There’s a common trope in media where it’s revealed, most often near the end of the story (but sometimes right off the bat), that trying too hard to do good makes you evil. Game of Thrones, HBO’s Watchmen, The Hunger Games, and many other shows, movies, and games all have endings that seem to come out of nowhere, as if they’re imposed from without rather than obeying the story’s inner logic.
Any pop culture artifact is compelling to the extent that it taps into our real desire for change, justice, virtue, freedom, resolution, etc. But it can never go all the way down this road, it can’t consummate this desire, because that would be too threatening to the reigning social order. The very principle of free speech has shown symptoms of this same hysteria since its inception. John Stuart Mill, father of enlightened liberalism and one of the early advocates of free speech, explicitly warned against extending it to socialists:
An opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. [1]
Why do stories that may start out so promising and suggestive seem to always turn to crap towards the very end? Because any consistent working-out of problems tends towards communism. Such a consistent working-out has to be sabotaged, thwarted; to do that, the principle of consistency itself has to be chucked overboard. A counter-revolutionary ending has to be passed off as a happy ending, meaning whoever represents the revolution must turn out to be a villain, no matter how implausible or visibly tacked-on this characterization is. Erik Killmonger, Daenerys Targaryen, Alma Coin, and Lady Trieu all break bad sort of inexplicably, punishing the viewer for supporting the power-claim of someone with good politics. The message is unequivocal: “Having good politics doesn’t make you fit to rule! Having no politics does! The restoration of the status quo is the best we can hope for.”
These stories cynically wring emotional identification out of the viewer by giving them a taste of communism, and then when they no longer need that emotional buy-in — because the show’s wrapping up — they insult the viewer for falling for it to begin with. Inglourious Basterds “gets us to share those fantasies [of killing Hitler] and then it starts calling the fantasies into question. … [Tarantino] hates us for liking his movies the way we do; he hates us because he can so easily bring us round to enjoying the sight of people being gathered into a closed space so that they can be exterminated.” [2] Christian Thorne is wrong to see this as a peculiar quirk of Tarantino’s: hating your audience is endemic to mass media.
This hatred and condescension is just a more specific case of the general form of liberal wisdom. Namely: the truth is always whatever conclusion you reach after you get over your youthful radicalism. Artists ostentatiously signal maturity and seriousness by condemning radicalism. This gesture is as obligatory and reflexive as making the sign of the cross when you walk into a church. No matter what interesting ideas you start out with (and there really are a whole lot of interesting ideas in my estimation), you must always end on a note of fidelity to the status quo. And this distorts the whole story, especially towards its end. Expectations (that is, the way the audience was hoping this would go) must always be “subverted” (that is, denied in conformity with overriding structural imperatives) to remind the audience that they can’t ever get what they want (that is, communism).
Who are showrunners accountable to at the end of a successful franchise? Certainly not the viewers, whose semi-conscious revolutionary desires fueled the thing’s success. Since the show is already a hit, it doesn’t need to end in a satisfying way to get people to fill seats. Showrunners are accountable only to future investors, who need to be reassured that the showrunners are a good investment. They find themselves obliged to engage in performative treachery as a way of virtue signaling to hypothetical moneymen. As Black Sails and Marx’s Inferno show, treachery is the founding sin of capitalism, and all major productions have to ritualistically reenact this gesture if they’re ever going to find their way into the big leagues. They demonstrate their value to power through a loyalty oath that gets woven into the script: “I made arrangements to ensure that when we leave here, it is with compromises in place that will diffuse any threat of widespread rebellion.” [Robert Levine and Jonathan E. Steinberg, Black Sails 04x10 — XXXVIII]
The swerve, capitalism’s yanking the football away at the last second, is comically predictable. It goes far beyond media: capitalism is a neverending practical joke, a sudden but inevitable betrayal that can’t stop repeating itself, worming its way into the substance of everyday life, making it ever stupider and more self-defeating (what Marx called real subsumption). But we shouldn’t blame each other for still making a run at Lucy’s football — like religion, mass media is both an expression of and a protest against real suffering. We may fall for the trick, but our steps get a little bit faster every time. It remains to be seen what a full working-through of the problem of communism would look like. Fortunately, we’ll never get it out of our heads (or off our screens) until we solve it.
[CW: minor discussions of violence, suicide]
I wouldn't recommend reading Nietzsche and I would recommend viewing anyone who invokes Nietzsche with a deep skepticism because there's generally two types of people who talk about Nietzsche and that's dusty old philosophy academics and teenage edgelords who are seeking a justification for why they're the main character.
But, with that disclaimer aside, I think Nietzsche's take on ressentiment and herd morality is really valuable for understanding the nature of the urge which leads people to adhere to the "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" thought-terminating cliche.
It's basically the presumption that if we find the perfect configuration of our relationship to power then we will either be free from the risk of inflicting atrocities and abuses of power or we will have a structure that prevents them from happening.
Neither are true. Mobs of people have committed mass slaughter and pogroms and lynchings just as readily as governments and strongmen have, the only difference that I see is that governments and strongmen have much more power and the durability of power so you see more abuses of power from the latter than the former.
There is no secret moral code written into the universe which we must uncover and align ourselves to in order to achieve perfection and thus purity in our action. This is a pseudo-religious attitude. Instead we are going to make mistakes and we are going to need to correct for them, if we ever happen to be so fortunate as to achieve political power.
Ultimately it boils down to a materialist perspective vs an idealist perspective - do abuses of power and excesses come from imperfect information, imperfect leaders, imperfect political structures, imperfect cultural norms, and imperfect decisions being made in time-sensitive contexts where there may not be any viable "good" or "pure" option, or do these happen as a product of the fact that we failed to truly achieve ideological purity by which we have aligned society to?
Am I excusing abuses of power and atrocities? Far from it.
Am I saying that we don't need to concern ourselves with establishing truly democratic structures in society with a clear ethical code and checks and balances on power? Again, far from it.
But I think it's more important to truly examine what produced historical abuses of power and atrocities than it is to reflexively dismiss them because I have already predetermined that the people behind something had failed to align themselves to the correct interpretation of... something - power, socialism, democracy, whatever thing someone might choose to attribute it to.
I think there's an attitude amongst the western left that tells people:
"Don't seize power, don't use power, don't establish hierarchies and structures - those are the tools which have historically been used to inflict abuses on people. If you don't do this then you will be ideologically pure and that's the most important thing because it's only through a perfection of practice and a rejection of all the wordly things that we can build something better, and those who try to build something better by seizing power are aspiring tyrants."
Ultimately power is a just tool, like a hammer is. A hammer can build a house just as readily as it can crack someone's skull open, and it can build a house upon stolen land just as easily.
The problem doesn't lie with the tool. The problem doesn't lie with the ideological alignment of the person who wielded the tool (see: Hitler's final mural and how a thoroughly garbage human being can do something good with a gun despite his intentions being selfish and his ideology being an utter trashfire). The problem lies in how the tool is used and to what ends it is used.
Perhaps it is true that we cannot dismantle the master's house with the tools of the master but the master's house sure as hell isn't going to be dismantled if we all just sit around congratulating ourselves over how much we reject the master's tools and how much better we are because we abstain from using them either.
I think Jones Manoel's article, also from Red Sails, on Western Marxism's purity fetish and martyrdom complex is really important reading on this matter.