Includes content and character spoilers for the show Legend of the Galactic Heroes. I think it is well worth watching, even with its immense length, but I do not think these spoilers will significantly affect the watch experience. It is a brilliant histori-scifi-political space opera, that features ever relevant themes. As I will discuss in this post.
Yang Wenli & LOTGH
Sometimes a character says something that sticks, for years. This quote has stuck in my head for a decade, I’m pretty sure. And I always wanted to write about it. Now I found the right seed
I think the initial reaction might be: The guy is just spouting the standard schpiel about how chaos is bad.
And for years I did wonder, is he truly correct? Is it not undeniably true that terror and conspiracies have, multiple times, pushed the world in a direction? Was not the first World War started by a conspiracy?
But no. They have not.
Constructive vs. Destructive tools
Be truly principled - like Yang Wenli
I think one reason why Yang sticks out is that he seems to be full of contradictions.
- He is a true believer in democracy. (Photos?)
- But he also thinks that the average voter is easily persuadable, predictable by phenomena like the ones further away from the front lines being more pro-war, and fallible
- And hates politics;
political power is like sewage. You can’t do without it, but it’s not something you want to approach”
- He is not a very disciplined guy by temperament. NOTE: From an alignment perspective I’d interpret Yang as Neutral or Chaotic, but he obeys the Lawful system because he thinks it aligns better with his values than - doing something individualistic.
- But he will never break the most important rules of democracy;
Yang Wen-li has many shortcomings, but he has one virtue that no one can possibly criticize. That is, he honestly believes in the principle that a democracy’s military exists solely for the purpose of protecting the lives of its citizens, and that he has acted upon that principle on more than one occasion.
Principledness = selfish?
I was doing research for this post and came across this thread Yang = selfish. Let us explore by example:
Let’s say there exists a person Y, who has, for good reason, accumulated a very high amount of military power, and has better popular support than any high-ranking politician in the country.
Then the politicians decide to do something bad.
Let’s presume we have three different possibible ways person Y can act here:
- Someone who will under no circumstances subvert democratic rule with their own hard and soft power, even if it looks like the democratic rule is leading to doom.
- Someone who will, after a treshold has been reached, subvert democratic rule, for their own and the democracy’s benefit.
- Someone who will, opportunistically, grab power when the opportunity to do so in a way that benefits them locally shows up.
- Someone who will, pay little attention to the goings-on in their democracy, and (???)
Do you honestly think person 1. is selfish?
Is someone who commits to never pulling the lever in the trolley problem selfish?
I can see why one can have ethical disagreements with someone who makes that commitment, but I do not think selfishness is an accurate description of the behaviour.
A significant part of what goes wrong in the LOTGH Alliance’s internal politics is when that the politicians get scared and schemy against the military, costing war effectiveness and this is fundamentally an issue of trust between components of a system that hold different kinds of power. If more admirals acted according to 2., this scheming to prevent the military from acting against the politicians would be more justified, but we would also expect to see way more of it. And the amount in the show is already quite bad for the Alliance’s war efforts.
On the other hand: it is true that people prefer to avoid getting their hands dirty if they can get away with it or let it happen elsewhere. I think this is a type of selfishness. And sometimes, in reality, we cannot differentiate between someone who is doing 1. because they are principled, and someone who is doing 4., from the outside.
But I think in LOTGH, with the themes of the show, the lesson is obvious. (My interpretation of the themes being: Sometimes systems get corrupt, bogged down, shift towards dysfunction and bad objectives. Sometimes you do need to shake such a system to generate something new. And the show’s central story arc features a brilliant Napoleonic reformer on the autocratic Empire side, a very good example of a dictator whose actions benefit the nation’s wellbeing. And then it features Yang Wenli as his counterpart. And the slower lesson, that the redditors seem to miss, is that after Reinhard von Lohengramm dies, the Empire will keep producing the kind of emperors that it had previously. There will be some good apples, but mostly the positive reforms will eventually be eaten by the autocratic interests of the ruler. And the democratic side of the Alliance, which has a political downfall of a kind during the show, will keep having downfalls, but it will also keep getting up, sometimes doing good, and sometimes bad decisions. But less of the time, it will be one imperious and hubristic autocrat, and often it will be boring and incompetent, but sometimes the people get what they want.
--- (Aside, and something I think the reddit comments who think Yang is being self-interested in are forgetting: One benefit of principles is that they reduce the amount of levers other’s can manipulate you with. And like we see in this discussion between the leadership of Pezan (the ~only neutral planet in the show, a place which profiteers on the war between the Alliance and the Empire), they truly did try. And altough some of the military did give in to the temptation, as the plots progress, nobody succeeded in making Yang commit to a power-grab. From a 1st-order consequentialist lens it may really look like it would have been better for the Alliance if Yang had grabbed the power. But from other ethical lenses, and from consequentialist lenses looking at nth-order effects, imagine how much worse the democracy would function if every military admiral had an easily reachable treshold
(Aside 2: FWIW I think the fact that partial and full mind control is literally a thing in Pathfinder is one reason why Lawfulness has a more-than-it-does-in-the-real-world advantage in Glowfics. It is extremely useful, in such worlds, to have bright lines that you will not cross, to make partial mind control less effective and to signal to your allies in the events of incompetent full mind control that you have been taken over, and in the scenario of competent mind control to reduce the action space that the adversary can utilize to benefit their ends.)
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