This post includes some observations I’ve made about the way Cerberus-related things are presented in ME1 and ME2, as well as personal opinions I have on morality and technology, which have caused me to give Cerberus quite a bit of benefit of the doubt. They have not caused me to support their agenda as a whole, even less their methods. But I believe that what I have observed has contributed to the fact that some people do.
I’m going to put the following topics up for discussion:
(1) The problem of invoking evil by association
(2) Presentation failure: trying too hard.
(3) Of evil methods and not-so-evil causes
(4) The bad name and the not-so-bad reality of consequentialism
What I'm not touching in this post is the good that Cerberus actually and irrefutably did by bringing Shepard back and enabling them to fight the Collectors. While this must be acknowledged and people put it forward as a justification, those who aren't predisposed to supporting Cerberus would grudgingly admit the merit but not change their opinion of the organization as a whole. I believe the reasons lie deeper. This post also does not take any of the leaked material into account, because this is the spoiler-free forum and anyway it is not sufficiently complete to be used in a discussion.
(1) The problem of evil invoked by association
Most players’ first encounter with the name “Cerberus” in ME1 is after UNC:Missing Marines. Admiral Kahoku contacts you and tells you that his men were killed by an Alliance black-ops group gone off the grid, saying that they were trying to create some kind of super-soldier.
All this put Cerberus in the ranks of the enemies. What it doesn’t *necessarily* do is putting them into the ranks of the evil. They have split from the Alliance to follow their own agenda and have initiated an act of war, that's all. It may have had any number of legitimate reasons. And well, the creation of super-soldiers *may* be indicative of some sinister cause, and it *may* include horrific experiments on unwilling sentient beings, but actually, nothing of this is necessarily a part of it. Creating super-soldiers is not an inherently evil thing to do. In fact, in some stories there are super-soldiers on the side of the good guys.
Still, Admiral Kahoku talks as if exactly that were an insanely evil thing to do, and the genre-savvy player already knows where this will go – Cerberus will indeed prove to be evil, and will suspect what will happen: the evilness will be driven home with all the power the medium can muster. See (2) for more about that.
What Bioware did here is trying to invoke evil by association – when you hear of super-soldiers, sinister causes like supremacism ideologies pop into your mind, spread over the world by insanely competent soldiers stripped of all human empathy by the horrific conditioning of their evil masters, and if you aren’t used to moral reasoning, likely you’ll be stuck with these associations.
Unfortunately, there are people the trope doesn’t work on. And those like me, who are highly allergic against invoking evil by association, particularly when it comes to technology. Technologies are not morally invalidated by having been used for evil causes. People may feel that way, but a little moral reasoning shows that this feeling is wrong.
Which, yet again, is another thing I’m highly allergic against: using emotional manipulation to drive a moral point home. As a result of this, after UNC: Missing Marines, I was absolutely determined to give Cerberus as much benefit of the doubt as I could.
But it doesn’t end here. Although not directly Cerberus-related, Bioware tried this again with Miranda’s genetic engineering. The "genetic aristocracy supremacism agenda" hinted at when Miranda spoke of her father was being used to morally discredit Miranda’s genetic engineering, driven home by her infertility in LotSB as some sort of "nothing good can come of it" message. Not only didn’t I buy into that, but this annoyed me beyond all measure, because I happen to believe that genetic improvement is highly desirable, and it is *factually* not necessarily tied to any any sinister agenda. Again, an evil cause was being used to discredit a technology. At this point, I was willing to side with the villains just to make the point.
Other people’s reaction may differ somewhat from mine, but the principle is the same: some people intuitively get that there is something wrong with evil being invoked by association. And they are less willing to be drawn in.
(2) Presentation failure: trying too hard
Think of Akuze and Toombs' description of what they did to him. Think of Pragia and the log telling you what happened to the children there. It is rather obvious that this is intended to invoke a "death camp" parallel.
Unfortunately, there is something wrong with that. Because in the historical parallel invoked, the deaths, the dehumanizing and the suffering were very much the point. They *were* the agenda, explicitly put down as policy is some cases. Which makes the monstrously evil acts plausible within the existing ideology. On the other hand, Cerberus was introduced as a reasonably competent organization – they wouldn’t have been able to drop off the grid otherwise, and wouldn't have been able to gain that much power. In ME2 it was presented as an organization with a cause it worked towards ruthlessly, but actual genocide or mass murder didn’t appear to be part of it. You even had a majority of nonhumans on your team. Even worse, there may have been indications of a *human* supremacism agenda, though that was never spelled out, but within such an agenda it would make no sense to build a death camp for humans. Even less human biotics, who would be valued as a rare resource even if you don’t care about morality at all – you just don’t “go through them fast”.
