This episode of Rethinking is sponsored by 1UP BOX.
What the f-… What. What the fuck? What do you mean I lost Karma? I’ll show you negative
Karma, asshole.
Uuuuuugh. You know I’ve not slept in like three days because I’ve been thinking about
this issue nonstop. Do I look stressed? I feel stressed. I’ve read two books on philosophy,
and several Neuroscience articles, and I’ve gotten drunk twice and gotten six new grey
hairs—but I think I’ve finally figured it out. I’m going to throw up in the toilet
right now, and be right back so we can start this episode.
If you’ve been following my series since the beginning, maybe you’ve noticed a bit
of a pattern emerging: a tendency I have to, I dunno, sympathize with the enemy. And we
could focus on every game ever made, every story that’s ever be written, and ask the
same question over and over again: is Magneto evil? Bowser? Father? Elder Maxson? The Joker?
Caesar? Me? You?
What IS evil?
Well, in the book The Myth of Evil, philosopher Phillip Cole says we’re actually talking
about two things when we say eeeevil: pure evil and impure evil. Impure evil, counter-intuitively,
is the term he uses to describe the concept of evil we apply to other people: a murder
out of jealousy or anger, war, rape, selling drugs, cannibalism, infidelity--evil that
is something “bad,” but evil that is diluted by the fact that the actions are carried out
by a human, with flaws, personality, pathos and emotions.
Pure evil is something that, for all we know, doesn’t actually exist in real life, but
we know what it is, it’s the very concept of evil itself as a force of nature. It’s
the Dark Side of the force, it’s Diablo if he were better written-- it’s Satan.
You know Satan. The biggest symbol of evil we have, basically. Satan is the original
Antagonist. Actually, fun fact, Satan, or Ha-Satan, is a Hebrew word that literally
translates into “adversary,” or “one who resists.” So quite literally, Satan
started out not as the Abrahamic God’s supervillain, but just as an idea, quite literally any mythical
antagonist. In fact, quite often Angels in the employ of God himself were considered
Ha-Satans. Over time, the idea of Satan as an evil entity took form in Christian mythology,
and BOOM: Lucifer was born. The epitome of everything we consider evil.
Cole isn’t really too interested in the idea of pure evil as it pertains to our real
lives, and I have to admit that I’m with him on that. Since I’ve personally never
meet any sort of embodiment of malevolence or grand evilness, but what is far more interesting
is the idea of impure evil. Evil between people. And even in these grand massive fantasy worlds
created for us, the most epicly big and powerful enemies are still, in many ways, human. Hermaeus
Mora, for instance, is cold and lacking in empathy--but he is prideful, and in spite
of being the Daedric Prince of Knowledge is completely capable of being hoodwinked. Alduin,
too. And John Henry Eden is nice and pleasant, and genuinely seems to care about the betterment
of humanity--he just happens to have a terrible terrible xenophobic streak. And we’ve already
talked about the humanity of mooks, raiders, and bandits.
So let’s pick some shitheads at random. What abooooouuuuut the uuuuuuuum the Umbrella
Corporation. They’re basically the Vault-Tec of the Resident Evil franchise. The exact
plotlines and motivations of The Umbrella Corporation are muddled and confusing because
the Resident Evil Series is developed by Capcom, but the long and short of it is that almost
nobody who’s playing a Resident Evil game is going to argue: they’re fucking evil.
They’re...the worst. They engineered not one, but two megasuper viruses and unleashed
them on the unsuspecting public, either on purpose or because they were negligent, creating
an unstoppable natural disaster so terrible that the only reasonable solution the United
States government could conceive of to stop it was to nuke an entire town off the map.
And you know what? You’re not going to hear me defending Umbrella. Their actions were
deplorable, and fully emblematic of the worst case scenario of corporate greed run amok,
where all that matters is the bottom line and dominance of the market--people, the environment,
and the far-reaching consequences are all afterthoughts at best as a giant group of
unchecked people do whatever they can for ultimate gains. Umbrella, Vault-Tec, their
biggest sins are rooted in greed.
But you know, while Umbrella as a corporation is absolutely terrible, what are they? I mean,
at their heart? They’re people. Tons of them, actually. Probably thousands. Umbrella
is a massive research and development corporation working on super weapon-level megaviruses,
but they’re still a corporation. A corporation needs more than just evil scientists to survive.
It needs accountants to balance the books, project managers to meet production and research
goals, office assistants whose greatest evil is, quite honestly, misfiling a memo. Janitors
and maintenance people to keep the halls cleaned and the lights working. Most of the people
working for Umbrella and Vault Tek, in fact, could just as easily be working at any of
the thousands of forgettable firms and corporations across the country. Chances are pretty high
that the only reason they’re working there is that it’s one of the few large employers
in the area.
