Innocence, Individualism & Moralism in Elysium
By @junawerA defining feature of the cultures of the Réal Belt is the worship of larger-than-life individuals: the innocences who are seen as personifications of history and progress, compressed and accelerated events, comprising innovations, discoveries, advancements of humanity; infallible, invincible, inevitable. Individuals who become legends, myths, and hauntings.
Dolores Dei is said to have been “the least self-aware of all the innocences”, and I think an innocence must have extreme tunnel vision (*Egg Head voice* TUNNEL VISION TO THE MEGA, if you like), a dissociation from the self even, to see the bigger picture and for their own will to be the most important, momentous thing in the world — an innocent is like a prophet or visionary standing on their ivory tower with extremely concentrated single-mindedness. As fascinating as that is, it can be just as eerie.
Their respective fields like innovation, travel, militarism, statehood, finance, urban planning, etc. and their methods, programs, campaigns are great in the sense of grand. Grand gestures, changes, and turning points in history and society — mostly regarded as positive ones, though likely because their positive aspects and grandiosity may simply overshadow their negative ones into irrelevance and oblivion.
War crimes are justifiable for an innocence, before or during their rule. Suppression by military force, mass resettlement, colonisation become mere footnotes. Franconegro, the father of militarism and nationalism and closely associated with fascism, was an innocence as well. Even torture, despotism, and world conquest are indicated to be not necessarily out of the question for an international political figure to become an innocence. It’s failure and defeat that seem to brand those regarded as false-innocences, like Ernö Pasternak, no matter how powerful they may have been before.
Had the Founding Party/Holy Party elected someone like Ernö Pasternak before the event of their failure, would that failure have been averted? Or if it had happened still, would the title of innocence be smeared? The election of the innocence becomes something of a gamble in that regard; from vision and intelligence to privilege and power, everything has to fit and it almost never does — there have only been six innocences in recorded history.
The last innocence Sola is an interesting case, as she is said to have left history largely to its own devices to encourage people to excel on their own rather than prescribing to a deified model of history, then to have been criticized for not having taken the side of the left during the revolution. She was called an anti-innocence for not imposing her will and resigning after an assassination attempt. Does she fit the moralist ideal or does she counter it?
With the Founding Party electing an innocence and, as an organisation, fitting neatly besides the Moralintern I can’t help but wonder how they select certain individuals and who they sideline. The Moralintern is seen as the continuation of Dolores Dei’s work (who in turn has been elected by the Founding Party) and though they accommodate innocentic rule if an innocence is elected, the innocence may be thought of as also having to accommodate moralist/Moralintern/Founding Party ideals.
The political entity that accommodates innocentic rule within its system and serves as a direct legacy of Dolores Dei’s work is the Coalition/Moralintern which represents moralism/centrism. Even though the existence of innocences started before the organisation’s inception, innocentic worship is inextricable from it and an innocence will hardly exist or operate outside of it.
An innocence and their lifetime is marked by world/society-altering implementations, inceptions, legislation, innovations, discoveries, and enforcements of their will. Centrism, on the other hand, hides stagnation and inertia behind a mask of progress, stability, and what they call humanism. In the words of the thought Kingdom of Conscience: “Centrism isn’t change – not even incremental change. It is *control*. Over yourself and the world.”
Other quotes from the game associate the Moralintern’s modus operandi with stalling, diluting, compromising, progress being measured in centimetres, abstract goals like “ensuring the continuance and flourishing of mankind”, and quelling hope for any drastic changes/improvements in one‘s lifetime — as if the organisation is an impartial entity like linear time but ready to smite anything with the wrath of god if need be. As the unofficial motto of moralism goes: “For a moment, there was hope.”
The abstract argument of “humanity as a whole” is one of the privileged. If a group of people, whether small or large, as long as they are marginalized and powerless/voiceless enough, fall through, what is it to the grander scheme of the progress of humanity? What are inequalities, injustices, worker exploitations, deaths, etc. if you can build or allow something as grand as, let’s say, the (predicted) atomic bomb (which, I’m sure, will fall under the same sentiment of inevitability when it succeeds)?
The inhuman and subtly sinister qualities associated with Dolores Dei are shared by the Moralintern and centrism — something only the least privileged will notice or come into contact with. “There *is* something lonely, paranoid, and even terrifying that people seldom mention […] This subtle terror is part of her iconography.” It’s also part of moralism and its institutions. When you get deeper into moralism it’s represented by Charles Villedrouin, the Sunday Friend, and the Coalition Warship Archer, an official within the Coalition Government who never reveals what his job truly entails and a faceless inhuman entity, both speak in riddles and with subtlety, voicing statements ranging from eloquent indifference to kind cruelty.
The mask of humanism on moralism can easily slip under the pretense of casus belli to unleash hell and destruction, like the threat of the communists and anarchists winning at the turn of the century. The deserter tells of how he watched “The mask of humanity fall from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone – everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.” Revolutions are about the collective uniting against oppressive forces and the cross-insulindian movement that liberated Revachol from the monarchy was crushed by the Coalition shortly afterwards — as if the unofficial moralist motto “For a moment, there was hope” sounded again.
