Sons of Liberty inspired Post-Modernist social visions — Part 1

In the early 2000s, game director Hideo Kojima hinted towards a futuristic, dystopian vision of societal downfall that has immense relevance today.

“The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever truth suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. The world is being engulfed in truth”

One aspect of the brilliance of Kojima’s multifaceted Sons of Liberty is in its ability to evoke a different notion of the inevitable stagnation and decline of Western society. Rather than political and civil conflict or nuclear war-torn battlefields, the dystopian vision is born through society’s bloated social-cultural battles between groups for ideological ‘truth’. Cultural hegemony and fear of tensions and social conflict (that ultimately are productive) leads to discrete binaries of social identity being established; ideological camps trading blows over politically-correct truths they have a political and cultural stake in, ironically ignoring the potential for connections across the social divide that each group has become blinded to with their hubris.

It becomes a sick corruption of radical democratic ideals where stagnated ideologue battles for acceptance for those positioned on the periphery through race, gender and class could potentially lead to any other sort of social difference and identity configuration outside of these highly delineated definitions becoming an outlier – a failure by society to recognise the very real complex and highly variable nature of the human social-cultural condition – those that exist beyond the categories and are without representation or a “truth”.

In this dystopia of “truths”, there is no space for genuine collective collaboration — for new, adaptive and meaningful contexts — to be created across the social divide. Such attempts to break beyond well-worn and superficial identity positions — to find the common aspects of identity we all hold and to create new grounds for engagement to further society — will sadly jeopardises the hard fought “truths” that ideologue camps have devoted their everything into.

For those camps, there is no going back. And society is the poorer for it.