So what we’re talking about, really, are a handful of researchers and executives. But
what are their actual goals?
Well, in the case of Vault-Tec, it’s a little unclear. I’m sure they definitely loved
profiting from people’s paranoia. But why the experiments? Well, there’s not a ton
of solid evidence on what the ultimate purpose of what the Vault experiments were for. The
only real answer to this is, of course is the non-canon, and cancelled, Project Van
Buren, which was the code name of the Fallout 3 game being developed by Black Isle. In Van
Buren, it was said that the entire purpose behind the Vault Experiments was to test the
limits of human endurance, both physically and psychologically, in order to provide data
to the remnants of the United States government, who were planning on leaving the nuclear wasteland
of earth to colonize another planet. So you can see, from that perspective, how some of
these atrocious experiments might seem worth it. Cruel and ruthless, and utterly terrible,
but the entire planet becoming uninhabitable due to nuclear Fallout is a pretty extreme
situation, which can push some pretty extreme survival instincts.
And what about Umbrella? Well, the viruses developed by Umbrella were originally developed
to be sold to the U.S. Government, and possibly other governments, as an alternative to sending
soldiers into hostile territory. Why risk the lives of your boys when you can just drop
in a zombie virus and have the enemy be defeated by their zombified friends and family?
The ethical problems with both Vault-Tec and the Umbrella Corporation are huuuuuge, like
the incredibly power imbalance in turning people who are utterly dependent on you for
survival into unwitting test subjects, or the human rights violations of using chemical
warfare on enemy combatants. They are terrible. Terrible. But they are UNDERSTANDABLE. I mean,
how many times have you been tempted to cut corners because it’s easy? I do all the
time. Sometimes I pick my nose when nobody’s watching because it’s easier than finding
a tissue. Now what if I had effectively infinite money and government support? The stakes to
produce are higher, the corners you cut become bigger, and the consequences further away.
And the result? Thousands, or even millions of people can be brought to their knees.
And this happens ALL the time in real life. In fact, you’re experiencing the Fallout
of it right now. The 2008 financial crisis. Without getting too much into the boring details,
financial traders throughout the world got really into these special type of mortgage
investments that, on paper, offered low risk and huge gains. Easy money. Well, as these
investments got more and more popular, mortgages got easier and easier for folk to obtain,
and people who had no business having any mortgage at all were getting mortgages for
hundreds of thousands dollars, and in some cases millions of dollars. On paper, the system
could just absorb people who defaulted with minimal impact, because the risk was spread
across a bunch of people.
In what will become a running theme in the course of humanity, a story that seems too
good to be true almost always is. The projections were wrong, mortgage values that had been
rising aggressively for months plummeted, and when the debts were called in, nobody
had any money to give. And suddenly, everything was fucked. The corporations, the people who
had mortgages, and everyone else. It affected the whole world.
And while these financial corporations were likely less shady and malicious than Umbrella
and Vault-Tec, they still suffered from a similar degree of short-sightedness, greed,
and a willingness to take shortcuts for easy gains.
THIS is the impure evil that Phillip Cole is talking about, which, if you’ve been
paying attention, seems less and less evil the more you look at it. Every time you zero
in on a situation and pick it apart, you find less “evil” and more...circumstance. In
fact, at the end of it all, Phillip Cole proposes a radical idea that evil doesn’t actually
exist. The word evil is a catchall term to describe bad things.
The sometimes this has a use, but more often than not it serves to oversimplify, especially
if you call something “evil” and just walk away from it. I’m going to do us a
solid by the way and not talk about Hitler for on--aw except for just then. But I am
going to talk about something that’s a lot more real to a lot of us, and a lot harder
to look at complexly: terrorism.
On September 11th 2001, 19 extremists hijacked three airplanes with the intent to use them
as a weapon. Two of the planes found their targets, striking the World Trade Center buildings.
All in all, 2,996 people died, hijackers included.
And on November 13th 2015, a series of coordinated suicide bombings and mass shootings occurred
in Paris, France killing 130 people and injuring hundreds more.
And sure, it may be fun to pick apart The Enclave, Vault-Tec, Alduin, Umbrella, and
The Institute and consider that they’re not, in fact evil. Hell, even wall street
traders, divorced from empathy and the consequences their actions bring upon individual people,
we can stop to consider that these are human beings who made choices.
But there are actions like the attacks on the World Trade Center and Paris that stretch
our abilities to empathize. Even suggesting it now seems wrong. “Evil” is easier.
“Evil” is more comfortable. “Evil” protects us from having to contemplate the
motivations and minds of people who are so desperate to inflict harm on other people
that they are willing to strap explosives to themselves.