Centrism likes to plant itself in the middle but it must have seen a potential communist state as further away from itself than the monarchy that had already existed and is still favoured by nationalists/fascists. The Revacholian suzerainty was closer to and directly derived from the monarchy of Suresne/Sur-La-Clef, where Dolores Dei and the queen she advised resided.
If moralism sees social-democracy or the choice of it over moralism as a “disappointment” then the sentiment towards communism moves in only one direction. Perhaps, it was not so much the loss of the monarchy but the potential of a communist state afterwards that set the Moralintern’s Operation Death Blow into motion.
The Coalition is now the governing and surveilling body over Revachol: “the nations that stopped the disaster of the Revolution.” The Zone of Control has the goal of making Revachol politically, legally, and economically as similar as the rest of the Réal Belt (again) and in accordance with moralist ideals. As the Coalition Warship Archer stated: “We’ll succeed in our mission the moment Revachol rejoins the international community as a sovereign democracy.”
Another aspect of Elysium is the tension between the notions and ideologies surrounding the individual and the collective.
Though, there is also not really a clear divide between what can be regarded as individualistic or collective, which in themselves can be contradictory things depending on the situation or context; some cross-pollinating in their features too, etc. For example, the individualistic “hero” archetype is also something that befalls Harry when he starts the communist thought process Mazovian Socio-Economics: “He is the Big Communism Builder“ and the player themself may anticipate “chosen-one” grandeur within the story.
Is collectivism seen as a commune without individuals or as individuals forming a commune; is individualism seen as everyone being an individual or as only a few actually being given/granted the status of an individual while the rest are a grey mass? (I usually tend to go with the latter for each.) It’s interesting, almost paradoxical, that with individualism only a few select actually are individuals (prominent, idealized, worshipped etc.) whereas the rest are grey masses, and that by favouring a collective worldview everyone in themselves is/becomes an individual, not necessarily widely known of but valued in their own right.
The tension between the individual and the collective can be even seen, though it might be something of a reach, in Dolores Dei and her assassin: “’We were supposed to come up with this ourselves!’ the man was reported to have screamed at the innocence.” Dolores Dei is this exceptional, seemingly out-of-this-world individual who tampered with the course of history and the achievements of humanity at large. (Though the game also established that any point of view regarding this topic is prone to extremes.)
Moralism and the Moralintern with its built-in accommodation of innocentic rule and its crushing of Revachol’s commune obviously favour individualism. Another thing that benefits the few is capitalism which in Disco Elysium is shown to also fit very neatly besides/within centrism: “Money and moralism? Peanut butter und jelly!” (X). Many Founding Party members invented modern corporate finance, the ICP protects corporate interests, the Coalition Warship Archer is “ready to unleash artillery fire if you were to rise up against the market”, “maintaining high levels of economic activity” is a top priority of the Coalition, and the moralist system at large is often associated with capital.
Communards prefer the collective, which is perhaps why a communard cannot be an innocence (or why it hasn’t happened yet). But perhaps more strikingly, communism is marked by failure and defeat — antithesis to the infallible innocence who “wins because an innocence can’t help but win”. Fascism, as much as it’s seen as populism just like communism, is still closer to individualism than collectivism. It favours kings and despots. A Franconegro was and perhaps still is closer to being an innocence than a Kras Mazov.
So, moralism favours hierarchic, top-down politics and inertia of the masses while waiting for a single larger-than-life individual to push society/humanity to excel at an increased level and pace. And the political body of stagnation and stability of the status quo worships the personification of inevitability and kills any movement that gives more power to the collective (and takes away from capital).
Elysium’s rationalization of the existence of innocences and the course of history as inevitabilities is really intriguing and not new to our world as well. One can read countless historians repeating themselves on not seeing events of history, especially horrible ones like dictatorships or wars, as inevitable. And one can hear countless people falling into the mindset of not being able to prevent anything.
The general view seems to be “if it works then it is right”: the defining quality of an innocence is that they “can’t help but win” and the revolution failed because failure and malfunction seems to be attached to communism. As Joyce said: “They might really have built something better. But they didn’t, because they lost.”
Factors like privilege and luck don’t seem to be discussed. Inevitability and “fate” is something favoured by the privileged as usually the flow of time may simply take the path of least resistance. It takes the most effort to change the status quo and the least for those with the right cards, privilege and power, to simply keep having them in hand. Perhaps, there is also a sense of defeatism involved. It’s interesting that Elysium at large and its historians favour the notion of inevitability. Even indulging in thinking of alternative courses of history or the praxis of preventability may be widely regarded as irrelevant. On top of that, not much is known about the isolas outside of innocentic influence.
This is also why Elysium gives me sort of “afterlife” vibes. Where else but in the afterlife, especially one carrying a name from ancient Greek mythology where the notion of fate reigned supreme, does the course of reality lose its malleable qualities?
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