When my sister and I were little, we would play a game in the backseat of the car. At each intersection, we took a guess at which direction our mom was going to turn and whoever guessed correctly got a point. Because we could not yet comprehend the rules of the road and had no clue what a turn lane was, this felt like predicting a dice roll. It kept us occupied on road trips.
Sometimes, though, the game stopped being fun. Sometimes, after we'd been driving for hours, we’d get hungry. We'd see a Taco Bell or the golden arches of McDonald's in the distance and beg our mom to go there. She rarely obliged, and as the prospect of a burger receded in the rear window, we become consciously aware who was in control. Which way the car turned was not random. It was a decision she made at each crossroads, and our ultimate destination was the product of those decisions in aggregate.
The state of the world is, to put it in academic terms, not good. As Russian troops and missiles pour into Ukraine, gender-affirming care for trans children is defined by Texas as child abuse, and the pandemic continues to batter at our health and sanity, to name only a few recent events, there is a universal sense that dominoes are falling. They began to topple years ago, pushed over by powers and forces beyond our comprehension or control, and now we cannot stop them.
One popular meme suggests that we are in "the bad timeline" and that perhaps there is another universe where we didn't allow the planet to burn, Donald Trump never ran for president, Putin fell off a rooftop, and a gorilla was never shot at the Cincinnati Zoo.
While we in the imperial core of the United States cannot fathom what reality is like for those in Ukraine, Russia's invasion has heightened a truth grinding away at us for years now: we can't do shit about shit.
The average person, those of us without immense wealth or power, can do nothing but rage against the machine. Older generations realized it after Vietnam, younger folks after the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and during the Trump presidency. Anyone who missed the memo seems to have finally internalized it during Covid. As our sense of stability in the world disintegrates, we type our pithy tweets with our grubby little fingers (or write our Substacks) and then, as we press send, we realize immediately that nobody is listening. We are ants at the base of a skyscraper, aware that something incomprehensibly large is blocking our path but unable to see the entirety of it. All we know is that it won't budge.
In short, we feel helpless.
I keep saying "we" because that's what years of essay writing have taught me to do, but the singular is better suited to this subject. I, Max, feel helpless. Behind my computer screen, I watch the world crumble, and all I can do is pound at my keyboard with the impotent rage of a toddler thrashing against the straps of his car seat. To belabor the metaphor, my parents have left me in this hot car and I think I might die here. No one can hear me screaming and suffocating. I am terrified.
But I wouldn't be writing this if I thought I were the only one who feels like this. So, let's talk about that feeling. Let's talk about helplessness.
Learning Helplessness
Over the past few years, beginning in academic psychology before being yanked through the sludge-filled sewers of social media sites beginning in T, a new term has come into vogue. It arrived amid a slurry of terms people learned in therapy like "gaslighting" and "love bombing." However, unlike those terms, which are colloquially applied as a way of projecting outward, pathologizing and demonizing the ways people tend to accidentally hurt each other in relationships, this term turns the focus inward. It pathologizes the self, saying, "You are the shitty way you are because of what's been done to you."
The term is "learned helplessness." It evolved to describe the reason why someone might remain in a harmful situation, even when an exit from that situation is available. The theory at its most basic posits that repeated exposure to a negative experience teaches us that the experience is unavoidable, and we therefore stop searching for a way to avoid it. But it does not apply only to relationships. Learned helplessness has been applied to addicts who relapse multiple times. It has been employed in a far more sinister sense to account for why people in poverty remain impoverished. Even the most robust theory can be misused.
People on TikTok and Twitter have recently seized on this bit of academic psychology and now increasingly apply it to justify certain behavior. Most notably, the common situation of not wanting to break up with someone. It's a bit of a digression, but sometimes relationships just…go stale, and being over someone is not indicative of abuse.
Were this rose by any other name, I do not think it would have seen such a boon in popular culture. If it were called, for example, "cognitively formed helplessness," people seeking to diagnose the reason they keep putting off that break up would have moved on to something else. Helplessness, as it turns out, is scary, and no one wants to admit experiencing it. Learned helplessness, by contrast, suggests that helplessness is not your fault. You couldn't influence your own behavior because of all that abuse and trauma and neglect you suffered. You can be absolved of your helplessness because, after all, it was trained into you. You are Pavlov’s abused dog.
More common than learned helplessness is something much more existentially terrifying: helplessness itself. When you desperately want things to be any way other than the way they are, and all the levers of change are just beyond your grasp.
