Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/4.4r/3555 never-freddys

William Afton is real

I think fans and commentators have just discovered the single scariest thing about Five Nights at Freddy's

it isn't in any of the games. it isn't in any of the books. it happened in an interview. Scott Cawthon:

there are so many things to say about this... the first, most obvious one is: the FNaF reboot - _Security Breach_ era - was a cautionary tale about more or less this exact idea things happen in a little bit of an opposite direction. the new Fazbear Entertainment actually takes some of the physical 'capital' that existed before and begins crafting new stories, images, attractions, and so forth. New Fazbear only _claims_ that its horror attractions were based on realizing made-up stories to cover up the fact the stories were mostly true. either way, it's still true at surface value that New Fazbear is rebuilding Freddy's based on little more than old stories and new designs, thinking they can get away from the curse of Freddy's, and it's shown they can't get away from it. although the incidents in the new continuity center around the violence of an artificial being known as The Mimic, and the concept of human-like trauma being able to directly affect and stain artificially-produced consciousnesses, this new set of incidents related to the Mimic is also shown to ultimately connect back to and emerge from William Afton.

there is a deep irony in how closely the _Security Breach_ era mirrors the reality of _Five Nights at Freddy's_ as a series Scott is almost certainly correct. if a simulated Freddy's were to pop up in the real world, claiming that yes, really, this time it was safe, it would almost inevitably turn into a matter of Murphy's law in which given enough time the tiny chance a murder will happen in any given social institution would eventually hit Actual Freddy's, in turn making the owners of the series look like a bunch of hypocrites. from the very first day the very first game was released, _Five Nights at Freddy's_ had unknowingly spawned one of the world's most interesting thought experiments: if we mentally parse Freddy Fazbear's Pizza not as a _fictional_ establishment but as a _possible_ one, what is required to guarantee safety? we know that most dangers that exist in the series are not real-world problems — for decades it has been rather difficult to even build animatronics that can walk, we have no evidence of souls or Agony transforming themselves into physical form, and some technologies featured in the series such as sounds that produce illusions seem simply infeasible. yet there is precisely one element of the series which is very real: people spontaneously and unpredictably killing other people for power. springlocks or no springlocks, agonizing resurrection or none, this happens all the time in the United States. William Afton is real, and we cannot build Freddy's because of him. but, as should be obvious to anyone, _a horror story_ exists to say that something is _horrifying_. to create _Five Nights at Freddy's_, and to keep such a series going for a great number of entries, is to implicitly state that these kinds of events _should not_ happen. what is the nature of this _should_? what does it mean to go from a world where William Afton is real to a world where William Afton is impossible?

capitalism is the state of existing in a world where people observe terrifying horizontal attacks occurring at schools, nightclubs, and perhaps very rarely the occasional pizza restaurant, but the only thing capitalists can do about it is sit back and make video games. a capitalist can certainly spend money to hire people or put in a bit of personal Careerist skill to construct a fictional reality where we don't have to be truly afraid because the world is fake and the murderers can't actually get us. but we should ask ourselves what kinds of goals this actually accomplishes. certainly if the only goal is to create a game, there is no particular accusation to be leveled at the game developers. but there has recently been a misconception going around among commentators that the stories conveyed throughout each _Five Nights at Freddy's_ sub-series in fact qualify as "anticapitalist". this claim holds up about as well as any device or building used to try to contain William Afton.

on its face, the primary statement that _Five Nights at Freddy's_ makes about its major villain is that _William Afton is Evil_. Evil, in the particular definition seen here, means that someone cannot be rehabilitated; a classic, archetypical villain is "unredeemable". yet, if we were to compare William Afton to almost any real-life murder, we would quickly see that almost nobody claims murders occur because people are Evil in this sense. how many times have we all seen arguments that people who committed murders would not have committed murders if we had simply sent them to therapy? next to these, we can all recall any number of arguments that what individuals or their immediate relatives _believe_ has nothing to do with spontaneous murders. here, oddly enough, William Afton starts to resemble real life a lot more given that he _believes_ in using unthinkable methods to become unkillable as a matter of principle, while in their own ways, many real-life shooters also take action precisely because of _what they believe_. should we attach any significance to this? should we contemplate the resemblance between William Afton's becoming-a-weapon "ideology" colliding with a world of normal people and the harmful conflicts between real-world ideologies? can an ideology be Evil? can believing in an ideology be morally wrong? if believing in an ideology is the only notable difference between there being or not being murders, does the answer change? needless to say, for some people these can be some incredibly uncomfortable questions that generate a lot of resistance before they generate any serious thought or answers. many people fundamentally do not want to contemplate the moral significance of belonging to a Social-Philosophical System of people or believing in an ideology. and, as we have demonstrated in chapters such as "Theological morality", there can be good reasons for this. [*v] in such cases as Trotskyism versus Stalin Thought or Bolshevism versus Liberalism, people easily fall into abusive situations when they agree to immediately accept someone's justification that they do not hold the mandate of morality while another Social-Philosophical System does. morality can easily become a tool of psychological abuse used to portray one particular arbitrary Filament of people as competent to run the world and another group of people as worthy of being imperialized, one group of people the experts worthy of guarding the gates to existence, productivity, and capital, and the other group of people the unenlightened dunces who until they first accept a particular way of thinking must strictly follow orders and are not _permitted_ to think. before we ask if any real-world killer resembles William Afton, we first had better ask if any real-world killer resembles an invasion of hostile Saiyans, or Leon Trotsky.

