Like communism, it looks forward. It's associated with "The New", the decade that brought Revachol disco. It doesn't seem pro-Pale, the way moralism and fascism tend to be. But the game feels pretty hostile to ultraliberalism. Then again, it's not exactly gentle with communism either.
Maybe it's a dialectic thing? Unity of opposing forces, progress through the resolution of contradictions? The Pale driven back as communists and ultraliberals fight over the future, birthing something better through the fight?
The "new" it celebrates is just a competitive process for translating all other values, ideas and creations into the basest commodities to be consumed.
It is built on the assumption that no other values or progress are possible beyond accumulation according to the most conservative, universally accepted capitalist terms.
No new progress is possible - only new products. The tension is whether Ultraliberalism can erase real progress and convert it into shallow consumerism faster than historical materialism can develop new, authentic values.
I tend to read Disco Elysium as being about being at the end of the age and not knowing what comes next, so I don't see it as representing any ideology as the actual path forward. Communism looks toward the future in style and sells itself as anti-Pale, but imo it's represented in game as being just as nostalgic as Moralism -- obsessed with resurrecting an old answer which already failed, and kept alive only by college kids stewing in that failure.
Ultraliberalism is in a weirder place, because it's not obviously dead -- capital, obviously, continues to exist, and something resembling markets always will. But I think Joyce's attitude toward it is fundamentally correct -- the actual ultra beliefs are an old cause limping along, and the time of its hold-over believers is ending. Any non-nihilistic liberal differs from a moralist mostly in having accepted it's over.
Every ideology has failed "this city." Apres le gris, le monde nouveau, but the new cannot be foreseen.
this is amazing, thank you
How do you think ultraliberalism fits into this?
Like communism, it looks forward. It's associated with "The New", the decade that brought Revachol disco. It doesn't seem pro-Pale, the way moralism and fascism tend to be. But the game feels pretty hostile to ultraliberalism. Then again, it's not exactly gentle with communism either.
Maybe it's a dialectic thing? Unity of opposing forces, progress through the resolution of contradictions? The Pale driven back as communists and ultraliberals fight over the future, birthing something better through the fight?
Ultraliberalism is just nihilism.
The "new" it celebrates is just a competitive process for translating all other values, ideas and creations into the basest commodities to be consumed.
It is built on the assumption that no other values or progress are possible beyond accumulation according to the most conservative, universally accepted capitalist terms.
No new progress is possible - only new products. The tension is whether Ultraliberalism can erase real progress and convert it into shallow consumerism faster than historical materialism can develop new, authentic values.
I tend to read Disco Elysium as being about being at the end of the age and not knowing what comes next, so I don't see it as representing any ideology as the actual path forward. Communism looks toward the future in style and sells itself as anti-Pale, but imo it's represented in game as being just as nostalgic as Moralism -- obsessed with resurrecting an old answer which already failed, and kept alive only by college kids stewing in that failure.
Ultraliberalism is in a weirder place, because it's not obviously dead -- capital, obviously, continues to exist, and something resembling markets always will. But I think Joyce's attitude toward it is fundamentally correct -- the actual ultra beliefs are an old cause limping along, and the time of its hold-over believers is ending. Any non-nihilistic liberal differs from a moralist mostly in having accepted it's over.
Every ideology has failed "this city." Apres le gris, le monde nouveau, but the new cannot be foreseen.