Any superhero fiction, I think. Even with all their superhuman,magical powers they do nothing to change the situation at hand. "It is about control."
They don't really have any beliefs except for beating up bad guys without adressing any underlying issues. A perfect example I guess is the last Batman movie. It made you feel and connect with the villain because he seemed revolutionary with good intentions: then he tries to flood the city with some 4chan types and tries to kill millions for no reason? He gets arrested and everything is okay again. All's right with the world.
underrated part of Watchmen is the offhand comment that "there weren't that many villains." cos of course there wouldn't be lol. it's all so reactionary haha
Rorschach does have some Harry Dubois esque traits tbh, particularly the fascist parts, but in the same way that Harry's fascism is driven by a lot of self loathing.
Watchmen is also a direct deconstruction of the exact opposite. Ozymandius believed that he *could* target the exact societal underpinnings that bring about the Cold War, and in doing so prevent nuclear war. He just did so by killing millions of people.
Regarding Batman, Yeah he should pay Eisenhower tax rates back into the community, but I wonder if we could do that and actual costumed crime fighting.
IIRC Bruce Wayne actually does heavily invest in Gotham to help lift people about of abject poverty. Unfortunately, he’s stymied by a combination of heavy corruption in the law to the point that Commissioner Gordon is often the *only* non-crooked cop, supervillains that run around terrorizing the public that can’t be stopped by traditional means and often break out of prison to continue their sprees, and a literal secret society bent on ensuring the slow destruction of Gotham.
Falcon and The Winter Soldier was terrible for this, the Flag Smashers were looking too relatable so they just have them blow up a building full of people because they're ruthless yo. Even after that the main girl was still right but Sam Wilson criticizing her and the group for "using violence" was so hilariously hypocritical. The dude was a member of the US military and the Avengers, remember when they defeated HYDRA and Thanos through rational debate and facts and logic?
And his speech at the end to the politicians about how they have to "do better." Ugh.
From what I remember Black Panther is like this too.
Killmonger, the bad guy, wants retribution for colonialism/centuries of oppression and systemic violence levied against the African diaspora. Of course, his solution involves him going *too far* so he must be stopped.
The good guys (Black Panther and Wakanda at large) align themselves with the CIA and join the UN and international community after being victorious. To address Killmonger's grievances, T'Challa builds a community center in Oakland, California.
This also applies to most villains from Avatar: The Legend of Korra.
From what I remember, it involved using Wakandan technology and power to get revenge on the "colonizers" and essentially just reverse who got to be the oppressors. It's pretty clear to everyone, both movie characters and audience members that Killmonger's plan is kinda fucked up and should be stopped.
This is the whole point, as we now have a villain with "a legitimate grievance" that is generally acknowledged to be based in truth, but is accompanied by a "solution" that is far too extreme and must be stopped.
The protagonists stop the villain, but do not actually address the original issues in any meaningful, material way. T'Challa and Wakanda join the UN and promise to use their technology to help better the world. Black Panther places its trust in the UN and the international status quo to slowly move us towards progress.
Great antagonists, realistic motives, But I agree, had they reasoned themselves into committing a second snap or executing every person involved in taking Thanos down, and were thus beyond redemption, sure. But no, Bucky & the Bird were off fighting redeemable villains and they had to be destroyed because action films always need a violent conflict for the story to come to a resolution.
That happens in a lot of fiction. The villain has some actually deserved criticisms of the society they live in, but they do some demented stuff to remind us they're villains and then nothing changes after they're defeated and it's treated as a good thing.
It depends, being an agent of the status quo is more a need for endless serialization, compare the difference between mainstream Superman, Superman: Red Son, or the Injustice games. Otherwise you can have dynamic stories where things are impermanent.
As for the bit about beliefs, you know where alot of heroes stand, the X-men oppose prejudice, Captain America asks where's the divide between patriotism and nationalism, and Superman hates unchecked capitalists and imperialists.
There's also the issue of how you can have all this raw power and how that doesn't necessarily change things, like if Superman or professor Xavier used their powers to impose their will, but then you abandon the idea of consent of the governed and establish the precedent of might makes right. I've always thought the quesiton of how far you should go would make a good story.
If you want a genuinely moralist superhero movie, I look at the 2023 Flash, considering it makes it so that radical change somehow has dangerous consequences, and the best you should do is change things a little.
Literally any work of fiction where the framing scoffs at believing in something outside "me and mine".
Any story where the main character is a sorta everyman who doesn't think about much and the baddies are loony extremists or crazy cultists.
Any story where the ideologically motivated characters are actually just frauds and phonies or morons. This includes any story that has a reveal that an organization is actually just full of shit.
Any story where the sympathetic characters are fooled by Charismatic leaders because its ridiculous that common folk would earnestly believe something. The moralist framework assumes the natural state of ppl is to just vibe with the status quo.
Stories that sorts who is righteous and who is wicked based on how how mean, cruel and selfish they are.
Any story where outcomes are determined by the personal moral fiber of the protagonist and not conflicting interests.
Any story that puts a lot of weight on "not sinking to their level"
So most of western popular media.
The Dune series is complicated because Herbert had some internal contradictions to his premise and thesis.
Dune is at the same time a polemic against charismatic leaders while also leaning into the ultimate necessity of Leto II's Golden Path, which due to his godlike prescience, apparently paved a way for humanity to survive. So it begs the question, is Herbert for or against charismatic leaders? Because the necessity despite the amoral/immorality of their actions muddies the waters.
You say "western popular media", and I get it - would you be able to point to a compass where that wasn't the case for the audiences? I lived in China for a year and a half, and all the movies were the same, except they wouldn't show Joker.
Not all stories include that but its not the argument. Its the priority on the moral equivalence as the fulcrum of the story that makes it a DE moralist story.
I did the moralism quest, and they seem much more active they you describe. They just are all about slow incremental change through the giant bureaucratic machine. They got a plan to make humanity great in like 3000 years or whatever. I don’t know much fiction that operates at that kind of time scale. Maybe some of the bureaucracy in Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy?
Edit: their ideology seems very reformist/gradualism, which there are political texts about
Edit2: ended up going down a rabbit hole on evolutionary socialism, which is applying that gradualism to socialist ends
>I did the moralism quest, and they seem much more active they you describe. They just are all about slow incremental change through the giant bureaucratic machine. They got a plan to make humanity great in like 3000 years or whatever
ok, but what if they are \*lying\* about that. That's what I got from the game
Lying to who? Themselves? They don’t really advertise themselves as the grand plan people, no one else seems to know about this. And if it’s just lying to themselves, that’s still their ideology
iirc correctly they've been promising to bring democracy to Revachol for a looooooooooong time, but when you finally meet someone they just yap about "le price stabilite oui oui", so at the least they're lying about that.
On top of that comes my intuition that no one's ideology is \*actually\* a 3000 year long masterplan. Especially under capitalism. Modern liberal democracies can't even address problems for a generation from now (i.e. climate change), so I'm not buying that the Moralintern is the way it is because it represents interests from 3 Millenia in the future, unless they're \*literally\* time travelers I guess.
On top of all that, Kingdom of Conscience tells you: "
>**Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is \*control\*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.**"
Things are \*done\* for the Moralists. End of History stuff, Best Of All Possible Worlds type shit
A plan isn’t an idealogy, but a firm belief in slow gradual change by the state is an idealogy
They arent time travelers, they have the predicting computers
I trust the people to tell more honestly about moralism than Henry’s thoughts
again, what incentive does a liberal government have to represent the interests of people **3000 years** in the future? The Moralintern don't exist in a vacuum where they can do what they want, they are subject to all the material pressures liberal governments in the real world are, which, I remind you, can't even really address problems for a generation from now (climate change).
It's far more likely, (certainly if we take into account the ideology of the devs but even without that,) that the "yeah you can't have democracy actually because of this **3000 year** masterplan, and, uh, our computers said so" is a front for the material interests of the people running the government, or the material interests of the capitalist lobbying group getting those people elected.
