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Centrism is not in vogue. It is seen as wishy-washy, noncommittal and the thing that opened the door quietly to all the right-wing populism the world has been seeing a surge in.
And to a degree it may be correct, but I'm here to mount a small defence of moderation at least, which we seem to have thrown out along with any notions of centrism. It does make sense, to a degree, to want to respond to what you see as extreme on the end you oppose, with an extreme of your own. However, is that the best way? Can a regular, normal person live sustainably in these extremes?
And I'm going to do this using the video game series Bioshock!
Background on the games
BioShock 1 and 2 were released in 2007 and 2010, respectively and are games that explore an underwater "utopia" built on an application of objectivism. I didn't play them when they first came out, but I watched a lot of content, so I knew what the story was about and eventually played them myself a few years later. Can recommend them if you haven't played them!
Now, like a lot of young people, I too read Atlas Shrugged, and for the first, perhaps half of the book, I was taken in on the girlboss journey of Dagny Taggart. However, by the end, the book definitely lost me. I believe Ayn Rand was writing out her trauma from a badly and violently applied socialist system being imposed on her and her family, who, by all accounts, lived a comfortable lifestyle before. As part of the bourgeoisie, she saw random apparatchiks and people who didn't deserve things get them just because they were now with the party, while her family starved. She was simultaneously incredibly deprived and suppressed by the regime, but also received an opportunity when the Russian Revolution allowed women to attend university. She was one of the first beneficiaries of that policy. Of course, even that was not without its problems, her barely being allowed to graduate, but all in all, she went through an incredibly traumatic time.
And her conclusion? Government - bad. Society - bad. Just look after yourself, forget everyone else. Of course, I'm being hyperbolic, but I remember walking away with that impression. Rather than her realising that all of this is just a result of the corrupting force of power, she concluded that the whole system should be thrown away; there is nothing to be learned from it. And since that system, which was built at least on the founding principles of "socialism - bad" (even though from the start it never was meant to be proper socialism if you ask me), then we must create the diametrically opposed philosophy, and it must be good, right? Right?
Again, I'm being over the top to make the point here, and I'm not dismissing her philosophy wholesale. I don't want to pull a Rand here! Some things,s like attention to the individual's needs, are important and seeking logic plus accepting objective reality are good. My issue here is the extremeness of the argument. Frankly, the world where everyone only ever looks out for themselves and nothing else sounds insufferable.
Bioshock 1
Enter Bioshock 1. Once upon a time, a chap named Andrew Ryan, I guess, read Atlas Shrugged (although there is no mention of that) and thought - I can do that! Set my own society. A Libertarian and Objectivist utopia by the name of Rapture. Everyone can come and be their best self without regard for pesky things like government, morality, ethics and care for society. You are "entitled to the sweat of your own brow". Sounds ... interesting. Oh, and all of that is under the ocean, so you get to occasionally see some whales swimming by because, of course, they figured out some extra strength ceiling-to-floor glazing. Ah, the human genius unbridled, truly!
You enter this "Rapture", and in the first 10 mins you are attacked by deformed and rabid humans, you pick up a wrench, attack back, inject yourself with a drug directly into your wrist and get electrical zappy powers in your hands! Oh, and the Utopia - very much a dystopia now.
Everyone pursuing their own interests, pleasures and goals has yielded the following in this utopia:
- Dr Steinman, a plastic surgeon, unbound by the Hippocratic Oath, keeps operating on patients seeking perfection. To him, aesthetics had become a moral imperative, so much so that he scribbled that motto in blood on the floor. And when one becomes unmoored from the constraints of ethics and care, one can truly reach the pinnacle of madness chasing that ideal. We find him cutting up a woman, who is not under anaesthesia, complaining to Aphrodite that it's not his fault, it's his patients' fault that they are not appreciative of his efforts. Patients who are all corpses. One turned out too fat, one is too tall, one too symmetrical, even. Also, it is not helpful to him that the drug for the superpowers I mentioned before is addictive and, in larger quantities, deforms people's bodies - poor lad, doomed from the start. The moral imperative had become completely moral degradation when he had no one to limit him.
