Deus Ex: Jack London/George Orwell/V for Vendetta Syndrome

Miscellaneous General
1

I loved the game Deus Ex, but I also think it is a perfect example of the unprincipled nature of leftist ‘anti-authoritarianism’. Like London’s Iron Heel, Orwell’s 1984 and Moore’s V for Vendetta it is not really about anti-statism or anarchism it is about those even raysist right wingers. London’s book was about ebil corporations taking over the world and running everything for profit (oh noez!), even though he promoted a socialism which would be more tyrannical than any Singaporian plutocrat ever imagined. Orwell’s 1984 was all about Nazis, and pretty much irrelevant to the cottonball left-wing democratic socialist tyrannies we live under - which Orwell endorsed, even at their worse, because a return to laissez-faire would be even worse as it put power in the hands of ‘irresponsible individuals’. V for Vendetta was a nightmare future of what would happen if we let Margaret Thatcher have her (actually imaginary) free market reforms (by Godz!).

Deus Ex is the same thing. These eeevul corporations are corrupting the guberment (insert lolz) and they dare to envision providing high end nanotechnology to the rich while teh poor pplz are left without!

This is basically why I have a much more muted response to these than most libertarians; because if you examine the books and their authors you find that 1) they’re ridiculously unrealistic; 2) the system the authors promote inside and outside the books are far worse than the ones they fear; 3) there is no principled opposition to political power, just power in the hands of the wrong people. Like the New Left these people weren’t against managerial statism, they were against non-left-wing governments, especially including laissez-faire. Frankly, Feudalism is better than the things that Moore and Orwell think are so cool.

The same applies to Watchmen, where that nutty Rorschasch thinks that degenerates, humanitarian murderers and socialists are bad people (what a bastard!) I am glad it blew up in Moore’s commie face when Rorschasch became the most sympathetic character for many people.

Also, the new character from Deus Ex: Human Revolutions looks like Gordon Freeman trying to be a badass.

2

Wrong. Gordon Freeman IS badass. But I see what your trying to say.

3

FUN FACT: By the time of his death, George Orwell was staunchly opposed to Stalinism - and probably thus also Marxism-Leninism itself.

FUN FACT: The plot of 1984 is largely pilfered from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Orwell’s innovations seem to have been in the areas of “mental and linguistic terrorism” - things like doublethink and Newspeak.

4

FUN FACT: By the time of his death, George Orwell was staunchly opposed to Stalinism - and probably thus also Marxism-Leninism itself.

Yeah, he became a democratic socialist; which is just as crazy if in a different way. And as I said above, he hated laissez-faire more than Stalinism. He explicitly repudiated anarchism, too.

5

Which ending did you pick?

6

I’ve always wondered if old school leftist thinkers like Orwell would still be leftists if they were born 20 years ago, if their leftism was just a symptom of the times.

7

Which ending did you pick?

I merged with the Helios AI. Screw Tracer Tong, he was a luddite idiot and the Illuminati are such incompetent jokers they couldn’t run a convenience store.

8

What about Homage to Catalonia?

9

"The Road to Wigan Pier — to a gradualist socialism proposed with some eloquence by an author still dismissive of the more doctrinaire positions of the intellectuals and the committed. But in the book after that — Homage to Catalonia — Orwell has a doctrinaire position of his own.

Where The Road to Wigan Pier ends with a call to socialists to cease “bourgeois baiting” and build instead a kind of popular front, Homage to Catalonia repudiates such broad alliances. In the latter book, capitalism is fascism; capitalists, fascists, so there can be no common ground between socialists and capitalists, QED. Dismissive of nationalism and militarism until 1939, Orwell would spend the early war years advocating a distinctly national socialism, the better that his country might win"

The Politics of George Orwell, by Tyrrell

So he went from hating capitalism to being a Nazi to being a social democrat. Homage to Catalonia, like all his other works, is an anti-capitalist screed and, unlike his earlier works, is explicitly pro-socialist. This is actually the turning point in his downfall from ‘tory anarchism’ to outright collectivism; so Homage to Catalonia is particularly bad in my opinion.