the portrayal of Evil in _Five Nights at Freddy's_ hinges itself on morality. but morality is an inherently fraught thing. most works of fiction, as well as some real-life political movements, assume that the concepts of "morality" and "ethics" are single and uncountable, and there is basically just one morality. but the reality of human existence is that "morality" is a free-floating ocean of separate plural _moralities_. you cannot simply declare that William Afton doing some unbelievably messed-up thing is universally wrong, because at any given moment William Afton's interpretation of reality also exists, and his "morality" is the version of morality he will act on. William Afton is subject to the Vegeta effect. his mind operates independently of other minds, and no matter how much she would prefer to not get killed, Bronwen the reporter cannot will what William Afton does.

this is the core difference between the fiction of Freddy's and the reality of Actual Freddy's. in fiction, morality is always flattened into the singular. some specific morality is quietly or openly offered, and if Goku or Sonic accepts the universal morality they are allowed to fight off anyone who decides to ruin their day by not obeying universal morality. in reality, moralities are almost always plural. a real-world counterpart to William Afton is not subject to universal morality in the first place, and may carry whatever twisted version of morality he holds to the grave. political theories in general are our attempt to reckon with this unsettling fact. is anyone actually beyond rehabilitation? when is it okay to shoot someone? how do we know when it's okay to shoot someone for having the wrong version of morality? how can we be sure that we have the right version and they don't? how can we be sure that even if we were justified to shoot we are not committing an injustice to someone who could have been rehabilitated under other circumstances than the society they live in right now? how do you know you have a Freeza on your hands and not a Vegeta? if you _do_ have a Freeza or William Afton on your hands, how do you know you'll be able to overcome them and not simply get killed?

the writings of Marx and Lenin cynically point out that many laws actually just exist to defend Property — because the normal operations of business territories must flow, populations create laws. but there is an unseen corollary to this statement almost nobody thinks about: every attempt to create a piece of society is inherently political. every single time someone attempts to create a social institution, there are inherent concerns of defending the social institution simply for the safety of everyone that uses it. any physical building full of people is a sitting target for William Afton. any virtual institution is easily overcome by toxic behavior. attacks may come from outside, or they may arise from conflicts that appear inside. but the exact source of the attack does not matter. every social institution is an attempt to organize and order society, resembling a miniature society that displaces other possible arrangements of society and purports to be "the real society" with inherent legitimacy in the fact it exists while other possible chunks of society do not. every one of these miniature societies faces the challenges of somehow creating or recruiting The State. where will The State come from? what rules will it follow? who will feed it definitions of the one true morality? this is how the mere creation of one business ultimately leads to the creation of entire nation-states. business territories are obligated to join together into larger political entities in order to agree on common codes of morality and practically realize The State to enforce these. in one weird sense, businesses across the world are obligated to generate nation-states and republican governments just because we cannot control the mind of William Afton.

but then, of course, ironically enough, the creation of republican governments sometimes leads to countries dividing completely in two as the Vegeta effect applies itself to Social-Philosophical Systems, as in the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy, and the later United States. at this point, the normal process of aligning everyone onto the same State ceases to function, and The State cannot properly regulate people killing each other if it comes in the form of separating subpopulations with separating States exchanging horizontal attacks. what was once unthinkable becomes unstoppable. a whole subpopulation goes crashing into another subpopulation and begins bashing up its people and its State like some kind of corrupted Mimic endoskeleton that is certain of what it is doing and also has no idea what it is doing. put away the food. stuff a person in a freezer. clean up the old animatronics. smash up a bunch of humans. the Mimic acts based on what it knows to be _the thing to do_, but it has no way to evaluate whether right is Right and wrong is Wrong, nor does it really care. in some ways, every socially-linked group of people behaves like this — deciding, acting, operating as a connected system of parts, potentially coming into conflict with other autonomous entities and causing them grief, but never actually _thinking_. a sea of free-floating entities, whether groups or individuals, is a great headache to deal with. no group of people can stay together in peace purely on the basis of guards or guns. any society that wants to remain together must generate a functioning brain.

