The 2020s will be a reckoning with our past: lessons from Disco Elysium

The world is endable. It may be ending now.

No, seriously. What I mean is that the potential of our world: democratic, open, progressive, free — it *can* end.

Of course, the natural hubris of looking from within a time period counteracts this narrative, the state of the world appears inevitable and immovable: There’s no way that basic things like democracy can end!

Of course it can. All societies can end — we just don’t believe it. We think of the world ‘ending’ by imagining a dystopian society decimated by an apocalypse. But that’s not what will happen — it will be the death of a thousand cuts, all in the name of ‘good’.

If we look closely (actually not really — it’s blindingly obvious), the progressive apparatus of society is ending everywhere. In India, Turkey, America, Philippines, Poland, Hungary, Brazil etc.…some places it never had a chance, like Russia and China (and there’s no point in listing theocracies or totalitarian regimes here). And although some academics like Steven Pinker think that society is much better, capitalism and selfishness still create drastic inequality and murders trillions of animals a year.

Democratic society, liberal views, cosmopolitanism, press freedom, independent judiciaries, they’ve all been battered by populism, nationalism and religious zealotry to such a degree that if people from the bright, revolutionary 60’s saw us now, they would think it a joke. The idea of the holistic whole, the idea that we’re all in the together, ‘global citizenship’ — they are all being rounded up in the streets and ousted in performative farces of national victimhood and anthropocentric chauvinism.

The main horror on the horizon, of course, is a fully existential one: climate change.

So this future decade could, in many ways, be the end of things.

In this past decade, one the most important pieces of art I experienced was a video game, surprisingly. Called Disco Elysium, it tells the story of a cop solving a murder case in a fictional world, somewhat like ours. But this is akin to saying the Bible is the story of a carpenter.

The video game is about history, prejudice, nationalism, meaning, longing, and existentialism. Its scope far exceeds what you think may be possible in a video game. The world you find yourself in Disco Elysium is one of a decaying city, held up by an international entente and global capitalism. Factional struggles between unionists, fascists and capitalists lay a background to individual struggles of people trying to flee from torrid pasts and personal struggles.

Yet all of this is a tapestry that has — quite literally — holes in it. The world, you see, has actual holes in it that are growing, swallowing up the world in something ambiguous called the Pale, which is perhaps a void empty of meaning, or perhaps an aggregate of human memory, subsuming the present into the past.

But the residents of this world have put blinders on. Though they are aware of it, they choose to ignore the ending of the world. Indeed a key question of this game is what it means to make meaning in a world that is indifferent, in a world that is dying.

The sharp contrast of this imagined world next to ours can’t help but push the player to reflect on how we, as humans, and as a society, are so utterly unmoored to the the substrate of mattering that undercuts all that we are, and all that we do.

The desire to be something, to create a space of happiness for oneself, even just the preoccupation of oneself as the centre of the universe, divorces us from thinking about what actually matters on the deepest levels. The meaning at large: where are we headed? Why are we so concerned with others like us? Why do we go to work each day? As in minds of the people in Disco Elysium, our minds aren’t concerned with the bigger questions, we too are unaware of the potentiality of our world to end, or indeed the slow ending of our world.

One lesson, however, is clear from Disco Elysium: the past cannot be escaped. Without spoiling too much, even the murder that you are trying to solve ends up being due to the past clawing its way forward through time to pull the figurative trigger.

All of our actions, all of the movements of people, places and things, leads us to right now. The built world, your person, technology, culture — everything — it’s all due to the past. More that the past pushing itself into the present — it directs and constrains our future.

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama declared the “End of History” — meaning that the present would only be conceived by its own logic, not the past’s. The Cold War had ended, and democracy, liberalism, and capitalism reigned supreme. Of course, this wasn’t true — the past has only become more difficult to parse. And of course, democracy and liberalism are crumbling, it seems that only capitalism remains on the upswing (inasmuch as it compatible with populism and nationalism).

It’s clear that, in the wave of populism that indulges in historical grievance and ethnic superiority, history is claiming its territory within the expanse of ‘the Now’. And expansive ‘the Now’ is. The digital landscape is ripe territory for vast, fertile fields of minds afraid of the future, clinging to the past.

For every new wiki, there’s a thousand trolls. For every social enterprise startup, there’s a propaganda bot army.

And climate change? Well the fuse was lit long ago, long before ‘the Digital’ became a thing, so it’s just a matter of how much we can contain the explosion.

What’s more, our indulgence in the past, to do what we have always done and supposed to do, means we cause suffering and death to trillions of humans & animals, and contribute to the ecological destruction of the world.

There isn’t a ‘satisfying’ resolution in Disco Elysium, at least insofar as you expect perfect closure in your narratives. Again, without spoiling too much, the case somewhat solves itself, and you continue on your way as a cop, or you don’t. The world doesn’t care, but it will slowly decay.

The characters mostly don’t come to terms with their pasts, and as such, it dominates them.

Facing our past, too, is a lesson. We have to face our past — we have to honestly come to terms with our grievances, habits, cultures, rituals — and conceptualise how we can not be dominated by them to imagine a better future. Perhaps it’s futile. But being aware of the past, by mulling on how it interweaves into our present, and by calling it out, can help us. And perhaps, sadly, the only way we can do this is by being honest about how the world can end, how the world is ending. Not in an explosion, not like in a movie, but like in Disco Elysium: pulled down in the spiraled embrace of a thousand tentacles lured from the past that we choose to ignore because we think: that’s just how it is.

Happy 2020.