- Sander Choen, an artist, who in search of inspiration. In that pursuit, he shows himself to be fickle, churlish and completely intolerant of any hint of critique, while he himself doles out scathing criticism as if it's an Olympic sport. He calls everyone who is not in complete awe of him a "doubter" - and kills them because freedom, right? To let you through his little area (which you will need to do to progress in the game), you have to help him complete his magnum opus, his quadtych. In simple words - find and kill his former disciples, photograph their corpses and put them on display. The display itself features statues that are holding up the pictures, but on closer inspection, you can see that they are all bodies covered in plaster. Cohen was promised a utopia where he could pursue his art and reach the highest of artistic heights - no consequences. After all, looking after your own self-interest is right and moral and how can an artist pursuing the highest art in true self-fulfilment be morally wrong?
- Brigitte Tennenbaum, a scientist who is in search of innovation, created a substance called Adam that alters the genes of people, giving them superpowers as mentioned above. However, this substance was highly addictive, over time caused mental deterioration and physical deformities and was ultimately the downfall of the society as people turned rabid. Her experiments, unburdened by ethics standards or morals, involved live human subjects as the initial substance was found only in tiny quantities in sea slugs. She needed to find a suitable "vessel" for mass production - and she did. For some reason, little girls were the best vector, and they started with the girls from the orphanage, and eventually, her financial backer just started snatching girls from around Rapture and turning them into "Little sisters" that are basically Adam factories. For years, she found nothing wrong with what she was doing, until eventually kidnapping and brainwashing girls, implanting sea slugs into them, finally got to her, and she started speaking out against this practice and her own invention. For this disavowal, she was labelled a madwoman only a few mere months after she was labelled a genius and a "Rapture gal".
All of this was enabled and lauded by the founder of Rapture - the aforementioned Rand reader, Andrew Ryan. He is a strong believer in competition (unless it's against him) and true freedom of speech, belief and endeavour (as defined by him and as long as it serves his purposes). Now you can see in the brackets what looks like a few interesting caveats, right? Well, as any person who has ultimate power and a very narrow vision of how things should work and everyone should live, he doesn't take kindly to deviations from the plan.
Take the other "villain" in the story, Frank Fontaine. Smuggler and a businessman in one, he was the first investor in the superpower-granting Adam and plasmids. He invested in the scientist (Tenenbaum) and in other causes like an orphanage (which was a front) and a house for the poor, which Ryan detested. Ryan believed that any handouts create parasites on society, and if you don't work, create or are productive in some way, you are worthless. However, not everyone can be a scientist or an artist. Someone had to be a cleaner, a plumber, and that is where Fontaine saw his opportunity to sway those workers to back him - eventually even creating his rebel alias - Atlas. After all, he should have the freedom to do as he wishes, right? Rapture was meant to be the utopia of freedom of commerce and innovation - he should be able to spend his money however he wishes. Not if Ryan had anything to say about it. He created a police force and basically ran an entire propaganda wing, harassed Fontaine's business, classified trading goods from the surface as smuggling, therefore illegal (so much for freedom of business) and eventually sank his department store to the bottom of the trench it was hanging over (remember this is all underwater). Ryan even committed the ultimate no-no - he "nationalised" Fontaine's company! The horror! The libertarian society is all about liberty...until it isn't.
Outside of that, anyone not with the programme got both censured and censored - including the aforementioned scientist Tenenbaum and the main villain of the second game, Sophia Lamb, but more on her later.