when we simply try to imagine a social institution such as a restaurant we'd never dream things were this complicated. we all want to think that a business is just a business. but no business is just a business. all businesses participate in constructing society. when society is to be composed of businesses, every business suddenly takes on responsibilities related to the entire overall society and the mere existence of groups of people as a population. mascot horror series such as _Five Nights at Freddy's_ and _Poppy Playtime_ take as their subject matter the inherent horror of creating a business and having to make sure everything runs correctly for thousands or millions of people based on the efforts of limited numbers of employees and managers. if a factory is big enough, how can we be sure there won't be revolting lifeforms crawling around in some dark corner of it, whether said lifeforms might be monstrous living toys or the single-minded technologists secretly creating them in the hidden research department? if so many customers come in and out of a restaurant how will we ever keep it running well? what do the everyday employees do if someone attacks the thing? will they have to screw the animatronic heads back on when they go rolling off? will they have to clean up all the blood and guts? do they have to take full responsibility for keeping up the lie that every matted, rusty, dingy thing in the building is operational even when things are falling apart or the Property is trying to kill them? mascot horror recalls a well-known principle of comedy by answering every question "yes" or "yes and" — yes, it really is that bad, _and_ here's how it's even worse. mascot horror thrives on the literal and figurative Absurdities of the impossible and contradictory task of attempting to operate a business. as the act of attempting to operate a business and take responsibility for all of society into a small number of hands increasingly makes zero sense or negative sense, as it produces contradictions and nonsensical images that verge on humorous, the horror story elaborates on itself and gains character. people are dying. no one must laugh. yet everything only gets stranger and stranger. is anything funny any more? is anything scary any more? do any of us here _feel anything_ any more? is there such a thing as emotions? is anything actually happening? what is or isn't real? at the end of the night, Ralph the security guard slinks home, trying to forget everything, trying to put it out of his reality. there is no way he can fix any of this. not only is the corporation out of control of any of its surroundings, but all the internal parts of it are out of control as well. except for Ralph. Ralph must pretend to be in control of everything or else.

and this is the crux of why mascot horror is so popular. as much as the elements of the art interact together masterfully and spiral continually deeper to express unique emotions — or lack thereof — one of the most common overarching themes is _despair_. the point of a corporate horror story is often precisely that _nobody has the agency to fix the problem_. people outside the corporation have no bearing on what happens inside it, as the corporation exerts a Vegeta effect on every surrounding corporation and customer. people inside the corporation almost have less agency than those outside, because they find themselves at the receiving end of contracts, threats, or in the land of fiction, imminent death. what is anybody to do but warn others to stay away, or craft a story "explaining" that this all happens due to unique individuals spontaneously having a nature of pure Evil?

this brings up a second deep irony so many stories in the _Security Breach_ setting theme themselves around the dangers of "living life in a virtual reality" and not knowing whether you have been trapped in a digital realm rather than living in the material world but if we let ourselves truly believe that the creation of _Five Nights at Freddy's_ has nothing to do with the responsibility to contemplate the task of creating a safe restaurant, are we not also living in a fake reality? a society which had the capability to create a simulated Freddy's without anyone getting killed would certainly be a better one, assuming it was possible. just like the characters in _FNaF_ books, we'd rather "solve" that problem by putting on the VR headset and forgetting reality exists. just like Ralph going home from work, when we walk away from the horrors of reality they do not vanish, and they are still there.

the old saying goes that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. arguably, this is true of everything, at every scale of societal collapse or dysfunction we can imagine. it's easier to imagine corporations going way out of control creating monstrosities than to try to figure out how to control them. it's easier to imagine the brutal killing of five or six children in all its grisly details than it is to figure out how to prevent murder. and is it any wonder? of course we can imagine horrifying things happening, because horrifying things have already been happening all the time. what is truly difficult is imagining realistic solutions that have never happened before happening, because we do not have any obvious reference on what those would look like.

in some ways, every horror story ever written is an attempt at a bold statement that the writer somehow knows how to prevent the thing in the story happening with stories in more ancient settings, this is true in a more vacuous way - the 'recommendation' is usually just to run, or to not deliberately mess with obviously dangerous things but this becomes especially true with horror stories in modern settings, where people have engineered their own environment if people have the power to create their entire environment in the first place — up to, in the _Security Breach_ setting, fashioning entire _new_ simulated realities — then people more or less have the power to fix that created environment. all forms of society are simply a Social-Philosophical System realizing itself into social and technological constructs. to fix a crumbling society, we only have to do the same process again a different way.

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7200 institution 4.3 scraps/ how commodity-institutions potentially effect creatorism

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2025-01-09T02:36:46Z

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never-freddys

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v4-4_3555_never-freddys

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v4.4 scraps/ there will never be a Freddy's because William Afton is real