Shin Megami Tensei - Law and the Danger of Dogma
I’ve been thinking a lot about Shin Megami Tensei’s alignment system lately, and not for reasons I am comfortable with. Art hands us a mirror with which to reflect our world from any number of angles, and understand it better through those perspectives. We may not always like what we see, but those perspectives never leave us. They reside in the back of your mind and we catch glimpses of them in life, like the face of a stranger who looks like an old friend. And sometimes, those glimpses allow us to clearly process that which you have always feared but have been unable to comprehend.
For the uninitiated, most SMT games allow you to align with the ideologies of Law, Chaos, or sometimes something in-between. Law being an alliance with the Abrahamic god where humanity’s free will and capacity for change is sacrificed to enforce a moral absolutism on the world. The end of conflict, but the end of freedom. Chaos is the other extreme - an alliance with demons to overthrow god and create a might-makes-right world where the powerful can exert their will without reprisal. The loss of social order to pursue absolute freedom, no matter the cost. As someone with Anarchist tendencies, I have my qualms with how the games portray Chaos, but that is a discussion for another day. As is the fact that in many games, if a player toes the line between these ideologies, they may pursue other options - we’ll put a similar pin in that for now. Law is what has been haunting my mind lately.
In the past decade, talking with my mother has been… difficult. A staunch conservative and Christian fundamentalist, she has voted for Donald Trump in each of the past three American elections, despite my constant pleas to reconsider. Through the years, I have shown her mountains of evidence of the material harm that the Republican Party is inflicting upon the world, the cruelty and suffering and greed and hatred shown in everything they do. Each time, I ask why she voted for them. Every time, she deflects the question in a very particular set of ways which I first read as cowardice, but I now see as something far more insidious. When pressed on these matters, she dismisses the issue, using one of several canned lines (Paraphrased for brevity here):
“All we can do is pray. Give your worries to god.”
“I vote for the party, not the individual, and the party always knows best.” (Sometimes she reverses this when it makes her look better to say the opposite)
“God will end the world soon anyway, and none of this matters - go read Revelations.”
“(Event that has happened) will never happen, stop thinking about it.”
The trend is easy to notice - when pressed, she always reverts to dogma. The idea of changing the world for the better ourselves in unthinkable heresy in this worldview - all you can do is lay down, shut up, and pray. What a miserable way to live, abdicating your free will in exchange for a place under the thumb of a god who will not respond even if he did exist. Your soul in exchange for an unbreakable, absolute Law. When I speak with her, this song rings in my head every time.
It's so fitting - the song is superficially comforting, but distant. Cold. I can only imagine a room of divine followers bound to their pews, senses blocked to the world, singing to a god they cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. A god which is not there. All with a haunting smile on their faces, forever. It pains me to see my own mother among their choir.
I have to stress, my frequent confrontations are not meant to make her ashamed. I would not waste my time on something so petty if that were the case. They are meant to make her mad. To kindle that indignant spark of compassion present in all conscious life that tugs at our heart and screams “This is not right”. That rage against the ills of the world welling up in your heart when you see a fellow person starving on the street and knowing that something must be done. That WE must enact justice.
What a convenient ruse the powerful have at their disposal to popularize the notion that this burning need for justice must be snuffed out. That the only true means of change is to do nothing and hope things improve without action, and that giving into the urge to help is proof of one’s lack of faith. Put on your blindfold, tie your bonds, and sing, angel. Your song shall heal the ails of man without the need to lift a finger. Repulsive. A pious rejection of what makes us alive. If there is a just god, then he gave us two hands and a free will with which to shape the world for the better. We have a duty to refuse the chains and blindfolds of Law and fight for our fellow man.
Someday I hope that something will shock her out of this haze of dogma, but after a decade of trying, I doubt anything ever will. But I refuse to accept that people categorically cannot change, and that people cannot change the world. No matter the odds against us, that is no way to live life, because the moment we accept despair as the norm is the moment we are well and truly dead. I vow to do what I can to work with my comrades to make the world better for all, and to prove my mother wrong with my actions. To hell with her sickening Law, I choose to ally with humanity, and right now, maybe a bit of Chaos in our favor is what we need.
Before I thought my mother’s actions were just cowardice and a stubborn refusal to accept reality. Perhaps my mother genuinely cannot imagine the possibility of humanity improving its station, and if so, I pity her. But Shin Megami Tensei taught me that strict adherence to dogma is a mind killer and a tool to silence mankind’s drive towards meaningful change. Whatever flavor it is presented in and whether it be preached from priests, politicians, or the wealthy ruling class, it all serves the same vile end, and we must change that. Because no higher power will be there to change it for us.
Addendum: This was a bit of a vent post for me, so my apologies if it comes off as hostile to religion as a whole - that wasn't my intention. The enemy here is stubborn and violent moral absolutism, not those peacefully living their faith as a complement to real action and who do not try to force their belief onto the unwilling. Stay safe out there, and remember that we have a duty to disobey an unjust law.