The Needful Many: Wild ARMs 2 and sacrifice
“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
I expect anyone likely to read this instinctively added “or the one” to that statement. This phrase holds a special meaning to the greater population of nerds and fangirls of the internet, a stark, elegant summation of the theme for a core installment of a foundational franchise for all of us. And yet…
And yet, when you remove it from that context, I wonder if it becomes sinister. The trouble with ‘basic’ logic is it’s easy to assume it’s equally applicable to any sort of problem, and because it is such basic logic applying it can become dogmatic: of course the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, it’s the most obvious thing in the world! Only someone being entirely irrational would question that!
The trouble with pithy sayings and simple logic is they make it exceedingly easy to bypass the implications of the words. Reducing life to a trolley problem is absurd on its face, after all; usually there aren’t binary options in life. But before we really go all in on dissecting how this applies to a real-life, political or social context, I think there’s a contrasting work we can use to help ramp up to it.
Wild ARMs 2 is a game that’s preoccupied with the nature and role of heroes in the world, and each of its cast members explores a different facet of how one becomes a hero, what motivates them, and the realities of that path of heroism. The most instructive of their number for our purposes is Tim Rhymeless, a child of mystic lineage whose involvement with the rest of the team begins rather accidentally.
Tim is originally from the Baskar Village, who maintain the ways and rites of Filgaia’s nature spirits, the Guardians. The villagers immediately recognize him as having the ability to become a Pillar, a living link between the Guardians and the material world. This trait is shared by one other in the village, a girl Tim’s age named Collette whom he unsurprisingly becomes immediately smitten with. Owing to visions of disaster, the village is eager for someone to immediately undertake the trials to become a Pillar, a potentially dangerous prospect in both journeying to the alter to the Guardians and in the process itself should the Pillar prove unable to withstand the Guardian’s power. Since he has little knowledge of his heritage or abilities, Tim hesitates briefly, prompting the village elder to immediately say they’ll have to return to their original plan and have Collette undergo the trial instead. Tim rapidly volunteers, and the party helps him through to the final trial with relative ease. During said trial he learns how to manifest the Guardians, who inform him that he is fated to die, and in order to combat the coming disaster he will have to stand at the Alter of Sacrifice.
That night the Tim overhears the village elder and it seems these terms are not merely metaphorical “your life is now dedicated to Filgaia and the Guardians” talk. Tim’s mother left the village to prevent his becoming Pillar so he would not be sacrificed, since the seers had foretold her children would be the next Pillar. Tim is shaken by this and the Elder goes into a short speech.
“There are people you want to protect in this world, right? This is the only way. There are times when SOMEONE must be sacrificed! Please understand Tim… you have to die for Filgaia.”
And other villagers immediately start to guilt him for a selfishness he hasn’t expressed, to please think of their families. I should stress that Tim is 12, and based on the reactions of the villagers so far if his mother hadn’t left with him when he was a toddler he’d have undergone the trial years ago. An untimely attack by the terrorist organization Odessa instills Tim with a desire to fight, rather than merely be sacrificed, and the matter is tabled. But of course, the visions of disaster were nothing to do with Odessa because Odessa was an engineered crisis all along, and the seers instead were seeing a literal vision of the encroaching of Kuiper: the sky being eaten away.
The tactics of the villagers here is where I want to focus. It’s framed as pragmatic, logical; dire situations require sacrifices, this is simply the way of the world. But seemingly, sacrificing the Pillar is the only solution to the omens of doom that loom over the Baskar, thus meaning that a small group of people are singled out as those who must be sacrificed, regardless of their willingness or understanding of the process. And indeed, when Tim himself seems unconvinced by the matter, it’s immediately proposed to simply move on to the next in this expendable class. Their best efforts are to a) lay on a guilt trip, b) emphasize cold logic, and c) threaten someone similarly in the minority. It’s simply assumed there’s no other solutions, and that the other Baskar have no other way to contribute except to sacrifice their Pillar, and the willingness of the Pillars themselves in this process are pretty immaterial.
Let’s wrap this back around. Star Trek itself has always had a complicated relationship with Vulcans, Logic, and indeed the phrase “the needs of the many” itself through the years as the franchise has gone through new generations of writers since it’s coining in The Wrath of Khan. Even the immediate next film, The Search for Spock, suggested at least one flaw in the idea, how the personal connections between people can lead them to refuse to accept those sort of sacrifices. But I think the answer arrived at in Enterprise is more instructive for how this sort of thinking can be misapplied in a real life political context.
“On any given mission, the limits of acceptable casualties is 20%. So says traditional military doctrine. Well, we’ve crossed that margin!
“There’s a Vulcan axiom: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Corporal Hawkins understood that.”
“That doesn’t make his death any more acceptable.”
“No. But it makes it honorable.”
In the context this exchange happens, a long-term military operation against a deadly foe, these sorts of sacrifices are largely made by those who have accepted a risk to their lives, and as that form of personal choice, there may be a sort of honor to it. But once the “logic” involved becomes applied to societal groups, we instead create large numbers of people like Tim: acceptable sacrifices to the comfort and safety of the callous majority.
