Telegram-канал r_discoelysium - Disco Elysium: Unsorted

Disco Elysium

08 Jul 2025 01:15

dissonance to alleviate her anxiety. To her, serious societal instability is being reframed as mere "market shifts" or "bad luck" or some sort of otherworldly, spiritual force that can be simply solved through talismans. This is only further supported by Sunday Friend, who's preaching the gospel of liberal capitalist economic values is paralleled through the description of a priest (via moniker "Sunday friend" and various options describing people like him as "the priest class that does cocaine to communicate with their god, the market").

Sidenote: It should be noted that Plaisance is a racist as well, maybe not as outwardly racist as the fascists like Measurehead or Racist Lorryman, but she has a clear fetishism for the mysticism of other cultures. I believe this fetishism is also a byproduct of capitalism and cognitive dissonance. In real life, swaths of working-class people can pinpoint that there is a problem with the "establishment," so much so that they elect Trump, a billionaire who claims he'll "drain the swamp". They recognize that they're poor because the "immigrants take our jobs" or that their money all goes to "welfare queens". They are too poor to be treated, so they become addicts, or they become crystal mommies that espouse that "big pharma feeds you medicine to make you more sick so that they can keep profiting off you". There is a sharp influx of conspiracy theorists nowadays because capitalism has fully broken these people, yet their blind belief in it forces them to explain its contradictions with conspiracy, racism, and antisemitism. They don't recognize that it's billionaires robbing them blind, but they know *someone* is robbing them blind. This is why capitalists and fascists go hand in hand.

Anyways, Joyce's musings on the Pale underscore her resignation to it as a form of "accelerationism". In her mind, she has compartmentalized the "Wild Pines/Union Issue" and the "Pale Issue" as two separate problems. Joyce's compartmentalization is particularly interesting because she is rich and intelligent, yet she is suddenly being trapped in the same logic as Plaisance (who comes off as a schmuck). She recognizes there is an abstract looming death that will kill everything eventually, but she finds discussion about this best relegated as academic trivia and writes it off as a "scientific phenomenon". The Pale is a subject of study for academics, not people like her. Like climate change, the Pale is just a strange phenomenon that humans have adapted to in order to do business.

She has no need to care about the Pale nor the future (beyond a trivial sense), because she is not a revolutionary; she wants to preserve the present and the status quo, since preservation of stability is how money is made. Through this characterization, Joyce implicitly believes the world is not worth saving, but rather, the present is detached from the future and exists in a vacuum, and that the present is simply a vehicle to make money.

With this in mind, it could be said that people's conditioned insistence to look away from the problem (capitalism) could be the reason why the Pale continues to grow. People continue to lose faith in the future, subscribe to fatalism and doomerism, and justify capitalism and its symptoms (fascism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc.), and it causes the Pale to expand because the Pale is comprised of thoughts and nostalgia unnatural to this world and to humans. The Phasmid explains that it wasn't there until people came and thought things, implying that capitalism and the pursuit of the material have corrupted people and rendered them un-human. Likewise, revolution counteracts the Pale, implying that communism is the natural, inevitable order that will make people human again. This is tied in a neat bow, leading us back to the symbol of the star and the antlers.

Climate change can similarly only be stopped if capitalism and the desire to seek infinite profits are dismantled. We typically hear of climate change described as "inevitable", but the totality of this adjective leads to apathy.