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This essay may be considered an extension of my previous essay, with the intention of focusing on a topic touched upon previously. That topic is the Master and his "Unity" plan. This will investigate Unity from a more philosophical angle, bringing to bear Eastern religions and the metaphysics of the Master’s ambitions on further analysis of Fallout's themes.
The Master, as discussed in the previous essay, is the mastermind and orchestrator of his plan for Unity. But it’s more than that: he’s emblematic of what Unity is, in principle. If you get the Richard Grey Audio Diary Holodisk, you can see where Grey first accidentally absorbs another creature. As I emphasized in my last essay, it’s accidental, reflexive on Grey’s part, not a choice. But more importantly, in the absorption of the rodent, Grey is no more. It’s not simply that he’s a mutated version of himself, like the ghoul Harold, whose exposure to FEV has left him scarred yet unaging. When Grey says, "I could actually feel its mind," he has already lost himself, is no longer the same man. In creating a new single self, the two minds cease to be.
That’s what I mean when I say he’s emblematic of Unity. And when you draw this interpretation to its logical outcome, it means that the Master as such will only truly exist when all selves have lost themselves in their absorption into the supreme entity. "The Master," the entity that you meet in the game, seems to think he is that supreme perfect being that will bring about Unity, that he is preserved even when he absorbs a new being, but the fact is that he’s not. Until his plan is realized, until the absolute ablation of all selves into a single organic whole, the fully integrated Master exists only as an abstraction. And that the being you encounter in the game, calling himself "the Master," presumes to be that perfect being already, is indicative of his systemic hubris: a philosophical flaw in his plan in addition to the oversight that his mutants are sterile.
To develop the relation of Unity/CoC-ism to Eastern religions, Unity is like the Hindu or Buddhist "nirvana," which word means literally "extinction." In these religions, achievement of nirvana always entails loss of a discrete self, loss of passions, loss of personality. And you can see this not only in the Master’s plan for Unity, but in the cult followers, who often talk of the Master as an omnipresent consuming entity "all around us," or speak of their sense of connectedness to all things, in various terms. Further, the goal of Nirvana is enlightenment, which we can see reflected in the Master’s integration of other beings into himself to gain their knowledge.
But while Eastern religions, as I understand, conceive of Nirvana as fundamentally "other," nontemporal and nonspatial, and therefore fundamentally spiritual in contrast to material, the Master’s conception of Unity is essentially grounded in the organic biomass that you see everywhere in his lair: ontologically materialist in its underlying presuppositions. Further, the "accident" of Unity, the catalyst of Richard Grey’s accidental immersion, is the deterministic result of cause-and-effect being played out in the material world. In this way, then, Unity stands in contrast to the philosophical concept of nirvana. Scientific materialism plays a sizeable role in the stuff of which the Fallout world is made—the material constituents of life and existence, the struggle for food and water, the fact that radiation or radscorpion-sting biotoxins or a bullet through the brain can quickly undermine the organic basis of your consciousness. And I say "scientific" in particular because, on the whole, Fallout is a game that seems to value pragmatic intelligence over naïve idealism.
In general, Fallout presents a certain perspective on the sacrifice of personality to an abstract, generally applicable ideal: conformity to a system that fails to take into account individual people is not just wrong, it’s untenable. However, the form in which it presents its perspective is just as important as the content of the perspective itself. For the Fallout Team chose to create not a book or a painting or even a movie, but a video game.
Consider: the "material" game-world of Fallout exists within your computer, as cause-and-effect laws (e.g. if-then statements), digital objects (items, NPC’s, environments, etc.), and their manifestations on the computer screen. These material components by themselves would entirely determine the gameworld’s progress, much as the scientific cause-and-effect laws of our material universe determine the phenomena that occur within it. However, the player is external to the "material" gameworld inside the computer! His actions are not dictated by programming nor by the "physical" world that presents itself to his in-game avatar; possible actions are circumscribed by the laws of the game, but do not obviate all input from the player. If this situation is taken as analogous to the "real world" that we inhabit, then human beings similarly act as players external to the deterministic gameworld, exerting causal power over their own bodies, capable of volition and reflective deliberation on the results of their choices. But here we come to an important difference between the world we inhabit and the world of Fallout: nothing we come across in Fallout can teach us about how to interact in the real world with other such free, volitional, deliberative beings. After all, unlike in the real world, everyone else in Fallout is an NPC.
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