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Posted by Random Nerd in a discussion on the White Wolf game Demon: the Descent:Here's my opinion on the God-Machine.
The Cthulhu Mythos is basically about H.P. Lovecraft's three big fears, a godless uncaring universe, people who weren’t white Protestant New Englanders, and fish. The former gives most of the shape of his horrific entities, and the latter two contribute aesthetics to them. So, Cthulhu is a big tentacled creature that is worshipped as a god by degenerate foreigners, but is actually just a big powerful alien dude that doesn’t give a shit about us. And… well, that’s not all that scary to me. For someone living in the modern day, the idea of a purposeless universe that doesn’t care about us is pretty much the norm. And so we have little stuffed Cthulhus with big squid eyes.
As for the God-Machine… sure, it's mechanical. But that's just an aesthetic, like Cthulhu looking like a sea creature. Here's what about it resonates with me. There's a scene in The Grapes of Wrath, where two farmers with shotguns wait to be evicted from their farm.
MULEY: You mean get off my own land?
THE MAN: Now don’t go blaming me. It ain’t my fault.
SON: Whose fault is it?
THE MAN: You know who owns the land - the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.
MULEY: Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp’ny?
THE MAN: It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.
SON: They got a pres’dent, ain’t they? They got somebody that knows what a shotgun’s for, ain’t they?
THE MAN: But it ain’t his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.
SON: All right. Where’s the bank?
THE MAN: Tulsa. But what’s the use of picking on him? He ain’t anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself, trying to keep up with his orders from the east!
MULEY: (bewildered) Then who do we shoot?
That’s the real horror of the God-Machine, the idea that there is a system that touches you every day, and that will blindly but relentlessly crush you if you happen to be standing in the wrong place, but that has no face or will or personality behind it. Any specific bit of it that you could possibly interact with is just doing this because that’s our policy, or because otherwise he’d lose his job, or because that’s just how the world works. There is no giant face of the God-Machine that you could even potentially punch, just a bunch of little bits each carrying out their own little task, like how there is no individual ant that decides when to have a mating flight and when to attack the ant nest across the road.
That’s what’s scary about it. Not the gears and robots, the way human society just mindlessly and purposelessly crushes some people’s lives just because that’s how all the little moving parts happen to fit together.
That sounds very familiar to me, that feeling.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are
comments.
The Cthulhu Mythos is basically about H.P. Lovecraft's three big fears, a godless uncaring universe, people who weren’t white Protestant New Englanders, and fish. The former gives most of the shape of his horrific entities, and the latter two contribute aesthetics to them. So, Cthulhu is a big tentacled creature that is worshipped as a god by degenerate foreigners, but is actually just a big powerful alien dude that doesn’t give a shit about us. And… well, that’s not all that scary to me. For someone living in the modern day, the idea of a purposeless universe that doesn’t care about us is pretty much the norm. And so we have little stuffed Cthulhus with big squid eyes.
As for the God-Machine… sure, it's mechanical. But that's just an aesthetic, like Cthulhu looking like a sea creature. Here's what about it resonates with me. There's a scene in The Grapes of Wrath, where two farmers with shotguns wait to be evicted from their farm.
MULEY: You mean get off my own land?
THE MAN: Now don’t go blaming me. It ain’t my fault.
SON: Whose fault is it?
THE MAN: You know who owns the land - the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.
MULEY: Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp’ny?
THE MAN: It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.
SON: They got a pres’dent, ain’t they? They got somebody that knows what a shotgun’s for, ain’t they?
THE MAN: But it ain’t his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.
SON: All right. Where’s the bank?
THE MAN: Tulsa. But what’s the use of picking on him? He ain’t anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself, trying to keep up with his orders from the east!
MULEY: (bewildered) Then who do we shoot?
That’s the real horror of the God-Machine, the idea that there is a system that touches you every day, and that will blindly but relentlessly crush you if you happen to be standing in the wrong place, but that has no face or will or personality behind it. Any specific bit of it that you could possibly interact with is just doing this because that’s our policy, or because otherwise he’d lose his job, or because that’s just how the world works. There is no giant face of the God-Machine that you could even potentially punch, just a bunch of little bits each carrying out their own little task, like how there is no individual ant that decides when to have a mating flight and when to attack the ant nest across the road.
That’s what’s scary about it. Not the gears and robots, the way human society just mindlessly and purposelessly crushes some people’s lives just because that’s how all the little moving parts happen to fit together.
That sounds very familiar to me, that feeling.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are
comments.