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.
Maybe its because that’s how the American revolution turned out. High promises that were ultimately dashed with all of the ideas that made people willing to fight for it abandoned and suppressed. Just compare Thomas Paine’s writings with the reality of what the US became and its night and day. He was basically the chief theoretician of the US revolution being read across the country but when it actually came time for the government to follow through on those promises it simply became an even more entrenched aristocratic system. The founding fathers pushed him far away from any chance at government power and slandered him hard to make sure that even long after his death, people like Theodore Roosevelt would still run his name through the mud.
Hell, even reading Paine today he’d be seen as a radical in many respects. Media would probably wrongly call him a socialist though he is closer to a social democrat but someone who is equivalent to a modern social democrat existing in the late 1700s is extremely radical. If he was raised today I’m fully convinced he’d be an ML.
Paine was pretty based for his time. Socialist and union groups in the fledgling U.S. were attacked as “Painite”, and his writings on slavery still slap.