In a non-abusive, normal relationship, change might be scary, but it is within your power. You can sit your partner down and talk about what you'd like to be different. If those changes don't take place, you can end things. It's emotionally difficult, but it is doable. People do it every day. Global systems of power, by contrast, dominate our lives and yet most of us have no say in them. You can elect a leader, but as anyone who's sent a letter to their representative knows, they don't answer to you. Not really. Citizens of Russia didn't choose to invade a neighboring country, trans people did not choose to be under legal attack. The completionist in me want to list all the horrid things we did not choose, any of us, around the world, but that would fill several libraries.
We live in a world we did not make, one in which the car sped past our desired destination at every turn. The question is not what we as individuals can do to enact change on a massive scale, but how to live with our inability to do so. And so I want to talk about a piece of media that has grappled with exactly that question and come out on the other side with something close to an answer. I want to talk about Disco Elysium.
Clinging to Disco, in search of Elysium
Disco Elysium is the best game I have ever played. It is also the most profound look at our sense of helplessness in the face of a doomed world. A mostly text-based role playing game set in the fictional city of Revachol, you play as a sad-sack, alcoholic cop named Harry who awakes in a motel room on the other side of a bender to find that he has no memory. He has drunk away all recollection of himself and his place in the world. As you progress through the murder mystery comprising the main plot, you learn that this erasure of the self was deliberate. On the night of his nihilistic bender, other patrons of the hotel heard Harry, blind drunk, screaming, "I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore!"
As Harry solves the mystery of a mysterious lynching that left a body hung from a tree on the Revacholian isle of Martinaise, the history of Revachol becomes crucial, not only to deciphering whodunit, but to Harry's understanding of himself. Revachol is the site of a communist revolution against a monarchal state, a revolution that was quickly and brutally crushed by the ultra-liberal Coalition which has controlled the region for decades by the time you arrive on the scene. Its destruction of communism was so total and unsparing that many people believe there is not a single communist left. They were, as the game's emissary of ultra-liberalism puts it, all shot in the head. And yet, if you like, Harry can become a communist in the game. He can go around town ranting about the tyranny of capital and calling for the execution of the ruling class.
When it comes to crushed dreams of communism, the game's writers know what they're talking about. Disco Elysium was created in the impoverished, post-Soviet state of Estonia by a group of self-professed communists. When the game won in the "Fresh Indie Game" category at the 2019 Game Awards, its creators thanked "Marx and Engels for the political education."
However, Disco Elysium has a ceaselessly brutal view of communism and leftists. If you make Harry say enough communist lines of dialogue, you will get the option to learn "Mazovian Socio-Economics" (Kraz Mazov being the fictional parallel to Karl Marx) and the game frames your leftist ambitions in blisteringly sarcastic terms:
People think Communism was some crazy idea that had its comeuppance 40 years ago. A fever that shook the world, never to return again. They were right. Until *he* woke up today – a spiritual corpse responsive only to the call of Commodore Red, prostitutes, and Kras Mazov. For him, Communism is still a *thing*. He will single-handedly raise the Commune of '02 from the oceanic trench where it has been resting, covered in ghosts and seaweed! He is the Big Communism Builder. Come, witness his attempt to rebuild Communism in the year '51!
Should you decide to accept this choice and become a communist, the game mocks you further. Once "Mazovian Socio-Economics" is unlocked, you are treated to another block of text, reading:
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself *sad*. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov *fucked him over* personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.
Not only does the game jeer at you for caring about communism, you are penalized for it with a reduction to your "Authority" and "Visual Calculus" skills. Believing in communism causes you to fail at important quests. Other people in the game take you less seriously, too, responding to your communist rants as if you've just called your middle school teacher Mom. Some will point out that, as a cop, you're an enforcer of the very same liberal order you claim to want dismantled.
At its core, Disco Elysium is a game about helplessness. You are not the "Big Communism Builder" and you're a fool for ever thinking you could be. Even if you choose not to be a communist, you will fail miserably, over and over. Fail to quit drinking. Fail to solve the case. Fail to stop a group of fascist mercenaries from gunning down members of a workers' union. Apologize for your failures, and you will earn the condescending title of "world's sorriest cop." Unlike most games, which serve as power fantasies, Disco Elysium makes you feel insignificant, powerless to stop an uncaring world from spiraling toward violence and doom.