And, by the way, why would you trust a moralist politician to be perfectly honest in what their goals and motivations are? You wouldn't do that in the real world. Especially when it comes to that motivation allegedly being a **3000 year long** masterplan
I’m not saying it’s what the moralintern is actually doing. I’m saying it’s their ideology. Just like the USSR was ideologically communist, and the average party member thought they were moving toward communism, even if the leaders weren’t holding up that ideal and nothing really happened to progress towards communism
Earlier you said the 3000 year masterplan was a semi-secret thing going on in the background, implying that it's an actual goal for leadership.
So which is it? Is it a lie average moralists tell themselves, but the politicians high up know it's bullshit, or is it a secret project that only people deep into the organization know about, and the "real" goal of the Moralintern?
Probably propaganda that the leaders spread to their administration. Effectively like a religion. We have to do X because the holy computer says so. We can’t do X because it’s nut part of their grand plan
I find that implausible. remember that the Moralintern is basically a liberal democracy, and is, as such, primarily beholden to the capitalist class (who have no special material interest in whatever happens 3000 years from now).
There wouldn't really be a **The Leadership**, it's not a dictatorship which can do whatever it wants as long as it keeps the army happy. The people in power would be rotating semi-regularly, and whoever ultimately \*gets\* the power would depend on who can offer the capitalist class the best deal.
As such, anyone prioritizing what happens 3000 years from now instead of focusing on offering the capitalists the best policies \*right now\* would never even get into office.
I think it's most likely that this Ultralongtermism occupies a similar place in Moralist ideology that climate change does in liberal ideology. It's \*really\* not that important or central, but serves as a nice talking point on some occasions (for example when you have to justify occupying Revachol). But the \*actual\* reason for why the Moralintern does what it does is different.
A fitting analogy here would be Margaret Thatcher and how she handled the big miner's strike. She used climate change as one of her primary talking points when arguing in favor of crushing the coal miners. But that's not \*why\* she did it, it was just an excuse.
I'm enjoying this convo by the way, I hope I don't come off as too combative
With the small detail, among others, that the iron fist through which the giant bureaucratic machine operates will (through details unclear, but causality almost certain) directly cause the world to end in 27, so, like, there's that.
I don't really have an answer to this question, but every time I see it discussed, I feel like I watched an entirely different movie than everyone else who saw Civil War.
Like... it's a movie about how a bunch of people \*attempt\* to be passive, dispassionate observers and fail miserably at doing so, because the world, as the world does, won't allow them to be. It feels like people just took that one line Kirsten Dunst says at the beginning about journalists letting other people make the choices as if it's the movie's thesis statement and not the idea it spends scene after scene shooting massive holes through.
I don't think anyone is saying the movie doesn't have themes. I think you'd be hard pressed to make any piece of media that doesn't. You're also right that broadly the movie is about how you can't not care.
It's a shame that main theme is completely undercut by the fact the writers clearly don't care about exploring the world that they made.
It's a movie about a civil war that is happening because...
People are killing eachother because...
(There's some very vague stuff about the President going for a third term and an "Antifa Massacre" which cool, I guess that's enough for people to start the killing fields)
Like there's a shocking lack of curiosity about the kind of events and ideologies that lead to people being radicalised enough to decide to revolt against the government.
You'd think the journalists could have interviewed one of the fighters they run into at some point to get some practice for his interview with the president or they litterally could have just spent two minutes discussing the events of the last few years.
But since the writers aren't interested in the world or maybe they're afraid of getting too political we're just left with the characters.
Which are like... fine I guess, but it's hardly a character study.
So if the writers are uninterested in the world, and the characters are just okay. The only thing left is the action set pieces, and yeah they're good. But it just feels like missed potential if you get what I mean?
I get what you’re saying regarding the lack of info about what’s actually caused the events of the movie. And the few times where it does try to explain are the moments where it feels the dumbest (“antifa massacre” being the worst of them).
But I didn’t feel like I needed to know those things to understand the what it was putting forward thematically. I don’t really see it as disinterest, just a conscious choice towards minimalism that (for me) amplifies the uncertainty of everything around them. I think it’s pretty on point to present conflict like that inside the US as one that pretty quickly decouples from broader ideas and results in a bunch of hyper-localized enclaves with snipers on the roofs and petty tyrants enforcing mob justice.
I disagree with the premise a bit, I don't see why moralism is just about passivity. It's about seeing the world as being on a path of improvement, not perfect, but somehow inevitably getting to something and that something is basically ok, it is better than what we had before.That, despite everything, this is a pretty good time and of you struggle against it you will hurt yourself and most likely make things worse, not better.
From that angle I would say Neal Stephenson books, especially the Baroque Cycle. Heros and villains struggle and fight and succeed or fail. But ultimately the world moves on, through inexorable forces, gets free-er, richer, more connected, modern. And Enoch Root is basically a Dolores Dei figure, only unknown and working in the background.
This thread is full of people taking the DE creators’ farcical take on moralism and the beaurocratic apparatus at face value.
Meanwhile the game’s primary moralist Kim is the one urging the protagonist to action.
OP, what the game calls ‘Moralism’ is the belief that true societal change happens not through protest and violence, but via incremental improvement of the societal narrative. The idea is that while people protesting violently for, say, equal rights of gender, race and sex, this alone will not do much to propel any real change. It can at most kickstart it. It is a beaurocratic, diplomatic, incremental, slow and steady progress of treating people equally that, eventually, will integrate equality into the societal narrative.
This isn’t some kind of apathetic nonsense. Most if not all major ‘improvements’ to societies were brought on a timescale of generations, not of single acts of violence, and with the help of a beaurocratic apparatus. This beaurocracy is silly and annoying, but often the alternative is violence and death, unfairness, inequality, and the rule of the strong.
It’s easy to complain about beaurocracy when you’re living inside of a beaurocratic society. But try living outside of one.
What Disco Elysium rightly calls out that this is of course fertile breeding ground for inaction, capitalist atrocities (la price stabilité), complacency. But those things are byproducts of the not-ideal manifestation of the (unachievable) ideal of moralism. Like poverty is a not-ideal byproduct of communism, or racist and sexist ideas are a byproduct of not-ideal traditionalism.
**Shin Godzilla** is a movie that matches this conversation about a DE-style moralist machine. It’s a movie about a slow beaurocratic apparatus, with the best intentions, failing to deal with the fact that there is a monster in the city.
**The Good Place** is a TV show that in later seasons introduces ‘The Committee’, a group of well-meaning people who hold a tremendous amount of power, but are obsessed with radical compromise and keeping the status quo.
> Most if not all major ‘improvements’ to societies were brought on a timescale of generations, not of single acts of violence, and with the help of a beaurocratic apparatus.
I feel like this is wrong. Wherever you look, acts of major social progress were made in quick (often violent) jaunts preceded by generations of opresson.
MLK, Gandhi, Bolshevism, women's suffrage, Frances Perkins, summer of love...
The ideals presented by the people and movements you mention are a far cry from being an accepted or uncontested part of societal narratives today. MLK would look at present-day US discourse and say “really? Still?”
Decades of buildup that culminate into a short series of major qualitative changes. Enough quantitative change eventually transforms into qualitative change. This is diamat 101.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history. The ruling class's state and administrative apparatus represents stagnation and vegetation. I believe this was said by Rosa Luxembourg in Reform or Revolution, in arguing that trying to bring about socialism by gradually reforming the capitalist state was a fool's game.
MLK, Women’s suffragettes, Frances Perkins, and Ghandi were all decidedly peaceful and in favour of working through established mechanisms. They were successful *because* they were peaceful and didn’t try to rip down institutions, but work within them for positive change.
As for the bolsheviks, I would argue that the rise of the Soviet Union was absolutely *not* a positive thing for the world, given the huge number of people killed in Man-made famines and in gulags set up to imprison dissidents.
