Ok, I get that its more of a gray with the Foundation, but what do you think we lean more to?
I mean we go through D-Class like candy. Then again we keep the world safe so…
I guess the real question is… do you think the higher ups are shining Beacons of Light, or mad men maliciously wringing their hands?
It's all about perspective. Some people feel the Foundation are the lesser of many evils, others feel they're the antiheroes keeping humanity safe. My canon shifts depending on the specific SCP or story we're talking about, so i don't have a set personal alignment for any one entity in the Foundation universe.
The answer is the same as most questions - what do YOU think? Why since it's HeadCanon, you're just as right as I am!
Personally, I thing that it depends on exactly who you ask and when. My Foundation is large, but doesn't have strong controls on it's members. Most of them are there for the Science, with a secondary of saving the world. Or at least making sure it's there long enough to complete their own experiments. There are a few "True Believers" that repeat the SCP mantra in their sleep. A few that straddle the line between "science" and "mad science" And one or two who tripped over the line, cursed it's vile existence and vowed that it would never again slow them down on the way to secrets of the universe!
How I imagine an O5 might reply (at least in my headcanon):
"You need to put your personal feelings aside. Humanity is up against the greatest threats of our brief existence."
"But from the sounds of it, humanity is always up against the greatest threats of our brief existence. What do you really want?"
"What we've always wanted. We're committed to the advancement and preservation of humanity. If we wait for the world's governments to act, no humans will be left."
Is the Illusive Man an O5?
I don't think it's a case of good or bad, more a question of methodology.
So, Paragon or Renegade?
RENEGADE. Paragons wouldn't use D-Class, for one thing.
If you're looking for a Mass Effect parallel, try Cerberus, except with a more competent leader.
So, we now know the identities of two O5s. David Bowie and Martin Sheen. Fantastic.
Well seeing as the Foundation has an Ethics Committee that makes sure all this suffering has a purpose…I would like to think the Foundation at least leans towards the good side of the spectrum. That wouldn't matter much if they were already so far into the black.
As the theory goes…
"Yes, I see you've heard the jokes. Here's one - 'how many members of the Ethics Committee does it take to change a lightbulb? None! The Ethics Committee can't change anything!'
No, it's all right. You're meant to laugh"
See, but in my headcanon, I'm not so sure how often the rest of the Foundation listens to them.
There is no canon, but it's generally taken as a necessary evil, and that the ethics committee prevents it from going further than that.
as i see it, they're bad guys without the plans of global domination who save the world on a regular basis. they're good guys who don't object to doing bad things to prevent worse things. they're neutral guys who get involved in everyone's business, have connections anywhere and can control anything they need to if they wish, and won't let anyone do things the foundation isn't okay with.
the question in the end has to come down to: what are their goals?
well, their main goal is to protect humanity from existential threats. their secondary goal is to study paranormal things so as to understand them so thoroughly that they are no longer paranormal. their third goal is to maintain "normalcy" in the world so that humanity doesn't self destruct out of fear of what's really out there.
are those things "good" goals? they're self serving goals, but they aren't really "evil".
the foundation is made up of a bunch of good guys who willingly do horrible things in order to save the world, but the foundation itself is simply what it is.
The Foundation is not good.
The Foundation is not nice.
The Foundation is necessary.
The Foundation exists because horrible things sometimes have to be done in order to prevent even more horrible things from happening.
To borrow a line from Warren Ellis:
"There's no justice. There's just us."
I think that line actually comes from Terry Pratchett (Mort, if I remember correctly). Predates Planetary by a good twelve years or so. It sounds like something that could be older than either though.
It's older than that. Back in the 70's Richard Pryor was telling a joke about going down to court and seeing only black people. "You go there to find justice and that's what you find - just us."
It's the Witch from Into the Woods.
You're so nice
You're not good
You're not bad
You're just nice
I'm not good
I'm not nice
I'm just right.
Yes, because 'good' and 'nice' aren't always the same as 'right'. And 'right' isn't always (or even often) 'good' or 'nice', it's just 'right'. The difference is what has kept me awake on many a rainy night.