If I'm making the game sound unendingly miserable, that's because I'm describing it in broad terms. Joyous sublimity can be found, but it arrives in the small moments. You share a cigarette with a poetic truck driver. You bond with your partner over a love of cars. You help a group of teenagers start a nightclub in an abandoned church, and you dance with them. You graffiti a wall with the words, "Something beautiful is going to happen."
In these moments, Disco Elysium excels at the kind of endorphin rushes that other games reserve for leveling up or killing a big boss. I have never felt more joy in a video game than when I got Harry to dance with a group of burnout teenagers in their newly formed nightclub. The final ingredient to their music is the sound of the world dying, a low bass that the game frames as a metaphor for the encroaching apocalypse. And you dance to it.
Despite being a side quest, the game takes its name from the church nightclub. You help the kids to name it. You call it Disco Elysium. From Greek, “Elysium” translates to “an ideal state of happiness.” Despite being set in a bleak dystopia, the game is named after these few square feet of sublime bliss.
I think this is Disco Elysium's thesis, its solution to the problem of helplessness. Fair warning, I am going to spoil the whole ending now.
The Deserter
The murder you have been sent to Martinaise to solve is presumed a lynching. The dockworkers' union is on strike and Wild Pines, the corporation which owns the docks, has sent a representative to break the strike. She, in turn, brought fascist mercenaries with her—truly evil men who brag openly about raping and killing foreigners. It is one of these men who was lynched, and the union members claim they all hung him as a group when he tried to assault a woman staying at the motel. During your autopsy, though, you find a bullet in the man's head, proving that the man was hung postmortem, and eventually your investigation leads you to a deserted island just off the coast.
The island is the final destination in the game. There, you find an old man called The Deserter. He's the sole survivor of the communist army, spared from the mass execution of his comrades because, as the Coalition decimated the communist forces, he fled at the last moment. In hiding from society for over 40 years, he has developed a habit of spying on the town through the lens of his sniper rifle. Whatever he sees, he sees shit. To him, the town is a collection of gutless liberals and outright fascists, pawns of global capital.
Partially, his worldview is justified. When the liberal Coalition took Revachol, after communist forces had already surrendered, they executed his comrades en masse. They called it Operation Death Blow. He tells you, "I've seen it, the mask of humanity fall from capital—it has to take it off to kill everyone—everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed. And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death... the sweetest most courageous people in the world. You see the fear and power in its eyes. Then you know that the bourgeois are not human."
It is helplessness coupled with the bitterness of failed revolution that has kept The Deserter on his island, developing into an incel (this guy really hates women and queer people) and killing people with his rifle. After watching a young woman with whom he had developed a psychosexual fixation have sex with a fascist mercenary, The Deserter killed him, sparking the violent chain of events that consumed the town and brought you there.
The Deserter is more than a solution to the game's mystery. He is who we risk becoming if we give in to helplessness. When you try to become the Big Communism Builder and watch the world crumble nonetheless, you can go one of two ways. Either you recognize that building a better world is hard—that it approaches the realm of the impossible, or you continue to build something else entirely : your own "precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.”
That’s when helplessness metastasizes into something far more poisonous: hopelessness. You allow hopelessness to drag you beneath the surface. You drown in it. The cynicism fills your lungs and your brain, pushing out any air bubbles of hope. You sink, isolated from humanity, into it.
Learning hopelessness is no way to live.
Caring
I don’t know what to do about this poisoned world. Ask anyone I know, and they’ll tell you it’s unlike me to admit that, but while I am very good at picking out individual problems to analyze and offer solutions for, what to do about the world in aggregate is beyond me. All these intersections at which we made the wrong turn have led somewhere far beyond my ability to diagnose and prescribe.
What I do know is that we all feel the helplessness pressing in around us. We all struggle to tread water above it. And the worst thing we can do is to stop struggling and let ourselves sink beneath the waves.
To live is to struggle, and to be a leftist is to struggle all the more. There will always be those who tell you that a better world is not possible, and a lot of those people will have money, missiles, or both. They are experts at making helplessness feel like the best option, and if that fails, the mask will come off and the guns will come out. But they cannot stop us from doing what we can, where we can. They cannot stop us from finding solidarity, from helping each other in small ways. If their decisions, added up one by one, created this world, ours can do the same to reverse it.
Continuing to care in the face of helplessness is a brave act, perhaps even a revolutionary one. We cannot change anything on our own, but together, we can dance. We can fight. We can cling to joy in the smallest places. We can find disco, and maybe even Elysium.
-M.A.M