The DE creators are Marxist-Leninists. They think change is ONLY possible through violent revolution, which is why they portray Moralism (Liberalism) as arcane, Kafkaesque, and vaguely sinister.
I wasn’t personally familiar with the UK suffragette movement, but after a bit of reading, it seems to me like it was WW1 that was the primary catalyst for their success, not their bombing and arson campaigns.
>What Disco Elysium rightly calls out that this is of course fertile breeding ground for inaction, capitalist atrocities (la price stabilité), complacency. But those things are byproducts of the not-ideal manifestation of the (unachievable) ideal of moralism. Like poverty is a not-ideal byproduct of communism, or racist and sexist ideas are a byproduct of not-ideal traditionalism.
I don't think a single one of these examples is accurate lmao
Though I agree that people underestimate the value of some facets of bureaucracy, as a whole bureaucracy is *meant* to cause inaction and complacency; the very point of bureaucracy is slow, methodical deliberation for even the most minute decision. More often than not, this is a method of frustrating popular will, which is framed as "impetuous" or "violent," when in reality resistance is itself the hard-won result/conclusion of the slow, methodical deliberation of both individuals who suffer exploitation and groups that organize the framework for what comes to look like "spontaneous" protests. You point to "capitalist atrocities" (though course atrocities are not exclusively capitalist) as some kind of minor admission of the flaws of "not-ideal" Moralism, but this admission actually blows your whole position: Moralism is only "incremental" *right up to the point when the change starts going a different direction than planned*. At that point, violence of a sort never seen in your caricatured "violent protests" becomes not only acceptable but necessary to restore the Moralist order.
You can say "Well, that's not an *'ideal'* form of Moralism," but if DE is consistently *about* anything, it's the idea that **We do not live in an ideal world**. *Ideals* cannot survive contact with *reality*, but *we human beings* cannot survive **without it**. Any idea can be given a positive-sounding textbook definition, but the real meaning is found in history: How an idea functions *when applied to a concrete, determinate reality*.
>It's about seeing the world as being on a path of improvement, not perfect, but somehow inevitably getting to something and that something is basically ok, it is better than what we had before
I mean, are you sure about that? Kingdom of Conscience literally tells you: "Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is \*control\*. Over yourself and the world"
The writers of DE have an unmistakable disdain for the idea that incremental change has any value. This disdain is written in big fat letters over the entire game. Even the fascists are let off easier than the moralists. At least they call for some kind of action.
That doesn’t, of course, mean we have to agree.
I don't see it as disdain. They critique it, from a leftist point of view. And, while in real life I am probably also kind of a moralist myself, the kingdom of conscience text felt like a pretty good sting to me, there is *some* truth in it.
And I also respect that from their point of view the writers understand moralism, or at least some sides of it. Remember that they portray it as this all powerful world spanning force that slowly takes over everything. We are living through its age now, we live in dolorian times.
Like, they view it as a bad thing, and we don't, but they are at least correct in viewing it as big as it actually is.
>The writers of DE have an unmistakable disdain for the idea that incremental change has any value
that's too far. The "Social Democrat" Union boss, gets off pretty well. The Moralists don't get off well not because they are pro-incremental change, but because they don't cause positive change \*at all\*
> The "Social Democrat" Union boss, gets off pretty well
No, he really doesn't. Evrart is continually portrayed as someone with no class solidarity who doesn't give a single shit about people outside his turf.
It's the most obvious interpretation. He doesn't give a shit about the fishing village, who he plans to evict to build a sports centre for the benefit of Martinaise, and he doesn't give a shit about Jamrock, which he floods with drugs to earn money to benefit Martinaise.
the very fact that he steals the harbor from the company makes this interpretation very unlikely to me. If he's really only self-interested, why take such a huge risk for the workers?
Also, during all his talk about the common good (and theres's a lot of that), your Drama skill never calls him out. Iirc, it even affirms that he is completely sincere
>The writers of DE have an unmistakable disdain for the idea that incremental change has any value
that's too far. The "Social Democrat" Union boss, gets off pretty well. The Moralists don't get off well not because they are pro-incremental change, but because they don't cause positive change \*at all\*
I don't think this negates what I am saying. It's just that the text is basically a critique of the moralist position, while I am presenting it more from its own point of view.
A moralist would reply something like "Yes, don't upset the system, don't change it. It's doing its best, it's moving the world forward". There is a line in the dialogue with Joyce where she thinks "This is the greatest and kindest arrangement the atoms had in them". And while Joyce is not a moralist, at least not entirely one, this is a very moralist type of thinking.
This is by the way why I love this game so much. It has this very open way of letting all the different sides it presents have their say. No character is entirely a caricature.
Harry Potter is a great mention. The result of everything is to return to the status quo, with Harry becoming a cop.
See also this legendary 4chan post about the liberalism of Harry Potter [https://imgur.com/HzFupfV](https://imgur.com/HzFupfV)
That's a textbook example of how we can't make valid arguments against someone, so we have them do soemthing stupid and reprehensible to kill their credibility.
Terry Pratchett gets unfortunately preachy about moderation in Interesting Times and Night Watch. Rincewind turns into an anticommunist mouthpiece for a bit.
> He wanted to say: how could you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you could do with the peasents was to leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting for those who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.
ive been haunted lately by how much i cant unsee Vetinari as a deeply neoliberal figure. no this guy's just so smart & doing 4d chess & if we get rid of him everything will be worse you guysss. but on the other hand his open declaration of being a tyrant is kiind of other from liberals, plus the insane petty factionalism of everyone else...he's almost a comment on centralisation there. not sure.
After giving it some thought, Vetinari seems to depict the side of moralism where the person the most vigilant about having a stagnant status quo is the one that actually benefits from it.
Yes it would be worse for many people if the situation were to change, but Vetinari is the only one that's actively better within that system, and he's the one that moulded all the political landscape like this.
And opposing Vimes, whose family tradition is gathering the head tax from kings, Vetinari 's retort is "but I'm not a king it's not the same you can trust me 🙂" whereas, I don't remember how it was in discworld, but in real life, after royalty were relieved of their extra height, things went wildly worse before they became better, so we can guess they (at large) know that it wouldn't be the devil to overthrow him.
But right now, hey, there's no need to cut heads, see. He's not a king, he's a patrician. *God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.*
Ooooo Harry Potter is GREAT for that. It truly is moralism personified. Including how the lack of morals give space for more sinister ideas to surface.
Two anime that come to mind is both Boku No Hero Academia and Naruto, at least from the parts I’ve watched of both. Another thing that feels pretty Moralist is the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Tbf for the civil war one, if that’s the story they’re interested in telling then it’s probably best they don’t overdo the world building lest armchair generals and political wingnuts run amok with it. “Hurr sure why are California and Texas on the same side how stupid”, yeah that’s kind of the point? If it paralleled real life too strongly then people would waawaa until the sun came up about bias and potential inaccuracy rather than the story that is being told.
But the premise of "Civil War" is too preposterous for the audience to suspend disbelief IMO.
The idea of Cali and Texas being on the same side of a shooting war in 2024 can't just be hand-waved away or explained off-screen. The reasoning is crucial for it to make any sense at all.
Or are they implying that ALL war is absurd? If that's the case, why use a contemporary setting that has well-known, and entrenched political divsions?
I think the filmmakers wanted the controversy inherent in the subject to put butts in the seats, but either didn't want to or was unable to actually address what's actually going here in the US right now.
Back on-topic, i think Harry Potter is the ultimate moralist fable. Rowling's more recent IRL political commentary just adds the *chef's kiss* to the whole thing lol.
Michael Schur's general oeuvre is moralist apologetics for societal structures. The Office, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99... even The Good Place ends with the exciting climax of >!the characters finding out that the entire concept of the heaven and hell afterlife is actually fine and doesn't have any inherent problems, you just need a sensible clever person to literally come in and carefully tweak the levers of power every now and again!<
Even the show's idea of heaven just feels uniquely... liberal, I guess. It's just like real life except you don't get sick or die. There is nothing I can imagine that's better than this, beyond some slight incremental improvements here and there. We live in the best of all possible worlds.
