The Drama of Life
Yesterday, I started talking about “The Lost Room” with one point in mind, and before I got very far, had drifted into an entirely different point. Sometimes it happens that way.
So let me get back to what I wanted to say in the first place. “The Lost Room” wasn’t perfect; while it had some creative, deliciously weird moments, it sometimes fell into stupid tropes, too, like The Hero suddenly having sex with The Chick for no conceivable reason. The one that really got under my skin was the cabals, shadowy power groups that somehow always know what everyone else is doing, despite the fact that every individual you see on the show, including members of the competing cabals, are pretty clueless, operating on a mixture of panic, wild guesses, and the synchronistic way the Objects themselves are drawn to one another, with their owners in tow.
I think the show would have been more interesting if the people involved were just people, not “The Legion,” “The Order of Reunification,” “The Collectors,” and so on, along with a guy rich and amoral enough to make a powerful faction of one. I said as much to Eileene, who figured that it’s only natural that organizations of Object seekers, and especially Object owners, pool their efforts. She’s right, but such reasoning only goes so far. My problem is that the cabals should hold together long enough to become functional, especially since we see people in the cult of the Objects, including members of the Cabals, betray one another with frequent and casual indifference.
My first thought was of some of the penetrating analysis of the paradoxes of conspiracy theory, and especially of participating in the kind of conspiracies the real crazies imagine, offered in the monumental GURPS Illuminati rulebook. For example, the Illuminati (or similar all-powerful conspiracies) work (or are imagined to work) through a pyramid structure, each power group controlled by agents planted in key positions by groups higher in the structure, and everybody thinks they’re at the top of the pyramid. Given this, even the members of the innermost circle of the conspiracy have to doubt the fact. Once you admit that people can be made to believe anything through sufficiently sophisticated disinformation, and that the conspiracy can produce this level of disinformation, you have to accept that anything else you may know about the conspiracy may just be what someone wants you to think you know about it. Once you start accepting data that supports your wild theories about the conspiracy and dismissing data that undermines it as disinformation planted by the conspiracy, you can believe anything, and prove it, too, just as long as someone else accepts your categorization of what is true evidence and what is manufactured by the conspiracy. Once the conspiracy controls everything, there’s no power in the world to stop any one member from subverting the conspiracy to his own personal goals (which, given human nature, won’t quite match the conspiracy’s purpose)—except another member of the conspiracy. Conspiracies, including cabals trying to collect the Objects, are doomed by their very nature to split.
But after mulling it over for a while, I can find a simpler metaphor for why the cabals are implausible. If you’ve ever been in an MMO guild, you know that “drama”—petty politics fueled by ego and greed—is an inevitable part of the scenery. It doesn’t always get out of hand, but it usually does, sooner or later, for every group of forty or more gamers. Often, the drama leads to a splintering of the guild. Invariably, at least one side and probably both, exaggerate the affair out of all proportion. If otherwise decent, playful, friendly people can get so worked up over a +12 sword of butt-kicking—or, more accurately, a pixilated representation of said sword—that they refuse to talk to a couple dozen former friends ever again, and tend to reproduce these rows every year or two, how would the openly treacherous weasels of “The Lost Room” behave, while pursuing the Objects, and with them, the possibility of rewriting the whole of reality, or touching the mind of God, or other matters of cosmic import?
That’s right. They wouldn’t last a week together.