Today we’re gonna take a look at the politics in the Fallout video games, namely the neoliberal
politics in the Fallout video games. So let’s start by quickly summarising what neoliberalism
is.
Neoliberalism, is the
dominant ideology in the capitalist world, it aims to eliminate the concept of the community,
turning collectivism into a dirty word, instead putting the focus on individual responsibility
and achievement. If you’re living in poverty it’s because you’re lazy and if you’re
wealthy it must be because you’re great and worked very hard.
Neoliberalism is also characterised by a fetishistic devotion to the free market as the solution
to all of the world's ills, rampant deregulation, destruction and privatization of social services,
and incredible riches for a few, while the rest of us get the scraps. The government
needs to mind its business when corporations want to do as they please but as soon as they
fail and need bailing out, you can bet they’ll be there with a bit of good old welfare.
Most importantly, neoliberalism has been incredibly effective at presenting itself as something
natural, as a default human state. Mark Fisher describes this in his book Capitalist Realism.
The title refers to a phenomenon he describes as.
“the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system,
but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”
Later in the book, he goes on to describe the process by which an ideology ceases to
be seen as ideological:
“An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it
cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly,
neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense.
Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a 'business ontology'
in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education,
should be run as a business.”
So here we are. The end of history. Communism has been beaten back, dissenting ideas have
been crushed and any person of sound mind would surely agree there is no other economic
system. No other way of doing ANYTHING that could rival neoliberal capitalism. This is
humanity’s Final Form.
Now that we’ve achieved the perfect system. Even the end of the world couldn’t change
it.
(I don’t want to set the world on fire)
What if capitalism killed the world. And survived.
The Fallout series takes place in an alternate Earth that seemingly stopped culturally developing
at a point similar to our 1950s, when a global nuclear war destroyed civilisation as well
as most life on the planet. The world of Fallout is a tragic but humorous snapshot of 50s style
and cold war hysteria trapped in time forever, and progressively becoming the backdrop to
the more pressing current events of the games themselves. Many of the factions fighting
for power of the various corners of the wasteland simply replicate the political ideologies
of the pre-war era. Clearly meant as ghoulish exaggerations of real world politics. Though
often it’s telling how little they need to exaggerate.
Unlike many post-apocalyptic settings that, at most, give a passing explanation for How
The World Fell and focus on the people and events after that Fall, Fallout keeps the
old world and the new, irradiated world fundamentally tied together, and it uses the factions at
play in its universe as political allegory, perhaps in the hope that removed from the
context of a world we recognize, we can see these ideas with new eyes.
To discuss the politics of Fallout we first need to talk about the events that lead to
the destruction of civilisation. Before the Great War that saw the major global powers
launching their nuclear arsenals at each other, the stability of the world was rocked by an
energy crisis. This universe’s technology was even less energy efficient than our own
and as they quickly sapped the fossil fuel reserves of the planet, pushed on by consumerism
and military investment - war in the middle east over oil began to break out with a European
invasion. No political parallels to draw there.
The Americans eventually discovered what very well could have been the last untapped source
of crude oil in Alaska which quickly resulted in war with China, ultimately leading to the
launching of the nukes.
The Fallout universe has mostly kept it ambiguous who launched first, One character in Fallout
2 who insists the Chinese launched first, and I imagine if we were able to speak to
anyone from China we could find someone insisting the Americans launched first.
But if we were to look at any of the global powers at the time to understand who instigated
the end of the world, we would come up dry. The nuclear apocalypse was not the work of
the Americans, the Chinese, or the Soviets. It was Vault-Tec. An incredibly large, powerful,
and well connected corporation with the US government in their pocket who stood to profit
immensely from the hysteria of nuclear armageddon. It’s made clear throughout various log entry’s
in the games that the Vault-Tech higher ups knew exactly when the end was going to come,
and it’s even explicitly stated in the script of an unmade Fallout film that the Vault-Tech
executive launched the first nuke.
It perfectly completes the narrative of the Fallout universe for Vault-Tec itself to have
begun the nuclear war. Global destruction the likes of which humanity had never seen
before, all because of one massive, unchecked company.
Let’s fast-forward to the post-apocalyptic Fallout world we’re familiar with.
Through factions like the Brotherhood Of Steel as well as an assortment of pre-war robots
we meet throughout the wasteland we get glimpses into the mentality of the US military leading
up to the war. Aggressive, jingoistic, xenophobic, and hilariously anti-communist. Fallout pokes
fun at the Better Dead Than Red attitude of cold war era America, and even their most
heavy handed satirical characters like Liberty Prime honestly are only a very slight exaggeration
of what the real Red Scare sounded like.