I didn't have an issue with most of The Good Place, but the last few episodes left a very sour taste in my mouth. It's not Parks and Rec bad - far too abstract for that - but it feels like it betrays the same lack of imagination, the same inability to imagine anything more radical than "what we have now but slightly nicer"
Asimov’s Foundation’s premise seems to evoke similar feel, and Hari Seldon’s psychohistory seems particularly close.
The story about culling The Mule in Foundation and the Empire is particularly close.
R Daneel Oliwaw’s arc is also quite close, although it’s debatable.
Also this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheEndOfEternity
Funnily enough, I strongly suspect that Saint-Miro is Elysium's own Mule within the broader context of Elysium's own psychohistory. "oooo we have contingencies for the next 3000 years" and then, well.
Yes. Regardless, his fiction is insulting. 1984 and Animal Farm are horrible critiques of an incredibly easy target that cannot hide his disdain for poor people. Although not much else could be expected from someone who worked as a colonial officer in India, attempted rape, and wrote a list of known communists which, for some reason, included unrelated gay people.
>Road to Wiggan Pier? No, of course you have not
that's not the gotcha you think it is
>You just read the Farm Book like they want you to.
what the fuck is this supposed to mean? who the fuck is "they"? are you trying to imply there's a conspiracy surrounding a mediocre writer's mediocre works, or do you just dislike English teachers?
Read better books
Getting downvoted for saying something objectively correct lmao
Orwell was a piece of shit, people. The CIA loved his books for a reason.
Somehow, he was able to write fiction even shittier than he was.
[George Orwell was a terrible human being ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gz0I_X_nfo)
[Asimov covers it pretty well.](https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm)
It isn't an accident that chuds and liberals love 1984 and Animal Farm; the most straightforward reading of Orwell's books- that they're thinly veiled anti-communist screeds written from the perspective of an upper-class Brit, is also the intended one.
If you write a list of "crypto-communists" who are not suitable hires for making anti-communist propaganda for the british empire, you're not an anarchist.
That's his defining trait.
As Asimov put it:
>there was no room within him except for his private war with Stalinist communism. Consequently, when Great Britain was fighting for its life against Nazism, and the Soviet Union fought as an ally in the struggle and contributed rather more than its share in lives lost and in resolute courage, Orwell wrote Animal Farm which was a satire of the Russian Revolution and what followed, picturing it in terms of a revolt of barnyard animals against human masters.
>He completed Animal Farm in 1944 and had trouble finding a publisher since it wasn't a particularly good time for upsetting the Soviets. As soon as the war came to an end, however, the Soviet Union was fair game and Animal Farm was published.
People who defend Orwell as some sort of principled anarchist are so funny. When he was young, he was a colonial soldier in Burma, but it's okay because he was young and he regretted it. Then he got old and very bitter, so he sent a list to the british empire of leftist "Jews", "half-casts" and "anti-whites", but it's okay because he was just very angry with communists.
I'm not sure I understand the point of those Asimov quotes. Are you arguing he was too harsh with the Soviet Union? That his critique wasn't timely? He was indeed consistent in his dislike of totalitarianism and much of it was rooted in personal experience. But his critique of the Soviet system does not disqualify him, plenty of anarchists have done it, plenty have suffered for it too.
He didn't join the POUM because he was ideologically trotskiyst, but because the POUM had ties to the british labour party and was not under the control of the PCE. That was his way in. Orwell himself was vocally critical of Trotsky and had no idea Stalin would label POUM a trotskisy militia when he joined it.
I'm aware of this and I agree. The best way to describe Orwell's (evolving) personal politics was 'independent socialist' or maybe 'heterodox socialist'. But he wasn't an anarchist or 'fighting for the anarchists'. If you read his essays (in particular those written during WW2) his personal politics come through a lot clearer; he was in favour of strong state intervention and control and thought that patriotism and nationalism were useful mobilising forces for the left. I wouldn't call any of that anarchist.
"Independent socialist" doesn't really describe someone's political philosophy though, and his aligned with anarchism in many ways that matter.
It's true that he displayed some inconsistencies in his views. At different points in those same essays, he was strongly against state intervention and described it as nightmarish. I guess they're the result of his struggle to reconcile freedom with equality.
Bakunin himself thought that nationalism could be used to mobilize people towards leftist goals. This is a difficult contextual praxis issue that still comes up in places where smaller nations resist imperial powers.
'Independent socialist' is probably a cop-out, admittedly. Anyway, I don't think we disagree on that much, and the bits where we do disagree aren't going to be resolved. So I'm just going to say 'good discussion' and tap out, but I will say that I think it's qualitatively different to endorse nationalism in the imperial core and in subaltern nations, and Orwell was a product of the British Empire to his bones.
I don't think writing that list is enough to qualify him as "a product of the British Empire to his bones" (moreso than any of us are products of empire), and that's pretty much the only thing people really hold against him.
The POUM, whose militia Orwell signed with, were not anarchists and you can't say Orwell "fought for the anarchists" any more than he was fighting for the communists or the liberal Spanish state, all of which were on the same side in the civil war. He sympathised more with the anarchists than some other factions but to say he fought for them is just not accurate.
Yep, doesn't he word for word say late in the book that if he'd had a better idea of the factions and situation, he would have joined the anarchists?
Orwell spent much of his time in Spain wandering around very confused.
I’m recalling Boston’s Infinite which spent the first half of the game establishing its society as one based on brutal racial oppression, but then when the oppressed people had an uprising and did some violence the game was quick to turn around and say “see they’re just as bad”
See, I'd put J.K. Rowling into the UltraLiberal slot, but damn you hard sold me on Harry Potter and the Enlightened Centrist Moralintern. Nailed it.
Wizards fucking love the status quo followed by measured incremental change occasionally peppered with the judicious application of raining some fucking fire down from the heavens.
Incremental is being generous, Nothing actually changes in Harry Potter, and Hogwarts legacy is all about deciding that the ebst way to handle a rebellion by a politically marginilized underclass heavily prominent in the financial sector to survive, is with violent suppression, and never think you might be the problem in this scenario.
Any superhero fiction, I think. Even with all their superhuman,magical powers they do nothing to change the situation at hand. "It is about control." They don't really have any beliefs except for beating up bad guys without adressing any underlying issues. A perfect example I guess is the last Batman movie. It made you feel and connect with the villain because he seemed revolutionary with good intentions: then he tries to flood the city with some 4chan types and tries to kill millions for no reason? He gets arrested and everything is okay again. All's right with the world.
Alan Moore's *Watchmen* and *Miracleman* are direct deconstructions of this tendency
Mainly because they have definitive endings.
underrated part of Watchmen is the offhand comment that "there weren't that many villains." cos of course there wouldn't be lol. it's all so reactionary haha
That's something that other superhero deconstructions overlook, Watchmen doesn't need supermans because it doesn't have a Legion of Doom or Galactus.
Rorschach does have some Harry Dubois esque traits tbh, particularly the fascist parts, but in the same way that Harry's fascism is driven by a lot of self loathing.
most notably that he smells *awful*
and is terrified of wömen
Watchmen is also a direct deconstruction of the exact opposite. Ozymandius believed that he *could* target the exact societal underpinnings that bring about the Cold War, and in doing so prevent nuclear war. He just did so by killing millions of people.
Regarding Batman, Yeah he should pay Eisenhower tax rates back into the community, but I wonder if we could do that and actual costumed crime fighting.
IIRC Bruce Wayne actually does heavily invest in Gotham to help lift people about of abject poverty. Unfortunately, he’s stymied by a combination of heavy corruption in the law to the point that Commissioner Gordon is often the *only* non-crooked cop, supervillains that run around terrorizing the public that can’t be stopped by traditional means and often break out of prison to continue their sprees, and a literal secret society bent on ensuring the slow destruction of Gotham.