I can only guess that most libertarians are so fish-in-water with this leftist stuff that they can’t spot it, because it was clear as day to me the first time I read it. My Leftist Crank radar is finely tuned; I think Paul Gottfried is the only other person I know of that has pointed out that fake-conservatives like Jonah Goldberg are raging leftists; their language and assumptions are pretty much exactly the same. Also why left-libertarians drive me absolutely insane, they’re so full of it they should start selling fertilizer.
So he went from hating capitalism to being a Nazi to being a social democrat. Homage to Catalonia, like all his other works, is an anti-capitalist screed and, unlike his earlier works, is explicitly pro-socialist. This is actually the turning point in his downfall from ‘tory anarchism’ to outright collectivism; so Homage to Catalonia is particularly bad in my opinion.“The Road to Wigan Pier — to a gradualist socialism proposed with some eloquence by an author still dismissive of the more doctrinaire positions of the intellectuals and the committed. But in the book after that — Homage to Catalonia — Orwell has a doctrinaire position of his own.
Where The Road to Wigan Pier ends with a call to socialists to cease “bourgeois baiting” and build instead a kind of popular front, Homage to Catalonia repudiates such broad
alliances. In the latter book, capitalism is fascism; capitalists, fascists, so there can be no common ground between socialists and capitalists, QED. Dismissive of nationalism
and militarism until 1939, Orwell would spend the early war years advocating a distinctly national socialism, the better that his country might win”

So he went from hating capitalism to being a Nazi to being a social democrat. Homage to Catalonia, like all his other works, is an anti-capitalist screed and, unlike his earlier works, is explicitly pro-socialist. This is actually the turning point in his downfall from ‘tory anarchism’ to outright collectivism; so Homage to Catalonia is particularly bad in my opinion.“The Road to Wigan Pier — to a gradualist socialism proposed with some eloquence by an author still dismissive of the more doctrinaire positions of the intellectuals and the committed. But in the book after that — Homage to Catalonia — Orwell has a doctrinaire position of his own.
Where The Road to Wigan Pier ends with a call to socialists to cease “bourgeois baiting” and build instead a kind of popular front, Homage to Catalonia repudiates such broad
alliances. In the latter book, capitalism is fascism; capitalists, fascists, so there can be no common ground between socialists and capitalists, QED. Dismissive of nationalism
and militarism until 1939, Orwell would spend the early war years advocating a distinctly national socialism, the better that his country might win”

So he went from hating capitalism to being a Nazi to being a social democrat. Homage to Catalonia, like all his other works, is an anti-capitalist screed and, unlike his earlier works, is explicitly pro-socialist. This is actually the turning point in his downfall from ‘tory anarchism’ to outright collectivism; so Homage to Catalonia is particularly bad in my opinion.

10

1984 is about any type of dictatorship, though Animal Farm is specifically against the Soviet Union. And there was no ‘safe’ democratic socialism at that time. It was actually pretty brave to even be against Stalinism. Stalinism was considered the great experiment and every academic wanted to be a fellow traveler.

Remember that Orwell wrote in response to The Road to Serfdom:

“in the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often — at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough — that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.”

He was on the side of the anarchists in the Spanish civil war. But didn’t repudiate anarchism. He just saw that on the one hand it was destroyed by the Soviet Union’s hand. And on the other that anarcho-syndicalist feeling quickly evaporated. In Homage to Catalonia he actually has to kill people for the benefit of anarchism. Which, for the most part, would put anyone’s mind and conscience against strong ideology. Which I think even primed his thinking for 1984; since he never wrote stuff like 1984 and Animal Farm before that incident.

11

1984 is about any type of dictatorship

No, it’s about a Nazi dictatorship. Duh.