Ultimately the foundation is good. Their ultimate goal is to PROTECT humanity (and the SCPs) by securing and containing SCPs.
They just do whatever is necessary to achieve that goal.
If they were an evil organization they would have dominated the world/the universe/all paraelle universes long ago.
Two bits of reading which you probably should check out. Personally, when my mental swing of The Foundation hangs further towards the dark and scary, these two Tales are pretty much my views exactly.
As for good guys/bad guys? They're the good guys. But they're playing with forces more powerful and potentially more destructive than the most powerful weapons ever created by man. The ethical indiscretions that happen on a daily basis at The Foundation are done in the name of absolute necessity, because there's always the possibility that if they DON'T take the plunge, the consequences will be earth-shattering.
The Foundation from what I see needs to keep borderline on the both good and bad idea as to avoid being to soft or too cruel. With those balances in check they can probably do a better job keeping SCPs contained without the restrictions of overly moral societies and people. Without some of the "cruel" things the foundation does, there probably wouldn't be anyone to complain about it. Without some of the "good" then the bad would just be a little too much and can lead to self destruction anyway. There's a balance to be had. Just a little less jargon for the same message :)
I think the Foundation is staffed by men and women that, on average, fall somewhere well north of Heinrich Himmler on the "Unmitigated Evil" scale. And the D-Class personnel bring that average down. The consistent moral thrust of the people that make up my Foundation is villainy beyond the scope of redemption; I think the idea that they're serving some higher good probably helps a few of the less honest employees sleep at night, but I also think that this is a grotesque falsehood completely at odds with the actual mandate of the Foundation and the comportment of its operatives. I've never liked this ~Good Men Making Hard Choices~ bullshit, because it reeks of narcissism, and there are too many harmless, benevolent, beneficial anomalies (and in some cases "anomalies") locked up to take it seriously. Members of the Foundation engage in torture, kidnapping, disinformation, social corruption and murder on a vast scale, not because there is some nebulous greater good they are serving but because they don't really mind the work.
The organization taken as a whole is probably a net good, but that's because its ambiguous mandate is protected from its executors by the Foundation's relentless, impenetrable, complex-to-the-point-of-minor-sapience bureaucracy; the unthinking administrative fervor which gives its members an excuse to perpetrate atrocities also demands, by way of accident, that they address shit that is actually bad for humanity as a whole. Even then those members only do "good" by dint of being Snake Plissken, unambiguous villains in a world that is nevertheless worse; and even then that only makes SCP a "net good" in the same inert way a spider is a net good, inflicting benefit and harm upon its ecosystem with equal ambivalence, an inhuman gestalt of stimuli beneath complexity. It's a bureaucracy of such intensity that it actually transcends its own architecture, and can thus be said to behave, on the level of an organization, with the precise moral import of a bear eating a baby. There's not any real justification for it either way. It's a creature.
But yeah, the guys who work there? Shitbags. They should all be in the Hague.
quoted text I've never liked this ~Good Men Making Hard Choices~ bullshit, because it reeks of narcissism, and there are too many harmless, benevolent, beneficial anomalies (and in some cases "anomalies") locked up to take it seriously.
quoted text
I would like to point something out about this, however. How many of the "good" SCPs do you think would last in the world today? For some, there is the possibility that the could be abused and subjected to cruelty far more than what staying at the Foundation is. Take Iris for example. Some people would take advantage of her unusual abilities, and not only cause pain for her, but for the rest of the human race as well. The truth is, some SCPs are not locked up to protect humans, but to protect the SCPs themselves.
Iris is actually one of the SCPs I was thinking of, here. Her ability is strange, certainly, but it's also not really dangerous, and she's never shown any signs of wanting to do anything with it other than live a normal life. But it's weird, so they throw her in a box forever. It's not a question of "protecting" her, because protect her from what? They stumbled across her because of a bumblefuck accident and she can't do anything particularly noticeable or useful. And the way they've chosen to protect her is, again, to lock her in a box, sever all her relationships and steal her life. Maybe there's a worse alternative out there, but this sure looks like killing the natives to save them.