“Evil” is easier than even trying to unwrap the complex and old geopolitical circumstances
that reach all the way back to World War II, or even further back, to the age of Imperialism,
where European countries developed the fun habit of arbitrarily carving up swaths of
lands and turning them into “territories” without any respect to the incredibly diverse
local cultures. Thinking of extremists as “evil” is more comfortable than facing
the possibility that by providing arms and destabilizing governments to suit our own
short term interests we may be at least partially responsible for the circumstances that made
extremism possible to begin with.
Calling regimes and countries “evil” makes it easier to justify retaliations that cost
half a million Iraqi citizens their lives. Calling someone else “evil” makes it easier
to ignore the possibility that we, ourselves, may be “evil” to someone else. Evil keeps
us from empathizing with others, but more importantly, dismissing actions as “evil”
can keep us from examining the circumstances surrounding horrible, horrible acts. And if
we don’t try to understand WHY these terrible things are happened, how can we ever hope
to try to prevent them happening again in the future? And don’t get me wrong, empathy
and understanding are not the same thing as endorsement: trying to see the human behind
terrible tragedies does not make the tragedies any less terrible--but it can be a terrible
thing that you know, and something that you know and understand—well, that is a potential
tragedy in the future you might be able to stop.
Video games offer us a safe place to explore morals, ideas, and consequences--they’re
a place where we can ask these questions without it feeling too weird. We can explore the motivations
of organizations like The Enclave, Umbrella, or Shao Khan if you’re feeling frisky. But
I want to be perfectly clear: these questions aren’t meaningless. The questions that games
ask us, and the questions we ask games and ourselves are incredibly important and carry
real weight, and affect the way that we look at the world around us. Can you understand
Alduin? Are Synths people? Is the Enclave evil? Or more importantly: are we? Thanks
for watching.
I have no idea if I’m in focus but before we go any further we have to hit the sponsorship
music for a sponsored unboxing from 1 UP Box. So this is a- this is February’s 1 Up Box
that they have sent to me, and I cannot figure out how to open it. Okay. Let’s see what’s
in here, they say… I understand that there’s supposed to be a shirt every time, so let’s
see what we got here. I’m not going to fake any emotion, even though I’m- ooookay I
see something I’m actually kinda excited about. I have an amazingly beautiful Link
on the “Game of Thrones” throne. Kinda awesome- I have NO idea where it’s going
to go in my life. Alright, we have a AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH! Okay, this I’m actually pretty stoked about,
it is a Deadpool [incoherent]. Why is the- okay, marketing thing, why is the letter a
thing. Where are all the vowels. It’s a Pokémon pin- is it upside down? Ah, there
we go it’s Mew, I was like “what is that ugly fetus monster”. I can’t get it- to
get in- focus… I don’t actually know what it’s referencing so or what video game it’s
referencing because I’m apparently a looser and don’t know and WOW- GET OUT OF THERE.
GAAAAAW. Haha, I hope that’s not worth any money because I totally just ruined it. So
this is all the stuff and I just discovered that there’s actually a guide that comes
with it that I could have used the whole time to make myself look very smart, but instead
you can see how stupid I am, and if you’re interested it’s 13 bucks, we’ll have a
link down in the description, and we’ll be giving one of these away to a lucky ShoddyCast
subscriber. Yum, so just leave a comment in the comments telling me your opinion even
if your opinion is a bad one that doesn’t agree with me. It’ll be random, I will randomize
and pick people I won’t even look at what you say. So just comment and please subscribe
to the channel, that’s all. Just don’t say anything racist.
And now that that’s over what do you guys think? Is evil real? Am I crazy? Did I stay
up far too late? I did. And before you ask, no I’m only an hour into Undertale but it’s
probably a good game to play if you’re curious about exploring this topic more. Based on
my hour into it. Another game that I highly recommend if you want to experience what it’s
like to emphasize characters that are not typically empathized in a lot of games is
“Life is Strange”, which spends a lot of time empathizing bullies for one of my
favorite ones where it take characters who are usually one dimensional people who exist
solely to make other people miserable and makes them way more complex. Anyway thank
you for watching an thank you for putting up with our sponsorship and if you are interested
in having a free 1 UP BOX of your own- spoiler alert I’m recording this before opening
the box, you’re getting a peak behind the cloth- just leave a comment down below, we’ll
be picking one lucky ShoddyCast subscriber to get their own 1 UP BOX. That’s very exciting
I hope I didn’t break anything, but I guess we’ll find out when we do the thing that
already happened that I haven’t seen yet. Anyway, thank you so much, and I’ll see
you in a couple- I’ll see you next week for other stuff, but I’ll see you for Rethinking
in a couple of weeks. You stay sexy and beautiful. Yeah… Woah…