As a result, the evils of Akuze and the Teltin facility appeared to be separate from the Cerberus agenda, accidents, so to speak, for which of course TIM would have more or less responsibility, but which were never intended.
So, how do people react who see through these inconsistencies? Some may accept things at face value nonetheless. But here’s another thing I dislike: trying to hammer the point home that Cerberus is evil by overblown presentation of pointless monstrous acts of evil. Overlord is another example. I don’t know how others reacted, but when I saw the image of David in that contraption, my reaction wasn’t a horrified "That’s….monstrous", but rather "You don’t *seriously* expect me to take that at face value. Right?"
Simply: they tried too hard.
As for what *would* have worked: imagine if you had found this log on Pragia: "I noticed you’ve scheduled another round of experiments on Zero...yes, I know you’re pressed for time and we’ve run out of sedatives, but can you do it somewhere else? The screaming makes the other children nervous, and that skews the results of our psychological evaluations." I believe that would’ve been quite a bit more chilling because of the ruthlessly plausible reasoning. And in Overlord, the scene would have worked better if David was sitting in a chair. Or does anyone think what was done to his eyes and the force-feeding tubes weren’t enough to show what we were dealing with?
(3) Of evil methods and not-so-evil causes
We are used to distrusting power. We are raised to it. There are good reasons to distrust power, but actually, seeking power is not evil. Not even seeking absolute power. That’s because power is a potential, it can be used for good and bad things, and you can even gain it by reasonably acceptable means. And while starting a war of conquest is usually regarded as evil, it’s such a regular event that even that doesn’t put you beyond the moral event horizon, unless you’re especially cruel in going about it.
This means that "human advancement" can have a good face. In my case, I envision one of admittedly radical technological advancement most notably including genetic improvement, but one that would not be brought about by evil means. Of course, Cerberus does quite obviously not represent that face as a whole, but since you can, for various reasons already mentioned, dismiss the more monstrous acts as "not being the real Cerberus", it becomes possible to posit that Cerberus advances a desirable agenda, and that apart of a few "accidents", it goes about it by means that are, if morally problematic, nonetheless justified.
Again, I can only speak for myself: I do not think that Cerberus as a whole uses acceptable methods, nor that their image of "human advancement" is benevolent, but I nonetheless refuse to denounce them altogether because they are the only organization which could yet include that good image in one of their many faces. I thought, and still think, that Miranda represents it and embodies it. To a lesser extent, the crew of the SR2 represents it as well. My main problem is, again, that the ME trilogy appears determined to denounce what I’ve called the "good face of human advancement" as evil by association (see (1)). I hope I won’t need to, but I will side with the villains before relinquishing it.
(To that end, I seriously hope to see some Cerberus renegades in ME3 who have something more interesting to say than “What I did was wrong”)
(4) The bad name and the not-so-bad reality of consequentialism
Consequentialism – the notion that that moral good is determined by outcomes rather than methods, has a bad name. Usually it’s described as "the ends justify the means". While this is a correct description, it is also incomplete. People usually understand it as "Any good end justifies any evil means", which is incorrect. It rather means "Some ends justify more means than others, and they never justify more than the least unacceptable means necessary to reach the goal." And consequentialism is very much prevalent in our normal lives. For instance, the outcome – the use the revenue is put to – is all that distinguishes a tax system from a protection racket.
Now Cerberus was introduced in ME2 a ruthless "result at all costs" type of organization. As which it shouldn’t have been too different from the salarian STG or even the Spectres. Besides, in the ME games we find ourselves in a war for survival of all organic sentient life in the galaxy, which can reasonably be said to justify rather drastic means. Arrival provides the best example.
People may be mislead into believing that Cerberus represents that kind of ruthlessness. If it did, using anything more than the least unacceptable methods to further their goals would make no sense. Still they do. Which should cause people to withdraw their support. So why don't they?
If not for the presentation failure (see (2)), I would be able to ask "Why the hell are they doing this?" and suspect a much more sinister agenda behind it all than simple "human dominance". Discovering such a cause would cause me to renounce them altogether instead of just being ultra-careful around them. However, given the way things go, I must suspect that the writers didn’t think a lot about their presentation of Cerberus and were just determined to make them appear evil by any means possible. See points (1) and (2) for the resulting reaction.
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That's it for now. There are two more points I could be making: The "Evil is Cool" effect and the undoubted charisma of the Illusive Man and his status as a "Magnificent Bastard". I don't have a lot to say about that. Others may.
Modifié par Ieldra2, 21 novembre 2011 - 09:34 .
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