And the whole game is set in the dystopia that is the tenets of objectivism taken to their extreme. Everyone has gone insane because there were no guardrails to try to prevent unethical experiments that led to a very addictive, superpower-granting and mind-deteriorating substance to become a mass market commodity. At a very rapid pace, it is shown that nothing was sacred anymore in a place like Rapture. Not even children! Little girls, who became vessels to grow more of the substance, were now commodities. A line item on a spreadsheet, because ultimately, the pursuit of science was greater, the pursuit of self-interest was paramount.
In the end, it created a very hostile society that was basically a powder keg with a whole layer of "lower class" ready to ignite at any point. And ignite they did, with or without the Incinerate plasmid.
Bioshock 2
Bioshock 2, on the other hand, took an interesting kind of utopianism under the motto of "for the greater good". Many people think that it shows socialism, but I actually think it is not necessarily so. It still carries the objectivism philosphy and the way it sees its opposite. How Ayn Rand would portray her nemeses - the altruists. If you have never seen videos of her speak, the vitriol with which she speaks about altruism is astounding.
The way Objectivism views altruism is not just someone willing to put aside their own needs for a bit to help out someone else. Nope. It is a complete and total abdication of your identity. The sense of "self" is eliminated, as described in Rand's book Anthem.
Now there is an element of truth in that often controlling regimes aim to encourage a love for fatherland/party/society over the love for individuals. The Soviets were actually really good at this, creating heroes of people who had completely "given" themselves to the party. Case in point - if you were of a specific generation post-WW2 in the Soviet sphere of influence, you likely learned of the case of Pavlik Morozov. A boy who gave up his father to the party for stealing from the party. His dad, according to legend, basically kept a bit of food for the family so that he could feed them, but Pavlik was so dedicated to the fatherland that he reported his father, who was then executed. In reality, the story is potentially more complicated, but definitely, there was a child named Pavlik Morozov who reported on his father, and the Soviets twisted the story and made him into a hero.
That is a bigger part in my opinion of eliminating the self, less that your own individuality gets erased by being made to wear similar clothing, or there is a limitation on the hairstyles you can have. Those can be important, but in the scope of the above story, superficial. Eliminating the self to the point where you don't see yourself as a son, a member of a family - that can be very scary. The kind of love you can have between family, be they biological or chosen, cannot be shared with an entire society and instead it becomes a twisted sense of unity, of which eventually almost no one will be able to fulfil the requirements.
Back to Bioshock 2 and how that is all applied there. Sofia Lamb, as a psychiatrist and one of the leading minds of Rapture at one point, took advantage of the fact that many people were becoming persona non grata for Andrew Ryan. She used this and her intimate knowledge of people as a psychiatrist to form a sort of resistance movement, similar to Fontaine, taking advantage of those outside of the norms of Ryan's societal rules. While Fontaine, in his persona of Atlas, tapped into the rage that the addition of the substance Adam was breeding around, Lamb took a different approach. She saw how isolated and lonely people tended to feel in Rapture and offered them "salvation". Through words like "family", "paradise" and "common good" with her as a "mother".
At one point, it was discovered that Adam has a peculiar quality that allows it to be recycled out of dead bodies. However, it carried with it genetic memories of the people who had it in their bodies before. Kind of like part of their essence was stored in Adam itself and passed on to the next person. For many that resulted in Ghost-like visions of the past, and it led to intensifying the mental effects of Adam addiction.
When Lamb discovered this however, she saw the perfect vector through which to create her utopian - one person who can absorb all the memories of everyone in rapture, therefore erasing all of the self in themselves. She started with one of the other scientists there, who volunteered to become the first utopian, but it was a failure. The next experiment was to be her own daughter.
To get there, she made sure that everyone in Rapture basically got to worship her after the death of Ryan in BioShock 1. She created a cult from the seeds she sowed of appealing to the downtrodden masses, which is an inevitable result of rampant ultra-aggressive capitalism. In that sense, she was no better than Ryan, punishing people for not following her ideal, threatening with her omnipresence through her agents ("Big Sister is always watching").
