Trope-a-Day: Knight Templar
Knight Templar: To a lot of people in the galaxy, the Empire, based on their unapologetic status as a libertist-technepraxic ideological state, willingness to tell the rest of the universe that they’re all doing it wrong and other forms of earnest ideological propagation, and utter devotion to, oh, I Die Free, No One Gets Left Behind, Disproportionate Retribution, (apparently) Black and White Morality, and similar tropes.
More thorough people point out that they do appear to be rather self-aware (especially given that they subvert that “do away with that pesky ‘free will'” issue by mostly fighting for freedom of choice, or else) about the patent contradictions involved in waging war on everyone for freedom and in exterminating people who might yet choose to be better, and thus do neither of those things. And indeed hunt down those Renegades who’ve seen the outer galaxy and decided, well, it’ll have to go, and such Well-Intentioned Extremists as the Blood of Tyrants. (See also Utopia Justifies the Means.)
And thus, while they may take a fairly absolutist view of the world, refrain from being idiots about applying it.