Many fans of the series have unwittingly made this political commentary much more cutting
my seemingly not understanding that this attitude is being MOCKED. Instead identifying with
this mentality and happily repeating these quotes as if they weren’t intended to be
seen as a ridiculous relic from a world that destroyed itself with these very attitudes.
While this overt political commentary tells us a lot about the Fallout universe, there’s
something else at work here. Capitalism may have killed the world. But it didn’t die.
The wasteland is a snapshot of pre-war America. Sometimes in literal ways as you discover
skeletons of people killed by the bombs endlessly repeating their final acts for nothing. But
more than that, the political questions haven’t moved on. 200 years and the end of all things
and we still have a militaristic conservative group obsessed with protecting this image
of an Ideal World from a period in the past, and killing anyone that conflicts with this
image.
We still have neoliberal ideologues waxing poetic about the importance of individual
liberty while using state violence to control their citizens
We still have incredibly wealthy and well connected men manipulating political events
toward their own desires.
We still buy and sell necessities on the market, even using a materially worthless but symbolically
valuable currency. Something as arbitrary as a bottlecap.
Does it look familiar? You can paint it up in a grey-brown hue and add a few fantasy
creatures and mutations… but nothing has really changed.
But nowhere is neoliberalism’s alienating banality felt more than in the interaction
you the player character have with the world in these games. You are individualism personified.
Able to do more or less anything you want. You as an individual can go where you want,
and take what you want provided you have the force to protect it. But you can’t meaningfully
interact with society itself. You have theoretically endless freedom but can effect nothing. 90%
of the time you spend in the games you’re completing tasks that leave the world identical
to how it was before you began the game. The one moment of agency you’re afforded generally
comes at the end, when you get to choose a faction and their corresponding real world
ideology and win that little shred of wasteland for them.
And then… still nothing changes. The names of the people controlling certain locations
changes but there is no systemic change, there is no economic change. The new faction in
charge might be making life a bit better or worse for the faction they like/dislike, but
capitalism continues to replicate itself throughout the wasteland.
At no point, does your player character or anyone else in the game even seem to question
this. Hell hardly anybody even seems interested in how the world was destroyed in the first
place. Fights to control certain areas in the name of certain factions are strictly
in the interest of power, it doesn’t even occur to any of the factions in the game to
meaningfully build something beyond what existed before the war. They genuinely can’t imagine
a world outside of the world they know, that has been so fundamentally shaped by pre-war
capitalism. This is just the way we do things. There is no alternative. It’s easier to
imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism.
The true dystopia of the Fallout universe isn’t because of the bombs. It’s because
even the bombs couldn’t stop neoliberal capitalism’s hegemony over not just our
economic system but the way we think about the world and how we can interact with it.
The irony is probably not lost on Bethesda that they’ve released multiple titles in
a universe where an unchecked corporation caused the downfall of civilisation and the
economic model that facilitates their 3 billion dollar net worth is painted in such a grim
light.
Robert Pfaller describes what he calls interpassivity, the delegation of pleasure and consumption,
but also the delegation of activity. For example, consuming a piece of media that is anticapitalist
and feeling a sort of catharsis, as if you yourself had opposed capitalism, as if you
yourself had taken an action. When in reality all you’ve done is give Bethesda your 60
dollars. Remember, neoliberalism seeks to present itself as something apolitical, as
a fact rather than a value, so it can and will commodify other political ideologies,
happily displaying them as some quaint novelty, something obviously not applicable in this
modern post historical era. If there is a market for anticapitalism, the capitalists
will sell it to you.
Even in our fictional worlds, we can scarcely escape the all encompassing influence of capitalist
realism. Even between battling super mutants and navigating underground vaults full of
hostile robots, there is an unspoken understanding that the main values of neoliberalism remain
the default.
In Fisher’s book he says this about Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain:
In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the
despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated,
tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another
piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that
his every move was a cliche scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliche. The
impasse that paralyzed Cobain is precisely the one that Jameson described: like postmodern
culture in general, Cobain found himself in 'a world in which stylistic innovation is
no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through
the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum'.
The skeletons littered throughout the wasteland aren’t the only ones frozen in time. Just
like the factions throughout the Fallout games endlessly replicate the inconsequential political
squabbles of the neoliberal era, so do we. So long as neoliberalism succeeds at making
itself a fact, and not a value. Common sense, and not ideology. We will remain intellectually
paralyzed, unable to meaningfully solve any of our problems because we cannot imagine
solutions beyond the level of the individual. As such we will remain trapped in time, endlessly
refighting the same political battles, rehashing the same cultural moments and discussions.
We will remain, a snapshot, endlessly repeating our final act, for nothing.