“in the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often — at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough — that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.”

Cherry picking Orwell as libertarians usually do. He also wrote in that same review:

[H]e does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.

There are others, but that’s as explicit a repudiation of anarchism as any.

Orwell was not an idiot, or a psychopath like many leftists. But he was deeply confused and just as anti-libertarian as he was anti-fascist.

12

It’s pretty obvious when the capitalists in the book are pigs.

13

Exactly. Orwell is saying, “the communists are just as bad as the capitalists!” I wish communists acted like capitalists (aherm, China).

14

What I found strange was that Deus Ex (2000) had the premise of a false flag attack in New York blamed on a group of French anarchists.

You see, it wasn’t two years later that people envisioned that a certain attack in New York was a false flag attack wrongfully blamed on foreigners.

Dare I say that Deus Ex itself may have ingrained that impression in people? :wink:

15

Kafka’s Metamorphisis is a bad book because he didn’t know anything about what bugs really think.

16

I always got the same vibe from V for Vendetta as well. While I appreciate the anti-police state message, it basically hit you over the head with, “if you let conservatives run wild, this is what will happen.” I didn’t consider it was initially a criticism of Margaret Thatcher (because I never read the comic and have only seen the movie), but obviously the movie was suggesting, “this is what George Bush will do to your country” at the time it came out. It’s paranoid leftist fear.

Two years after Bush, I’m still here and we’re not a police state…Yet!

17

What I found strange was that Deus Ex (2000) had the premise of a false flag attack in New York blamed on a group of French anarchists.

You see, it wasn’t two years later that people envisioned that a certain attack in New York was a false flag attack wrongfully blamed on foreigners.

Dare I say that Deus Ex itself may have ingrained that impression in people? :wink:

The best part is that, if you take notice, the Twin Towers aren’t in the game’s skyline during the Liberty Island levels. But the game was made two years before the attacks. Put on your tinfoil hats!

Actually they were taken out to save on memory costs, but if I recall correctly they explained it somewhere in the game or the supporting documents that they had been destroyed in a terrorist attack sometime in the past. So keep your tinfoil hats on.

Also, while Bob Page was a triollionare buisnessman, he was also a corrupted member of the Illuminati and basically co-opted the state apparatus that they used, in order to persue his meglomania and god complex. Not the typical “greedy buisnessman” villian.

18

I never understood the whole idea that Bob Page was the “corrupt” member of the Illuminati. As if the other Illuminatus in the game were wonderful people.

That’s what another Illuminatus asserted, but he himself had no problem with wanting to be a “benevolent” organizer of human society for its own good. The game hints that the remaining Illuminati lived in delusion and were paranoid and extreme self-conscious if anything.

One Illuminatus living in a French mansion with a helipad in his house had a cryogenically frozen man inside a secret room behind a mirror. The frozen man was Lucius DeBeers. DeBeers believed he could still retain full control of his body while his disciple just kept him for advisory roles and left him in the freezer. What is interesting is that both were under the delusion that they had any meaning or usefulness in a technologically empowered society, and while one felt pity for both, one can assume they both were ruthless, unemotional people who cared little about the billions on the planet. Their “benevolence” was only for their own ego and satisfaction.

19

Deus Ex Spoilers Ahoy!

Well that’s the whole point Prateek. :wink: There’s a reason that the video for the Illuminati ending is very, very similar to the game’s opening movie with Page talking to Simons. None of them are good people, they’re just not quite as malevolent as Page is.

None of the endings are really that great. Hand society back over to the Illuminati, partially enslave humanity to a supercomputer, or destroy a hell of a lot of technological progress and set society back a few hundred years. Not really a clear cut choice.

20

For me it’s a clear cut choice. Whatever leaves me holding the most cards.

Libertarianism is cool and all, but if I have a choice between being a stone-ager and being a dictator I will pick dictator any day. Technology > Society.