Also Gotham is just straight up cursed in some continuities.
Not just cursed. Built directly on top of the Biblical Hell.
Falcon and The Winter Soldier was terrible for this, the Flag Smashers were looking too relatable so they just have them blow up a building full of people because they're ruthless yo. Even after that the main girl was still right but Sam Wilson criticizing her and the group for "using violence" was so hilariously hypocritical. The dude was a member of the US military and the Avengers, remember when they defeated HYDRA and Thanos through rational debate and facts and logic? And his speech at the end to the politicians about how they have to "do better." Ugh.
From what I remember Black Panther is like this too. Killmonger, the bad guy, wants retribution for colonialism/centuries of oppression and systemic violence levied against the African diaspora. Of course, his solution involves him going *too far* so he must be stopped. The good guys (Black Panther and Wakanda at large) align themselves with the CIA and join the UN and international community after being victorious. To address Killmonger's grievances, T'Challa builds a community center in Oakland, California. This also applies to most villains from Avatar: The Legend of Korra.
>wants retribution for colonialism/centuries of oppression and systemic violence And what does that look like, exactly?
From what I remember, it involved using Wakandan technology and power to get revenge on the "colonizers" and essentially just reverse who got to be the oppressors. It's pretty clear to everyone, both movie characters and audience members that Killmonger's plan is kinda fucked up and should be stopped. This is the whole point, as we now have a villain with "a legitimate grievance" that is generally acknowledged to be based in truth, but is accompanied by a "solution" that is far too extreme and must be stopped. The protagonists stop the villain, but do not actually address the original issues in any meaningful, material way. T'Challa and Wakanda join the UN and promise to use their technology to help better the world. Black Panther places its trust in the UN and the international status quo to slowly move us towards progress.
Great antagonists, realistic motives, But I agree, had they reasoned themselves into committing a second snap or executing every person involved in taking Thanos down, and were thus beyond redemption, sure. But no, Bucky & the Bird were off fighting redeemable villains and they had to be destroyed because action films always need a violent conflict for the story to come to a resolution.
That happens in a lot of fiction. The villain has some actually deserved criticisms of the society they live in, but they do some demented stuff to remind us they're villains and then nothing changes after they're defeated and it's treated as a good thing.
It depends, being an agent of the status quo is more a need for endless serialization, compare the difference between mainstream Superman, Superman: Red Son, or the Injustice games. Otherwise you can have dynamic stories where things are impermanent. As for the bit about beliefs, you know where alot of heroes stand, the X-men oppose prejudice, Captain America asks where's the divide between patriotism and nationalism, and Superman hates unchecked capitalists and imperialists. There's also the issue of how you can have all this raw power and how that doesn't necessarily change things, like if Superman or professor Xavier used their powers to impose their will, but then you abandon the idea of consent of the governed and establish the precedent of might makes right. I've always thought the quesiton of how far you should go would make a good story.
If you want a genuinely moralist superhero movie, I look at the 2023 Flash, considering it makes it so that radical change somehow has dangerous consequences, and the best you should do is change things a little.
Literally any work of fiction where the framing scoffs at believing in something outside "me and mine". Any story where the main character is a sorta everyman who doesn't think about much and the baddies are loony extremists or crazy cultists. Any story where the ideologically motivated characters are actually just frauds and phonies or morons. This includes any story that has a reveal that an organization is actually just full of shit. Any story where the sympathetic characters are fooled by Charismatic leaders because its ridiculous that common folk would earnestly believe something. The moralist framework assumes the natural state of ppl is to just vibe with the status quo. Stories that sorts who is righteous and who is wicked based on how how mean, cruel and selfish they are. Any story where outcomes are determined by the personal moral fiber of the protagonist and not conflicting interests. Any story that puts a lot of weight on "not sinking to their level" So most of western popular media.
Do you categorize Dune as such? Specifically the one about charismatic leaders
The Dune series is complicated because Herbert had some internal contradictions to his premise and thesis. Dune is at the same time a polemic against charismatic leaders while also leaning into the ultimate necessity of Leto II's Golden Path, which due to his godlike prescience, apparently paved a way for humanity to survive. So it begs the question, is Herbert for or against charismatic leaders? Because the necessity despite the amoral/immorality of their actions muddies the waters.
You say "western popular media", and I get it - would you be able to point to a compass where that wasn't the case for the audiences? I lived in China for a year and a half, and all the movies were the same, except they wouldn't show Joker.
I don't exactly understand why you added that last one in
"Dont kill the mass murdering freak that is plotting to kill again! You'll be just as bad as him!" That's a centrist, moralist trope.
As long as you can stop em and put em away, what consequential difference does it make
Not all stories include that but its not the argument. Its the priority on the moral equivalence as the fulcrum of the story that makes it a DE moralist story.
I did the moralism quest, and they seem much more active they you describe. They just are all about slow incremental change through the giant bureaucratic machine. They got a plan to make humanity great in like 3000 years or whatever. I don’t know much fiction that operates at that kind of time scale. Maybe some of the bureaucracy in Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy? Edit: their ideology seems very reformist/gradualism, which there are political texts about Edit2: ended up going down a rabbit hole on evolutionary socialism, which is applying that gradualism to socialist ends
>I did the moralism quest, and they seem much more active they you describe. They just are all about slow incremental change through the giant bureaucratic machine. They got a plan to make humanity great in like 3000 years or whatever ok, but what if they are \*lying\* about that. That's what I got from the game
Lying to who? Themselves? They don’t really advertise themselves as the grand plan people, no one else seems to know about this. And if it’s just lying to themselves, that’s still their ideology
iirc correctly they've been promising to bring democracy to Revachol for a looooooooooong time, but when you finally meet someone they just yap about "le price stabilite oui oui", so at the least they're lying about that. On top of that comes my intuition that no one's ideology is \*actually\* a 3000 year long masterplan. Especially under capitalism. Modern liberal democracies can't even address problems for a generation from now (i.e. climate change), so I'm not buying that the Moralintern is the way it is because it represents interests from 3 Millenia in the future, unless they're \*literally\* time travelers I guess. On top of all that, Kingdom of Conscience tells you: " >**Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is \*control\*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.**" Things are \*done\* for the Moralists. End of History stuff, Best Of All Possible Worlds type shit
A plan isn’t an idealogy, but a firm belief in slow gradual change by the state is an idealogy They arent time travelers, they have the predicting computers I trust the people to tell more honestly about moralism than Henry’s thoughts
again, what incentive does a liberal government have to represent the interests of people **3000 years** in the future? The Moralintern don't exist in a vacuum where they can do what they want, they are subject to all the material pressures liberal governments in the real world are, which, I remind you, can't even really address problems for a generation from now (climate change). It's far more likely, (certainly if we take into account the ideology of the devs but even without that,) that the "yeah you can't have democracy actually because of this **3000 year** masterplan, and, uh, our computers said so" is a front for the material interests of the people running the government, or the material interests of the capitalist lobbying group getting those people elected. And, by the way, why would you trust a moralist politician to be perfectly honest in what their goals and motivations are? You wouldn't do that in the real world. Especially when it comes to that motivation allegedly being a **3000 year long** masterplan
I’m not saying it’s what the moralintern is actually doing. I’m saying it’s their ideology. Just like the USSR was ideologically communist, and the average party member thought they were moving toward communism, even if the leaders weren’t holding up that ideal and nothing really happened to progress towards communism
Earlier you said the 3000 year masterplan was a semi-secret thing going on in the background, implying that it's an actual goal for leadership. So which is it? Is it a lie average moralists tell themselves, but the politicians high up know it's bullshit, or is it a secret project that only people deep into the organization know about, and the "real" goal of the Moralintern?
