Into The Philosophical Morass With Thee
Over here, Akhilajnya is pursuing the noble art of quiet self-infuriation and indignation which philosophically introspecting chiefly involves.
Here, he considers what influence is. A quick summary of his position from the article follows:
No one can truly give anything to anyone. A person can only speak in the language of the other’s existing logos. At best, influence is an illusion—a shared mirage between speaker and listener, where the listener believes transformation is occurring through external force, while in truth, the transformation is evoked from within.
This is, indeed, a valid way of seeing the concept of influence. On the other hand, it also somewhat supposes a conscious agent. What about all those seeds people have that they do not know they have? Here enters the smokey depths of the subconscious.
Story Time
While Akhilajnya endeavors to find the scalpel to cleanly cut the subject into discrete parts, I will instead take the route of telling you a story. Back in 2016, a game was released on several systems called We Happy Few by Compulsion Games. The game unfortunately shared a similar vibe to the pre-existing survival horror genre games of the Bioshock universe and appears almost to take place in the same continuum. A lot of time was spent by the game studio decrying the fact they were emphatically not Bioshock. (Thou protesteth too much?)
The plot of We Happy Few revolves around a post World War II society that has done some bad things and it very much wants to forget having done those bad things to the point that it demands everyone take a drug called “joy” that puts the inhabitants in a euphoric state–or at the very least–a compliant state. The main character works as a censor for a government office and discovers that when he is not taking his “joy” reality is a terrible nightmare scenario that the pills were disguising as acceptable parameters of quotidian life. Of course, everyone taking their joy notices his attitude, and their response is to try to force him to take the pill, or kill him. At this juncture, the game turns into a kind of riff of The Twilight Zone meets The Prisoner aesthetic.
Remember, This Was 4 Years Before COVID
At the time the game arrived, I pointed it out to people who were avid gamers and suggested to them that this specific game was closer to a kind of confessional–that someone had decided to turn some of the darker facets of our world and its mechanisms into a game so that people might be able to more easily pretend that it was simply fiction. If one watches a movie, or reads a book, or even plays a meaningful game with a plot, there is typically that moment of “Ya know, I think I learned something here,” if a person is truly engaged with the process. I made some statements at the time about how the medical system cannot always be trusted and that the game demonstrated that point in a way that my simply saying so could not. People played the game, beat it, and then, only a short 4 years later, were not sure whether or not they ought to take the COVID vaccine. In fact, many of them did. It was as if I had never said anything about this game, and as though they had never played it or learned anything from the experience of doing so.
Presidential Election 2024
By the time we get to the presidential election of 2024, Kamala Harris decides to run on what? You’d never guess it: joy. For four years, the country underwent a succession of less than ideal changes with which it is still grappling, and people who actually played the silly video game did not or could not see that Harris was actually like some cartoon character from the game! “Do not worry about the state of the world, take your vaccines, focus on joy!” Was this art imitating life, or life imitating art? A confessional? A plan designed as a game?
The Tyranny of the Subconscious
What We Happy Few tries to address is the maladjusted coping mechanism of denial. When people refuse to acknowledge something they did or are harboring within themselves, they have no choice but to shove the content into a file marked “stuff I’m not going to worry about”. The obvious outcome of that, though, is to have a thousand buttons that a breeze can blow by and push that suddenly have a person doing whatever it is that someone else wants them to do just so long as they do not have to deal with the thing they are trying to avoid. The desire to “coast” and to do no “internal work” is the main drive. The only influence necessary is to tell someone that they can take that path and continue to do what they have been doing. Influences, in the social media aspect, are not really doing anything other than telling people what they want to hear. In this regard, Akhilajnya is right. However, I would hesitate to call these proclivities “seeds”. They are more like the opposite of seeds–maybe rot or blight. There can be no real persuasion or influence where there is nothing to persuade or influence other than a kind of lethargy that courts death. There is no substance in such a temple. Only a vacuum.
Influence As An Illusion?
Yes, the influence is an illusion in the case Akhilajnya points out which supposes substance. However, it is not even an illusion in the case where there is no substance. It is nothing at all since there is nothing for it to do other than uplift nothingness. It is simply a burnt offering on the altar of the subconscious where no experience, prophecy, or message gets through other than the ones the person wants to hear. “Be happy, go for joy! You don’t need to change! There’s nothing wrong with anything here!” These voices are the gods they must serve. Whatever sacrifice that requires, they will make.
On Continuity
Without ruining the game, in case you, reader, decide to play it, if you do happen to also play the games in the Bioshock realm, I think you are likely to discover an overlap in all those dark secrets that lie at the heart of the plot of each of them. Asking yourself why this specific theme arises in each game might be worth thinking about–and that it showed up on a national stage even moreso. A more terrifying prospect is that those games were never games. They were judgments and indictments. If you were only amused by the game, guess where the sentencing will fall?