She was so absorbed in her ideals as well that she was completely ready to give up her own daughter, Eleanor. This, after seeing how badly the first experiment failed with the scientist who volunteered to be the first "utopian" - he basically completely lost his mind, as he was not able to absorb everyone's thoughts and experiences and became, for lack of a better term, a monster. This did not deter Lamb as she believed her daughter exceptional (there is some potential merit to that claim), and that for her ideal, vision and utopia it was necessary.
One convenient detail she didn't let the masses in on, however, is the fact that all of them will have to die in order to make Eleanor into the utopian. If she is to absorb all the Adam from every person in Rapture, then Adam needs to be extracted, and that extraction is fatal, from what we can see. Some of the followers seem to be ready to die for the cause, but it is not made very clear if they know they won't be the ones living in the utopia that the utopian is said to usher in.
Lamb is so convinced of her righteousness and her ideals that she keeps talking to you, the protagonist, as if she knows exactly what you will do. Even when you don't do the things she says, she continues to change the narrative of your actions so that they match what she thought you would do. You can, for example, spare a person in the game when you get given the chance to take revenge, and even though she is so convinced you'd leap on the opportunity, when that doesn't happen, she is not at all cognisant of her own shortsightedness.
She and Ryan, although on opposing sides, have one thing in common. A belief so strong in their ideals that it made them blind to reality.
Now, all of this is not to say that objectivism or altruism are necessarily always wrong. Almost every philosophy has some sort of kernel of truth, but often those are taken to the extreme to create an entire prescription for society. It's good to have beliefs, but any belief that gets internalised to be the core of yourself will mean it is very tough, if not impossible, to change. After all, if the belief became the core of who you are, then the person you are basically has to die if that belief has to change. And in pursuit of its survival, that self may even end up corrupting the ideal for others, just to escape the cognitive dissonance reality presents to these ideals.
The other error I see is that maybe a theory is good in one scenario. But just because you have an idea of how something works doesn't mean you can apply that everywhere. I often see a narrow conclusion being applied to many disparate scenarios that have nothing to do with each other. It's how we get "tech-bros disrupting" an industry they know nothing about and more often than not, making a mess of things. And the more extreme and strict you take the application of a particular doctrine, the quicker its own demise, in my opinion.
Ultimately, whether it be socialism, objectivism, capitalism or Confucianism - these are all ideals of a kind, and we as humans are not ideal. What happens when people inevitably fall outside of the idealised parameters of your society?
In my mind, having goals and values, but also flexibility, is the key to how resilient your social order can be. What happens when someone falls ill? In Andrew Ryan's society, they automatically become parasites. In Lamb's society, they become unable to work for the common good and likely will need to die so as not to sap resources. However, illness is part of the human condition, whether it be temporary or chronic. It's not an edge case that you don't have to legislate for.
Centrism - not the answer, but...?
As mentioned above, I'm not at all saying centrism is the answer, especially in the modern sense of fence-sitting or with the recent shift of the Overton window - right lite.
Not at all, I think you have to have a certain set of values to be the centre of the community. Those values, however, have to be both clear and yet have a bit of flex to them. That is why I call them values, not ideals. If you believe in individual freedom, that is great for you! However, if you are going to apply that belief to more than just yourself, then it needs to be caveated automatically, for example, individual freedom, so long as it doesn't substantially interfere with another's individual freedom.
In this article, I'm not going to explore in-depth what moderation may look like, but be on the lookout for further pieces on socialism and moderation specifically, which will cover a smaller piece of the social puzzle in more detail.
So, no. The answer to the rise of the far right is not Leninism (violent rise of the far left). Going from extreme to extreme is what I think will lead to the most suffering. That is not to say something needs to change, but I think I need to see more people thinking about the "how", not just the "what" of this change.
Do not search for Utopia, by its definition, it means "no place", and the Greeks were right, no place exists where one would have no struggles. However, what you can do is look to mitigate and create mechanisms to help in those struggles so that they are not insurmountable.