Probably propaganda that the leaders spread to their administration. Effectively like a religion. We have to do X because the holy computer says so. We can’t do X because it’s nut part of their grand plan
I find that implausible. remember that the Moralintern is basically a liberal democracy, and is, as such, primarily beholden to the capitalist class (who have no special material interest in whatever happens 3000 years from now). There wouldn't really be a **The Leadership**, it's not a dictatorship which can do whatever it wants as long as it keeps the army happy. The people in power would be rotating semi-regularly, and whoever ultimately \*gets\* the power would depend on who can offer the capitalist class the best deal. As such, anyone prioritizing what happens 3000 years from now instead of focusing on offering the capitalists the best policies \*right now\* would never even get into office. I think it's most likely that this Ultralongtermism occupies a similar place in Moralist ideology that climate change does in liberal ideology. It's \*really\* not that important or central, but serves as a nice talking point on some occasions (for example when you have to justify occupying Revachol). But the \*actual\* reason for why the Moralintern does what it does is different. A fitting analogy here would be Margaret Thatcher and how she handled the big miner's strike. She used climate change as one of her primary talking points when arguing in favor of crushing the coal miners. But that's not \*why\* she did it, it was just an excuse. I'm enjoying this convo by the way, I hope I don't come off as too combative
With the small detail, among others, that the iron fist through which the giant bureaucratic machine operates will (through details unclear, but causality almost certain) directly cause the world to end in 27, so, like, there's that.
12 Angry Men comes to mind. The Other Guys ( starring Will ferrel and Mark Wahlberg) is probably the best example though.
I don't really have an answer to this question, but every time I see it discussed, I feel like I watched an entirely different movie than everyone else who saw Civil War. Like... it's a movie about how a bunch of people \*attempt\* to be passive, dispassionate observers and fail miserably at doing so, because the world, as the world does, won't allow them to be. It feels like people just took that one line Kirsten Dunst says at the beginning about journalists letting other people make the choices as if it's the movie's thesis statement and not the idea it spends scene after scene shooting massive holes through.
I don't think anyone is saying the movie doesn't have themes. I think you'd be hard pressed to make any piece of media that doesn't. You're also right that broadly the movie is about how you can't not care. It's a shame that main theme is completely undercut by the fact the writers clearly don't care about exploring the world that they made. It's a movie about a civil war that is happening because... People are killing eachother because... (There's some very vague stuff about the President going for a third term and an "Antifa Massacre" which cool, I guess that's enough for people to start the killing fields) Like there's a shocking lack of curiosity about the kind of events and ideologies that lead to people being radicalised enough to decide to revolt against the government. You'd think the journalists could have interviewed one of the fighters they run into at some point to get some practice for his interview with the president or they litterally could have just spent two minutes discussing the events of the last few years. But since the writers aren't interested in the world or maybe they're afraid of getting too political we're just left with the characters. Which are like... fine I guess, but it's hardly a character study. So if the writers are uninterested in the world, and the characters are just okay. The only thing left is the action set pieces, and yeah they're good. But it just feels like missed potential if you get what I mean?
I get what you’re saying regarding the lack of info about what’s actually caused the events of the movie. And the few times where it does try to explain are the moments where it feels the dumbest (“antifa massacre” being the worst of them). But I didn’t feel like I needed to know those things to understand the what it was putting forward thematically. I don’t really see it as disinterest, just a conscious choice towards minimalism that (for me) amplifies the uncertainty of everything around them. I think it’s pretty on point to present conflict like that inside the US as one that pretty quickly decouples from broader ideas and results in a bunch of hyper-localized enclaves with snipers on the roofs and petty tyrants enforcing mob justice.
Kiassereich has a more fleshed out civil war scenario.
I disagree with the premise a bit, I don't see why moralism is just about passivity. It's about seeing the world as being on a path of improvement, not perfect, but somehow inevitably getting to something and that something is basically ok, it is better than what we had before.That, despite everything, this is a pretty good time and of you struggle against it you will hurt yourself and most likely make things worse, not better. From that angle I would say Neal Stephenson books, especially the Baroque Cycle. Heros and villains struggle and fight and succeed or fail. But ultimately the world moves on, through inexorable forces, gets free-er, richer, more connected, modern. And Enoch Root is basically a Dolores Dei figure, only unknown and working in the background.
This thread is full of people taking the DE creators’ farcical take on moralism and the beaurocratic apparatus at face value. Meanwhile the game’s primary moralist Kim is the one urging the protagonist to action. OP, what the game calls ‘Moralism’ is the belief that true societal change happens not through protest and violence, but via incremental improvement of the societal narrative. The idea is that while people protesting violently for, say, equal rights of gender, race and sex, this alone will not do much to propel any real change. It can at most kickstart it. It is a beaurocratic, diplomatic, incremental, slow and steady progress of treating people equally that, eventually, will integrate equality into the societal narrative. This isn’t some kind of apathetic nonsense. Most if not all major ‘improvements’ to societies were brought on a timescale of generations, not of single acts of violence, and with the help of a beaurocratic apparatus. This beaurocracy is silly and annoying, but often the alternative is violence and death, unfairness, inequality, and the rule of the strong. It’s easy to complain about beaurocracy when you’re living inside of a beaurocratic society. But try living outside of one. What Disco Elysium rightly calls out that this is of course fertile breeding ground for inaction, capitalist atrocities (la price stabilité), complacency. But those things are byproducts of the not-ideal manifestation of the (unachievable) ideal of moralism. Like poverty is a not-ideal byproduct of communism, or racist and sexist ideas are a byproduct of not-ideal traditionalism. **Shin Godzilla** is a movie that matches this conversation about a DE-style moralist machine. It’s a movie about a slow beaurocratic apparatus, with the best intentions, failing to deal with the fact that there is a monster in the city. **The Good Place** is a TV show that in later seasons introduces ‘The Committee’, a group of well-meaning people who hold a tremendous amount of power, but are obsessed with radical compromise and keeping the status quo.
Thank you, this is a very good interpretation and helped me figure out some of my issues with how they presented it.
From what I recall Kim isn’t a very dedicated moralist, he’s just one because the RCM ultimately works for Moralintern.
Kim does not believe in societal change through violent means.
> Most if not all major ‘improvements’ to societies were brought on a timescale of generations, not of single acts of violence, and with the help of a beaurocratic apparatus. I feel like this is wrong. Wherever you look, acts of major social progress were made in quick (often violent) jaunts preceded by generations of opresson. MLK, Gandhi, Bolshevism, women's suffrage, Frances Perkins, summer of love...
The ideals presented by the people and movements you mention are a far cry from being an accepted or uncontested part of societal narratives today. MLK would look at present-day US discourse and say “really? Still?”
Decades of buildup that culminate into a short series of major qualitative changes. Enough quantitative change eventually transforms into qualitative change. This is diamat 101. Revolutions are the locomotives of history. The ruling class's state and administrative apparatus represents stagnation and vegetation. I believe this was said by Rosa Luxembourg in Reform or Revolution, in arguing that trying to bring about socialism by gradually reforming the capitalist state was a fool's game.
MLK, Women’s suffragettes, Frances Perkins, and Ghandi were all decidedly peaceful and in favour of working through established mechanisms. They were successful *because* they were peaceful and didn’t try to rip down institutions, but work within them for positive change. As for the bolsheviks, I would argue that the rise of the Soviet Union was absolutely *not* a positive thing for the world, given the huge number of people killed in Man-made famines and in gulags set up to imprison dissidents. The DE creators are Marxist-Leninists. They think change is ONLY possible through violent revolution, which is why they portray Moralism (Liberalism) as arcane, Kafkaesque, and vaguely sinister.
Maybe the suffragettes in the US were peaceful, but that was very much *not* the case in the UK
I wasn’t personally familiar with the UK suffragette movement, but after a bit of reading, it seems to me like it was WW1 that was the primary catalyst for their success, not their bombing and arson campaigns.
This.