And it can be hard not to think of that comfort as the enemy at times. There have always been and perhaps will always be people whose reaction to desperate conditions is to become vicious and selfish, but in the main people in those conditions are prone to helping one another, even as their sense of scope narrows to survival. But people with a sense of stability “fighting” to protect it? That’s when vicious callousness becomes normal. Let’s go back to the example of Tim. Early on, when he’s first being pressured to save Filgaia, the Baskar villagers are gun-ho about the matter, pressing him hard with what they stand to lose if Filgaia is threatened and how important it is for him to accept his sacrificial role. But later, once Kuiper appears and the sky is visibly being devoured the tone shifts, a somber divulging of information on how to locate the sacrificial alter and a desire to find some better way underscore all their statements. The Guardians themselves are rather nonplussed when Tim and their vessel Pooka tell them as much when he asks them to describe the nature of the threat, although unlike the Baskar in the beginning they also freely suggest that Tim sacrificing himself without knowing why or the nature of the threat is no good to either him or them. Unlike the Baskar early on, the Guardians are simply employing the tools they know they have to combat a situation that seems quite beyond the powers of anyone else, and take far less convincing that seeking out another path is worth attempting.
Ultimately Tim’s role in the plot stops at this point without a clear-cut resolution. To be sure he makes it through the game just fine and other characters deliver more definitive statements on the heroism. Indeed, the game’s overall thesis is that there shouldn’t be heroes, because it’s just another, less direct way to sacrifice someone for The Greater Good rather than banding together to truly combat the problems of the world. While the man who engineered the Odessa crisis in order to ‘prepare’ the world to fight Kuiper ultimately sacrifices himself and his sister to create a vessel that Kuiper can be trapped and destroyed in, this simply awakens the lurking, just as deadly threat of Lord Blazer that’s been hanging over the entire game. And while Ashley, as his host, must take the charge in their duel for control of his body, the weapon he wields draws upon the hopes and energy of everyone on Filgaia, every character you’ve met through the entire game and even the very planet itself, to strike the demon down. It does one of the things Wild ARMs, and really most sci-fi, does best; makes the metaphorical literal.
So I think here we can set aside metaphor or interpretation of fiction for a bit. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that political coalitions act exactly in this fashion: declare some who participate in their coalition to be inconvenient, that society isn’t “ready” to advance their causes, and sacrifice them in the name of pragmatism. Political rhetoric will often employ this in sneaky ways. “Oh, we don’t support gay marriage, that would be too much, but we’ll back your civil unions for sure.” Some will even defend this, saying “oh that was just talk, they needed to downplay their real position to get into office, they always actually had your back!” How many succumbed to despair, seeing no one publicly willing to stand up for them, I wonder. And how can people so easily ignore that question, or pretend that number is zero.
This pattern repeats in larger or more organized marginalized groups within coalitions as well. People become convinced that only by viciously attacking others and denying their concerns as meaningful or valid can they purchase their own pardons to live. We’ve seen this several times in rights movements; the diminishment of Black women in second wave feminism and hyperfocus on white women achieving positions of power, the hyperfocus on gay marriage to the exclusion of securing rights or acceptance for queer people of all stripes. Seeing a small opening to secure greater comfort and proximity to privilege arise, an offer of supposed equality in exchange for tossing their supposed allies under the bus. And always the least oppressed among them take it.
We can go another step further here. The ways in which Tim’s story parallel’s marginalized communities jumped out to me for obvious reasons, but we can stretch a little bit and see how this logic is applied in more… let’s say topical ways. Wild ARMs 2’s broader thread on the nature of Heroes so directly speaks to the language used in 2020 for people who have had to work through shutdowns and the ongoing pandemic are stark. And we all knew it was coming as soon as describing front line medical workers as “Healthcare Heroes” became mainstream; they would not be provided support or compensation or even the basic tools necessary to safely work under these conditions. But London would come out to clap wouldn’t they.
And I think this is where we can circle back around. Another way to parse the phrase “the needs of the many” can be “you can’t save everyone”. And both share a certain amount of truth. Yes you need to help as many people as possible, yes it’s not usually possible to save everyone. It’s very pragmatic, and also a complete lie people tell themselves to avoid the truth: they did the easy thing, they let people die, because they weren’t willing to attempt the hard thing. The lives of a great many healthcare workers could have been saved with better preparation, with decisive action early in the spread, by paying others to stay home, by ensuring many safeguards to help people and businesses recover in the aftermath. But that would require asking people to give up just a little too much comfort for their liking. Not just financial, but social. It would require admitting we were living under a would-be fascist in a fading empire. It would require ejecting the social niceties that force us to pretend a handful of assholes and their tens of millions of sycophants aren’t assholes and sycophants who are causing all this harm through their stubborn insistence on not sacrificing the slightest iota of their rotted ideology. And it would require acknowledging that people are more married to that social stability and the crumbs of material comfort they too receive from these lies than to doing the maximum good possible.
And as heated as that is, there is a danger in going beyond condemnation. It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking the shift from the petty selfishness seen in Tim’s early story to the honest desire to help seen in the latter half is something that can be manipulated. Escalating from a threat to comfort to a threat to survival isn’t something that can be manufactured. When you purposely escalate, you also deny people the understanding of a threat in a way that allows them to engage empathy. “Things will get worse before they get better” as praxis is another form political pragmatism, and arrives from the same deficit of empathy. You’re still sacrificing the lives of others to your own comfort: it’s just your own supposed future comfort, rather than your comfort now.
So, let’s end with Wild ARMs 2, and its own ending. Because I think what Lord Blazer teaches us is this: any loss, accepting the Needs of the Many, diminishes us. Humanity has a deep inner darkness, and those innermost demons will not fall to anything less than all of us. We need all the experience, all the ways of thinking, we need everyone in order to overcome ourselves, and in so doing the challenges before us.
The Needs of the Many Cannot Be Met Ignoring the Needs of the Few.
