For the longest time in Disco Elysium, I couldn’t figure out why Empathy was the stat chosen to represent Moralism, the other political stats made more sense to me.
Rhetoric is Communism, constantly arguing for you and dismantling the arguments of others, choosing to feel smart and miserable over acknowledging your hopelessness under capital.
Endurance is Fascism, purely physical, purely reactionary. No intellectual angle and not the emotions of your mind, but of your gut. The squirming, uncomfortable feeling of your insides telling you that everything sucks in your life because of *them*.
Libertarianism is Savoir Faire, the slimy show off stat, the ooze and groove and grinding of a real hustler. The kind of mentality that leads a terminally poor cop to walk around the most destitute ghetto in the city bragging about his net worth and his visionary money manifesting, to which normal people rightfully treat you as if you’re insane.
All well and good, all tracks, but then there’s Moralism, the political center, the Kingdom of Conscience. The stat for this would seem plainly obvious, Volition, right? The self control stat, the stat of temperance and rationality and measured action. The boring stat. Hell, Volition is the one who chimes in approvingly when you try on the Moralist pants. It seems like a perfect fit, but no, the stat for Moralism is Empathy.
Empathy, the stat that lets you, even forces you to feel for others. To reach them at their level, cut through to the source of all their feelings, the Superego. What does any of that have to do with Moralism? With slow, incremental progress and La Responsabilité?
At first, I thought it might have been an oversight, one Psyche skill swapped with another. Then I thought maybe it was meant as a subtly pro-moralist statement, that extreme political ideologies make it harder to connect with others, and being more “sensible” politically makes you more relatable. But that doesn’t really gel with the games stance on centrism, which is decidedly not positive, with the Moralist International depicted as a cold and dehumanizing force of oppression.
It didn’t make sense until I completed the Moralist political vision quest, which is by far my favorite out of all four. With Harry on top of the statue of Frissel III, begging and pleading with Coalition Warship Archer, it’s an Empathy check you have to pass to make the faceless drone on the other side of the radio see you. Hear you, acknowledge you as a person who is suffering, acknowledge the suffering of Martinase and Revachol under the unfeeling negligence of the Moralintern.
That’s when it hit me, Empathy is the Moralist stat because it taps into a universal human experience. Most people don’t have consistent political beliefs, even those ascribing themselves to more radical points on the spectrum. Most people have a complicated relationship with faith. But that moment of Harry on the statue, shouting desperately at a dreary sky for someone to please do something about this, that moment is empathetic to us all.
Regardless of political leanings, whether secular or spiritual, that gnawing existential dread is consistent. The world keeps getting worse and worse, and nobody with any power seems to care, every day we’re met with the silence of God and the silence of Capital. That’s why Empathy was chosen to embody Moralism, to recognize that deep down we’ve all felt that anxious longing. To look up at the sky and hope that something, someone. Anything, anyone, would please just listen and hear. Please just do something about this.
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