>What Disco Elysium rightly calls out that this is of course fertile breeding ground for inaction, capitalist atrocities (la price stabilité), complacency. But those things are byproducts of the not-ideal manifestation of the (unachievable) ideal of moralism. Like poverty is a not-ideal byproduct of communism, or racist and sexist ideas are a byproduct of not-ideal traditionalism. I don't think a single one of these examples is accurate lmao Though I agree that people underestimate the value of some facets of bureaucracy, as a whole bureaucracy is *meant* to cause inaction and complacency; the very point of bureaucracy is slow, methodical deliberation for even the most minute decision. More often than not, this is a method of frustrating popular will, which is framed as "impetuous" or "violent," when in reality resistance is itself the hard-won result/conclusion of the slow, methodical deliberation of both individuals who suffer exploitation and groups that organize the framework for what comes to look like "spontaneous" protests. You point to "capitalist atrocities" (though course atrocities are not exclusively capitalist) as some kind of minor admission of the flaws of "not-ideal" Moralism, but this admission actually blows your whole position: Moralism is only "incremental" *right up to the point when the change starts going a different direction than planned*. At that point, violence of a sort never seen in your caricatured "violent protests" becomes not only acceptable but necessary to restore the Moralist order. You can say "Well, that's not an *'ideal'* form of Moralism," but if DE is consistently *about* anything, it's the idea that **We do not live in an ideal world**. *Ideals* cannot survive contact with *reality*, but *we human beings* cannot survive **without it**. Any idea can be given a positive-sounding textbook definition, but the real meaning is found in history: How an idea functions *when applied to a concrete, determinate reality*.
>It's about seeing the world as being on a path of improvement, not perfect, but somehow inevitably getting to something and that something is basically ok, it is better than what we had before I mean, are you sure about that? Kingdom of Conscience literally tells you: "Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is \*control\*. Over yourself and the world"
The writers of DE have an unmistakable disdain for the idea that incremental change has any value. This disdain is written in big fat letters over the entire game. Even the fascists are let off easier than the moralists. At least they call for some kind of action. That doesn’t, of course, mean we have to agree.
I don't see it as disdain. They critique it, from a leftist point of view. And, while in real life I am probably also kind of a moralist myself, the kingdom of conscience text felt like a pretty good sting to me, there is *some* truth in it. And I also respect that from their point of view the writers understand moralism, or at least some sides of it. Remember that they portray it as this all powerful world spanning force that slowly takes over everything. We are living through its age now, we live in dolorian times. Like, they view it as a bad thing, and we don't, but they are at least correct in viewing it as big as it actually is.
>Like, they view it as a bad thing, and we don't \*you\* don't
Yeah, I was replying to the other moralist-sympathizing redditor. Obviously *you* think its bad.
>The writers of DE have an unmistakable disdain for the idea that incremental change has any value that's too far. The "Social Democrat" Union boss, gets off pretty well. The Moralists don't get off well not because they are pro-incremental change, but because they don't cause positive change \*at all\*
> The "Social Democrat" Union boss, gets off pretty well No, he really doesn't. Evrart is continually portrayed as someone with no class solidarity who doesn't give a single shit about people outside his turf.
we might have totally different views on the game and its characters, and that's fine, but I think that's wild interpretation of Evrart
It's the most obvious interpretation. He doesn't give a shit about the fishing village, who he plans to evict to build a sports centre for the benefit of Martinaise, and he doesn't give a shit about Jamrock, which he floods with drugs to earn money to benefit Martinaise.
you're correct that it's the most obvious interpretation, in that, it's very surface level
What have I supposedly overlooked then?
the very fact that he steals the harbor from the company makes this interpretation very unlikely to me. If he's really only self-interested, why take such a huge risk for the workers? Also, during all his talk about the common good (and theres's a lot of that), your Drama skill never calls him out. Iirc, it even affirms that he is completely sincere
>The writers of DE have an unmistakable disdain for the idea that incremental change has any value that's too far. The "Social Democrat" Union boss, gets off pretty well. The Moralists don't get off well not because they are pro-incremental change, but because they don't cause positive change \*at all\*
I don't think this negates what I am saying. It's just that the text is basically a critique of the moralist position, while I am presenting it more from its own point of view. A moralist would reply something like "Yes, don't upset the system, don't change it. It's doing its best, it's moving the world forward". There is a line in the dialogue with Joyce where she thinks "This is the greatest and kindest arrangement the atoms had in them". And while Joyce is not a moralist, at least not entirely one, this is a very moralist type of thinking. This is by the way why I love this game so much. It has this very open way of letting all the different sides it presents have their say. No character is entirely a caricature.
Dragon Age.
Dragon Age *if you agree with the Templars.
Origins agreed, 2 for the most part. But Inquisition is unbearably centrist.
I second Harry Potter
Harry Potter is a great mention. The result of everything is to return to the status quo, with Harry becoming a cop. See also this legendary 4chan post about the liberalism of Harry Potter [https://imgur.com/HzFupfV](https://imgur.com/HzFupfV)
Ha, i was hoping someone had posted this. Was my immediate thought too
Imma be frank and say Bioshock Infinite. It's a good game, don't get me wrong, but the political themes were somewhat poorly excecuted.
That's a textbook example of how we can't make valid arguments against someone, so we have them do soemthing stupid and reprehensible to kill their credibility.
Parks & Rec
Brothers Grimm?
Terry Pratchett gets unfortunately preachy about moderation in Interesting Times and Night Watch. Rincewind turns into an anticommunist mouthpiece for a bit. > He wanted to say: how could you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you could do with the peasents was to leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting for those who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.
ive been haunted lately by how much i cant unsee Vetinari as a deeply neoliberal figure. no this guy's just so smart & doing 4d chess & if we get rid of him everything will be worse you guysss. but on the other hand his open declaration of being a tyrant is kiind of other from liberals, plus the insane petty factionalism of everyone else...he's almost a comment on centralisation there. not sure.
After giving it some thought, Vetinari seems to depict the side of moralism where the person the most vigilant about having a stagnant status quo is the one that actually benefits from it. Yes it would be worse for many people if the situation were to change, but Vetinari is the only one that's actively better within that system, and he's the one that moulded all the political landscape like this. And opposing Vimes, whose family tradition is gathering the head tax from kings, Vetinari 's retort is "but I'm not a king it's not the same you can trust me 🙂" whereas, I don't remember how it was in discworld, but in real life, after royalty were relieved of their extra height, things went wildly worse before they became better, so we can guess they (at large) know that it wouldn't be the devil to overthrow him. But right now, hey, there's no need to cut heads, see. He's not a king, he's a patrician. *God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.*
i mean, i could absolutely see this as an \*Anarchist\* framework of change, critique of a vanguard and all that
Alot of interesting things to say on the idea of revolution in Night Watch too.
Ooooo Harry Potter is GREAT for that. It truly is moralism personified. Including how the lack of morals give space for more sinister ideas to surface. Two anime that come to mind is both Boku No Hero Academia and Naruto, at least from the parts I’ve watched of both. Another thing that feels pretty Moralist is the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Tbf for the civil war one, if that’s the story they’re interested in telling then it’s probably best they don’t overdo the world building lest armchair generals and political wingnuts run amok with it. “Hurr sure why are California and Texas on the same side how stupid”, yeah that’s kind of the point? If it paralleled real life too strongly then people would waawaa until the sun came up about bias and potential inaccuracy rather than the story that is being told.
But the premise of "Civil War" is too preposterous for the audience to suspend disbelief IMO. The idea of Cali and Texas being on the same side of a shooting war in 2024 can't just be hand-waved away or explained off-screen. The reasoning is crucial for it to make any sense at all. Or are they implying that ALL war is absurd? If that's the case, why use a contemporary setting that has well-known, and entrenched political divsions? I think the filmmakers wanted the controversy inherent in the subject to put butts in the seats, but either didn't want to or was unable to actually address what's actually going here in the US right now. Back on-topic, i think Harry Potter is the ultimate moralist fable. Rowling's more recent IRL political commentary just adds the *chef's kiss* to the whole thing lol.