And even if there were some crazy cabal of death cultists aching for the cataclysmic power to look at a thousand live action ducky-face MyCupid bathroom pictures, that's not why the Foundation is locking her up. That would be incidental to the fact that she's a break from normalcy. Take something like 028. There's probably a cure for cancer lurking somewhere in there, but that's weird, so they lock it down. Or the pills that cure everything: Obviously you can't distribute that, but at present they're doing shit like turning people into zombies just to see if you can turn them back. Maybe releasing some of that information to the scientific community at large could get some better results?
The point is that they don't actually care. They don't give a shit about making the world a better place, or even a less evil place, not as a whole; they just care about suppressing everything that makes it a weirder place. The organization isn't morally ambiguous, it's morally ambivalent. It doesn't make those distinctions. If 231-7 initiating a █████ event led to free cookies spontaneously manifesting for every child on Earth, they'd still be doing 110-Montauk, because that's not where cookies have historically come from. The people who work there are always going to be shit, because they're always going to be doing things like that. But the Foundation as a whole? It's just a function. Everything it does is practically a form of instinct. It's blameless, but then so are those spiders that lay eggs in people.
~a shitload of words about nothing~
"The people who work there are always going to be shit, because they're always going to be doing things like that."
Not everybody, and even the people doing *that* (well, most of them) think it is absolutely horrible. I always imagined that any military-like shoulderpatch for SCP personnel with a nifty latin motto would read DIRA NECESSITAS, 'horrid necessity'.
What is 'Good' or 'Evil', by the way? The continuaton of the human race? Upholding humanitarian ideas? Basically, as other posters have noted, views of Good and Evil come down to the individual.
Few, if any, are in it to commit evil acts, but that's not really comforting, since everybody, from Mother Theresa through inquisitors through the people working on the Manhattan Project to Gulag guards usually thinks of him- or herself as 'good' and his or her actions as necessary. Whether it was "We must kill all the Jews" or "we must eradicate smallpox", driven people have always believed their actions to be absolutely necessary, and so does the Foundation as an organisation and so do the people who work for it. With the Foundation, the world might be lucky that they are usually actually *right*.
tl;dr - the Foundation personnel subjectively believe they do good, and without the Foundation, we would all be boned.
If 231-7 initiating a █████ event led to free cookies spontaneously manifesting for every child on Earth, they'd still be doing 110-Montauk
But it clearly won't. That can be inferred from the 6 times this has evidently happened before.
He's (she's?) being hypothetical.
I kind of agree with you there. The Foundation's technology could save millions if distributed correctly, but doing that would blow their cover. The Foundation loses secrecy, everyone pays more attention to the conspiracy theorists. Sooner or later, there's a Keter-class Reality Warper out there and a local TV crew gets there first.
Why the lack of secrecy is a bad thing? Well, memetic hazards for one. But we don't know the "canonical" suicide rate for Foundation employees, do we?
Well, if you're going to use an example…
Of course, I agree with you. The Foundation probably could, theoretically save lives if they released some objets to the public. But there are a few reasons why they don't.
One of them is the whole SCP-884 fuck-up, which I'm assuming here to act as a canon. Pretty much all of the objects the Foundation has (that is, all of the non-Keter ones, which would be bad to use for all involved). They don't understand how they work, or what would happen if they were opened to the public. There's been a whole tale series about what could, in all likeliness, happen if they did exactly what you're suggesting. Good god, for all you know, all of that happened before, after which the Foundation presumebly restarted. All in all, it probably wouldn't turn out well. Besides, many objects are so inexplicable that they just wouldn't be acceptable to release.
And that's even mentioning the reasons specific to each thing, like low supply, potential for weaponisation…
EDIT: Aren't you also the new fellow that tried to burst in and criticise SCP-231 for blatantly for being about rape?
I am, but you're doing me ill credit: I did burst in and point out that 231 is blatantly about rape, although the depth to which that's a criticism is something we can talk about on the appropriate discussion page.
