“Undertale” is an indie video game which sets itself apart from other games of today in that you do not need to kill a single enemy to finish the game. Instead, you can win combat encounters by befriending the enemy creatures. Befriending these creatures can be a matter of trial and error, just like in real life. It can be frustrating and you may lose the game from time to time. If you succeed in not killing a single enemy in the game however, you gain a better understanding of the world. You learn more about the characters in the game and you experience so much more of the game world.
We go out into our world and view the people around us as obstacles or goals. We objectify everyone, after a fashion, and some people we objectify more than others. I admit it; I have to stop myself from doing it too, sometimes. It’s the environment we grew up in. It’s the water we’ve swam in all our lives and it’s hard for a fish to notice its own water, isn’t it? But wouldn’t the world be a nicer place to live in if we could stop seeing people as obstacles and start seeing them as people just like us?
Jeff Vandermeer’s novel, Annihilation, can easily be seen as an argument that our current method of understanding the world around us and manipulating it to our benefit is destructive. It’s like studying a frog’s anatomy: we may understand the frog better by dissecting it, but it still dies in the process. Of course, we may be able to help more frogs in the future with the knowledge from the death of a few prior ones, but could we not find a better way; a way with no dead frogs? Vandermeer’s novel seems to think so. (How the book can be taken to say this is much too complicated to state in 500 words, I sincerely recommend that you read it if you haven’t yet. In particular, think about the scene where the protagonist studies words on the wall without sampling them immediately.)
We burn forests and dead dinosaurs to heat our homes and power our lives but that is unsustainable. Even if we ignore what’s happening to the environment and say that global climate change doesn’t exist (it does) we can’t ignore that there are only so many trees and dead things that we can burn. Someday very soon we need to find a way out of our dependence on such fuel sources. Shouldn’t we find the answer now? Shouldn’t we solve the problem of exponentially depleting resources and avoid the risk of global warming happening, even if it isn’t?
Our inability to understand and empathize with each other and our impending environmental catastrophe are two of the biggest threats we have ever faced. Either will lead to our eventual annihilation of ourselves. But with our current technological and cultural progress, we are the closest we have ever been to solving them. We set ourselves up for failure in the past, but that was the past. We can change the now.
We incentivized our leaders to focus more on the political game than solving our issues, but we can change the system. Instead of allowing them to manipulate the game, maybe we could change the game to make our leaders want to focus on the big issues. People have said that I’m too idealistic, and maybe they’re right. Maybe these ideas are unrealistic. But is it unrealistic because “that’s just the way the world works”, or is it unrealistic because everybody keeps telling themselves that it is?
