This video comment by
@Daojoan shaped my dreams tonight, and even keeps me busy now:
Why Fallout is a philosophical.masterpiece
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHZLZHF1IXISummary:
The
#Fallout television series presents itself as a video game adaptation, but buried beneath the retro-futurism and irradiated monsters is a rigorous philosophical thought experiment.
The show stages a 250-year-old debate between Thomas
#Hobbes and John
#Locke, gives both sides guns, and watches which worldview survives the apocalypse.
#Lucy McLean emerges from Vault 33 with the earnestness of someone who has never been betrayed.
She believes people are fundamentally decent when given structure, and that the surface world needs the right systems rebuilt.
Cooper Howard, now known as
#TheGhoul, has watched 219 years of human behavior under conditions of absolute scarcity.
He has seen every variation of desperate people doing desperate things, and concluded that
#altruism is a luxury good that evaporates when resources run low.
Trust is a
#vulnerability and cooperation is a sucker's bet.
She embodies Locke's optimism and faith in natural reason.
He has internalized Hobbes's diagnosis while rejecting the proposed solution.
The wasteland becomes their laboratory.
The show's real thesis proves more nuanced than either philosopher anticipated.
Human nature bends toward
#cooperation when conditions allow it, and snaps toward
#violence when they don't.
Lucy's faith in systems was faith in
#propaganda, built on lies she couldn't see from inside the vault.
The Ghoul's
#cynicism came from watching those systems fail catastrophically, convincing him that failure was the default setting rather than an aberration.
The same people who would kill for water in the wasteland would share water in Vault 33.
*Change the conditions and you change the behavior.*
Neither Hobbes nor Locke captured the whole picture, which is precisely why we've been arguing for 250 years and why a TV show set in a hellscape can still find fresh ground in the question...
Curt Johnson - Indie Genius
Philosophics
Raurquiz
eff1ngTV
inkorrupt (was here)
