Everyone, not just a chosen few, would suffer, and the social order as a whole would collapse.