As for the merits of the obsessive secrecy, that was just to illustrate a point about the Foundation's moral ambivalence to the strangeness it deals with. Not even I'm interested in an argument that takes the propriety of publicizing death-lizards as its actual object. My aim was to draw a distinction between what the Foundation does, which on an organizational scale I think is sufficiently broad in scope to be amoral, and whether or not the people that work for it are the "good guys", which I think is a question succinctly answered by the amount of torture, murder and worse that these people regularly get up to.
If I lived in a world where the shit the Foundation deals with was real, I'd obviously want a Foundation out there to cope with it…but that's not the same thing at all as saying I think they serve "the greater good". To answer Cassanos' points and maybe twist them around a little bit, I think it's a very ugly road to go down when you start arguing that the Foundation is "right" for doing the things it does, because that's a marriage of action and self-justification that, Godwin Godwin Godwin, sounds like the Nuremberg defense to me. The Foundation saves lives and has probably saved the world, but that's an incidental function of its biology; it locks up weird shit, and it's just lucky coincidence that a lot of weird shit is dangerous. Ascribing it moral transcendence is ascribing it moral agency, which to me is humanizing something about as human as tide. I spot it a moral exemption, the same as I would a shark, because it's more than the sum of its parts.
Which leaves us with the parts, to which I again have to say: Yeah, and the Spanish Inquisition and the Nazis and Julius Caesar thought they were doing the right thing too. The nebulousness of good and evil is the crux of my argument, here, because given the transparent subjectivity of those terms it's absolutely necessary not to subordinate fundamental principles like "don't murder thousands of people" and "don't torture little girls" to grandiose ethical abstractions. At the end of the day, whatever they tell themselves, that's the kind of job that Foundation personnel would be doing. I'd be enormously sympathetic to why, and it's a choice that I would respect, but styling it as noble self-sacrifice would be a hideous mistake; the point is that it's villainy, and installing loopholes only serves to distort our basic moral scope.
Writhe in fire, heathens.
I agree that it is very nebulous whether or not the ultimate goals of the Foundation are "good" or "bad," but, unlike you, I'm reasonably certain that at the end of the day, the net impact of the Foundation is good, and not by any accident. I don't think the Foundation started its day by looking at the world and saying, "Let's contain all these anomalies." It saw the anomalies first, saw that, by and large, they wanted to fuck us up second, and then decided that they needed to be contained. That's a theme of the mission statement: the higher powers have it in for humanity.
Along the way, we have kidnapped and tortured for that end. And yeah, the Foundation probably has done it "for the greater good." Yes, if somebody in real life actually kidnapped and tortured and killed, and then they justified it as "for the greater good," then absolutely, they are probably pulling self-righteous bullshit out of their ass. They are probably not working for the greater good, because there's extreme doubt cast upon whatever cause that person might be working for. It's very indeterminate.
The Foundation is different, because this is fictionland. The Foundation has seen, with its own eyes, literally dozens of anomalies that would exterminate the human race given the chance. As opposed to Hitler, who did not see Jews ruining Europe because that did not actually happen, or Julius Caesar, who could not see any possible benefit from a Roman Empire because that's just guesswork, the Foundation has a very solid, non-ambiguous warrant for what it does. So it can subordinate stuff like "don't torture little girls."
And this is all wish-fulfillment. You will never find a person or organization that is consistently "saving the world" in real life.
I think the Foundation does have agency. There are specific bodies comprised of thinking people in charge of running it. They have a mission charter that they follow. That's moral agency, at least to me.
And yeah, the Foundation is only a net good. There's a bunch of fucked up stuff that it does ONLY for the sake of containment, NOT for any net good. This is a product of paranoia. But on balance, containment is the net good. This ties in to whether or not the people working for the Foundation are good. If you are the average Foundation personnel, you are containing something that is probably not even sapient, and is also probably trying to hurt a lot of people. You're probably not even complicit in the evil shit the Foundation does, because they keep that stuff classified and you'll never know about it. I'd say that you're a good person.
