Lately I have been watching a friend play BioShock Infinite, something to which I paid little attention at the time of its release. At first the setting and the story were attracting me, as they pertain to my field of interest… but later in the story, after acquainting us with an archetypal capitalist, I noticed that the story was getting a little ‘darker’—in a familiar way—and it soon devolved into what I feared: another subplot about how much revolution sucks.
I’ve seen it already in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Metro 2033, so I know how it goes: first the writers lure you in with a display of the prerevolutionary situation, and at first they portray the revolutionaries positively, but as the climax approaches the revolutionaries go around suddenly committing atrocities without any clear rhyme or reason, nothing can be done to prevent it, ordinary people hate it (so the revolutionaries abuse them too), and the lesson is that revolution is no better than the prerevolutionary situation.
Why do revolutionaries go through the trouble of making revolution? Not because the material conditions (whatever those are) made revolution inevitable, no. It’s because revolutionaries are stupid and unreasonable. Simple as that. That’s probably also why they commit atrocities, and also why they can’t figure out how to keep their supporters without resorting to coercion or violence.
The message, it seems, is an advertisement for conservatism: ‘Yes, we’ll admit that things may be awful now, but no matter how awful they may be, anything else would be worse, so just shut up and do nothing.’ They don’t state it outright—possibly because of how embarrassing it would look—but that is the only conclusion that I can draw. (Otherwise, the only alternatives are either that the writers wanted to subject innocent people to their angsty, immature whining, or they simply wanted to waste their time, both of which would be bafflingly unwise of them.)
Is there anything inaccurate about my observation? Because otherwise, I don’t know why these presumed professionals would suddenly subject us to this lazy and shallow writing.
Wow, thanks.
In my mind, I do see the concept of a revolution that way - a revolution that topples the power structures creates a power vacuum. This leads to instability and for a competition to fill that void. The idea is that the people who have a better chance of winning the race to fill those voids are those who are willing to exploit the most effective tools of power - violence, oppression, and reward. So, a revolution creates an instability that is likely to be exploited by the greedy to the detriment of others.
But I have never been in a revolution. My ideas of what a revolution looks like comes from that trope that you mention - movies, video games, and novels will narrate these dynamics, and through repeated exposure to this logical sequence it has come to feel natural.
You bringing up this point makes me re-consider what I believe. On the one hand, I do not think that these ideas are fully invented - they make sense, and many revolutions in history have indeed followed this trope, and a revolution will cause an instability that will hurt people, so I am not going to do a 180 and throw away all my intuition about the topic.
However, it is also obvious that reality is a lot more nuanced, and it makes sense that these tropes can be used to highlight and re-inforce the negative aspects of a revolution. It is good to think about that.