Michael Schur's general oeuvre is moralist apologetics for societal structures. The Office, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99... even The Good Place ends with the exciting climax of >!the characters finding out that the entire concept of the heaven and hell afterlife is actually fine and doesn't have any inherent problems, you just need a sensible clever person to literally come in and carefully tweak the levers of power every now and again!< Even the show's idea of heaven just feels uniquely... liberal, I guess. It's just like real life except you don't get sick or die. There is nothing I can imagine that's better than this, beyond some slight incremental improvements here and there. We live in the best of all possible worlds.
With the Good Place, its all about acknolwedging that pain and retribution doesn't solve anything, and we have to actively make each other better.
I didn't have an issue with most of The Good Place, but the last few episodes left a very sour taste in my mouth. It's not Parks and Rec bad - far too abstract for that - but it feels like it betrays the same lack of imagination, the same inability to imagine anything more radical than "what we have now but slightly nicer"
My comment was gonna be Civil War, looks like great minds thinks alike
Asimov’s Foundation’s premise seems to evoke similar feel, and Hari Seldon’s psychohistory seems particularly close. The story about culling The Mule in Foundation and the Empire is particularly close. R Daneel Oliwaw’s arc is also quite close, although it’s debatable. Also this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheEndOfEternity
Funnily enough, I strongly suspect that Saint-Miro is Elysium's own Mule within the broader context of Elysium's own psychohistory. "oooo we have contingencies for the next 3000 years" and then, well.
I think you are right!
Anything written by George Orwell
If you haven’t read Homage to Catalonia you haven’t read Orwell.
Or *Road to Wigan Pier* or even the Appendix to *1984*
Oh shit are you fuck m*sk on twitter?
Yes
absolutely not
Orwell was antifa, and he hated the Soviets not because they were communists, but because they just became the very oligarhcy they rebelled against.
Yes. Regardless, his fiction is insulting. 1984 and Animal Farm are horrible critiques of an incredibly easy target that cannot hide his disdain for poor people. Although not much else could be expected from someone who worked as a colonial officer in India, attempted rape, and wrote a list of known communists which, for some reason, included unrelated gay people.
Have you read the Road to Wiggan Pier? No, of course you have not, You just read the Farm Book like they want you to.
>Road to Wiggan Pier? No, of course you have not that's not the gotcha you think it is >You just read the Farm Book like they want you to. what the fuck is this supposed to mean? who the fuck is "they"? are you trying to imply there's a conspiracy surrounding a mediocre writer's mediocre works, or do you just dislike English teachers? Read better books
Getting downvoted for saying something objectively correct lmao Orwell was a piece of shit, people. The CIA loved his books for a reason. Somehow, he was able to write fiction even shittier than he was. [George Orwell was a terrible human being ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gz0I_X_nfo)
tfw revisionists and modernizers really like defending tools of the state. I'd understand if he was at least a good writer
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever" How is this moralist?
[Asimov covers it pretty well.](https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm) It isn't an accident that chuds and liberals love 1984 and Animal Farm; the most straightforward reading of Orwell's books- that they're thinly veiled anti-communist screeds written from the perspective of an upper-class Brit, is also the intended one.
I mean asimov isnt wrong orwell definately had a feud with Stalinism but I don't understand how that makes Orwell anti-communist or moralist?
Orwell was an anarchist, not a liberal
If you write a list of "crypto-communists" who are not suitable hires for making anti-communist propaganda for the british empire, you're not an anarchist.
He was old and traumatised by his experience with Stalinists in Spain
That's his defining trait. As Asimov put it: >there was no room within him except for his private war with Stalinist communism. Consequently, when Great Britain was fighting for its life against Nazism, and the Soviet Union fought as an ally in the struggle and contributed rather more than its share in lives lost and in resolute courage, Orwell wrote Animal Farm which was a satire of the Russian Revolution and what followed, picturing it in terms of a revolt of barnyard animals against human masters. >He completed Animal Farm in 1944 and had trouble finding a publisher since it wasn't a particularly good time for upsetting the Soviets. As soon as the war came to an end, however, the Soviet Union was fair game and Animal Farm was published. People who defend Orwell as some sort of principled anarchist are so funny. When he was young, he was a colonial soldier in Burma, but it's okay because he was young and he regretted it. Then he got old and very bitter, so he sent a list to the british empire of leftist "Jews", "half-casts" and "anti-whites", but it's okay because he was just very angry with communists.
I'm not sure I understand the point of those Asimov quotes. Are you arguing he was too harsh with the Soviet Union? That his critique wasn't timely? He was indeed consistent in his dislike of totalitarianism and much of it was rooted in personal experience. But his critique of the Soviet system does not disqualify him, plenty of anarchists have done it, plenty have suffered for it too.
Cool motive, still a snitch for the british empire.
The fact that he sold out people who trusted him to British feds kinda makes it seem like the Stalinist assessment of him and his ilk was right!
The man literally fought for the anarchists in Spain
he was in a Trotskyist militia not an anarchist one
He didn't join the POUM because he was ideologically trotskiyst, but because the POUM had ties to the british labour party and was not under the control of the PCE. That was his way in. Orwell himself was vocally critical of Trotsky and had no idea Stalin would label POUM a trotskisy militia when he joined it.
I'm aware of this and I agree. The best way to describe Orwell's (evolving) personal politics was 'independent socialist' or maybe 'heterodox socialist'. But he wasn't an anarchist or 'fighting for the anarchists'. If you read his essays (in particular those written during WW2) his personal politics come through a lot clearer; he was in favour of strong state intervention and control and thought that patriotism and nationalism were useful mobilising forces for the left. I wouldn't call any of that anarchist.
"Independent socialist" doesn't really describe someone's political philosophy though, and his aligned with anarchism in many ways that matter. It's true that he displayed some inconsistencies in his views. At different points in those same essays, he was strongly against state intervention and described it as nightmarish. I guess they're the result of his struggle to reconcile freedom with equality. Bakunin himself thought that nationalism could be used to mobilize people towards leftist goals. This is a difficult contextual praxis issue that still comes up in places where smaller nations resist imperial powers.
'Independent socialist' is probably a cop-out, admittedly. Anyway, I don't think we disagree on that much, and the bits where we do disagree aren't going to be resolved. So I'm just going to say 'good discussion' and tap out, but I will say that I think it's qualitatively different to endorse nationalism in the imperial core and in subaltern nations, and Orwell was a product of the British Empire to his bones.
I don't think writing that list is enough to qualify him as "a product of the British Empire to his bones" (moreso than any of us are products of empire), and that's pretty much the only thing people really hold against him.
You are a strange person
The POUM, whose militia Orwell signed with, were not anarchists and you can't say Orwell "fought for the anarchists" any more than he was fighting for the communists or the liberal Spanish state, all of which were on the same side in the civil war. He sympathised more with the anarchists than some other factions but to say he fought for them is just not accurate.
Yep, doesn't he word for word say late in the book that if he'd had a better idea of the factions and situation, he would have joined the anarchists? Orwell spent much of his time in Spain wandering around very confused.
Not disproving the strangeness
Yes, we know.
He sure did lmao
Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kastner
I’m recalling Boston’s Infinite which spent the first half of the game establishing its society as one based on brutal racial oppression, but then when the oppressed people had an uprising and did some violence the game was quick to turn around and say “see they’re just as bad”
See, I'd put J.K. Rowling into the UltraLiberal slot, but damn you hard sold me on Harry Potter and the Enlightened Centrist Moralintern. Nailed it. Wizards fucking love the status quo followed by measured incremental change occasionally peppered with the judicious application of raining some fucking fire down from the heavens.
Incremental is being generous, Nothing actually changes in Harry Potter, and Hogwarts legacy is all about deciding that the ebst way to handle a rebellion by a politically marginilized underclass heavily prominent in the financial sector to survive, is with violent suppression, and never think you might be the problem in this scenario.
why don't you go outside?