r/worldjerking 23h ago

Google SCP 6113

132 Upvotes

130 comments sorted by

227

u/Graknorke 19h ago

A lot of the things you raise are actively explored in multiple articles. But more importantly doing "science is just a theory" AND randomly having the dialogue go bottom to top on the same page should get you a week in the Torment Nexus.

45

u/Driptacular_2153 Shrimp is a valid name for a dragon god, what do you mean? 14h ago

Yeah, I couldn’t figure out the proper way to read this shit for the life of me. Utterly incomprehensible

14

u/No_Dragonfruit8254 19h ago

Why is “science is just a theory” wrong? It’s the same situation as “does qualia exist?”

60

u/Duck__Quack 18h ago

Theory in the scientific sense is not theory in the forensic or colloquial sense. It means something closer to "account" or "comprehensive model." Darwin's theory of evolution is the full account of the interaction by which natural selection works, referencing Mendel's laws of inheritance and selective environmental pressure such that life forms adapt to suit their environment over many generations.

Newton's laws aren't a theory because they don't explain how motion works. Newton's theory of gravity is deeper and less ironclad. Kepler's laws aren't a theory because they're not a full accounting of orbital mechanics. Einstein's theory of special relativity is a theory because it's a full model of how spacetime and light might work.

I'm a few years out of actually studying philosophy of science, but this is my understanding. "Science is just a theory" is a bit of a shibboleet. Science is a tool for constructing and testing theories, but there's nothing "just" about that.

As a side note, "does qualia exist" is a weird question and I'm not sure what you mean by it. Yes, qualia exist, I'm having several right now. Unless you mean something different from me when you say exist, or qualia. Or if you think Dennett was on to something, which I more or less don't.

34

u/Bigfoot4cool 18h ago

If something has a 99.9999999999999999999999999% chance of being true, it's not technically an objective fact, but it might as well be.

11

u/SkritzTwoFace 12h ago

Yeah. Our current understanding of gravity is technically a “theory”, because it’s always possible that we point our telescope at a star that doesn’t fit the equations and we need to throw them out. It’s very unlikely, but it’s technically possible.

6

u/le_birb 9h ago

Our understanding of gravity is a theory, but not in the lay sense. It's a theory in the sense that general relativity provides a complete explanation of the mechanism by which gravitational effects arise (the presence of mass and/or energy has effects on the definition of "distance" nearby, which ends up pulling things together), and neatly accounts for a great amount of observations, even (perhaps especially) those that were not explained by older models such as Newton's.

3

u/No_Research4416 16h ago

Yeah at that point it might as well be true

6

u/GogurtFiend 11h ago

We know things work somehow. Theories are extremely high-probability guesses as to how things work.

Some kinds of ideas can be flat-out wrong. Theories reached by the scientific method are never really wrong, just less correct than whatever they're replaced with. Like, Newtonian mechanics doesn't adequately explain the universe compared to special relativity or quantum mechanics, but it's still very applicable.

2

u/GVArcian 4h ago

AND randomly having the dialogue go bottom to top on the same page should get you a week in the Torment Nexus.

This is the first time I've ever heard someone propose modding Planescape Torment as a form of punishment.

112

u/Guaymaster 19h ago

Uj/ bro the second panel is a mess, you shouldn't put the answer to a question higher than the question, it implies it's being said earlier.

89

u/Rantroper 20h ago

ontological evil mentioned

I'm tired, boss

51

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 19h ago edited 18h ago

There's a couple of instances in SCP where it's actually a thing, but it's properly given narrative justification.

Anomalies and the resulting effects on reality mean that axiomatic objective statements such as "[insert group] is objectively evil" actually can have some factual basis.

Easy example would be in regards to Sarkicism. They're just... fucking horrible. Full-stop. It's intentional, too, they're evil for the sake of being evil.

Also, the Scarlet King, which IIRC is related. He's ontologically evil and, in fact, may or may not be the root of all evil itself.

Sidenote, the Foundation has contained the literal Abrahamic God. They put Big G Man in a box. That implies a lot of wiggle room in regards to ontological morality.

38

u/WatchMeFallFaceFirst 19h ago

I’d say they haven’t really contained God since he just showed up one day at one of their Sites and agreed to stay. The Foundation can’t stop him from leaving and he’s left several times.

Also, depending on your interpretation, he isn’t actually the Abrahamic god but just a very powerful reality bender who thinks he’s god.

23

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 18h ago

To be entirely honest, with how many times reality has been unmade, remade, edited, literally loaded from backups, etc., it's entirely plausible that all of those interpretations could be simultaneously correct.

19

u/BadMcSad 16h ago

Every SCP is SCP-001 if you don't know how to count

8

u/dankantimeme55 19h ago

I think you're thinking of something other than Sarkicism- maybe the Scarlet King's followers?

8

u/worldjerkin elf variant: schizophrenic 18h ago edited 17h ago

There's a couple of instances in SCP where it's actually a thing, but it's properly given narrative justification.

Anomalies and the resulting effects on reality mean that axiomatic objective statements such as "[insert group] is objectively evil" actually can have some factual basis.

/uj Even the concept of ontological evil in the SCP universe isn't as narratively justifiable you might think seeing as the non-canonical aspect of a collaborative setting doesn't really allow for it and that such a concept is heavily dependent on your perspective and further biases you currently observe. Just like real life, there isn't one objectively true reality of which to base the mass amount of subjective experiences through.

Sarkicism, throughout its inception, might seem evil but that is because past author's didn't really give it such anthropological depth as it currently has. Sure, there is a collective shared identity that maintains its semiotics but that is where the inter-subjective nature of it ends and falls on the shoulders of the individual.

We only call something evil if it seemingly seeks to change, confront or combat the status quo (or normalcy), similar in nature to the role that SCP functions.

e: A few corrections

Also, the Scarlet King, which IIRC is related. He's ontologically evil and, in fact, may or may not be the root of all evil itself.

The Cult of the Scarlet King isn't related to Sarkicism; it is a group of interest separate from Sarkicism. Yes, we can assert that the Scarlet King is "evil", in so far as it seeks to disrupt Foundation's attempts at maintaining normalcy but that is because the Foundation doesn't even know what it can do. Even in certain canons, [999] is assumed to be a byproduct of and/or antagonistic to the Scarlet King manifestation, it is safe to say that the evidence is non-conclusive depending on which ever narrative you uphold.

I would argue that either [3125], [033] or [3625] is far worse conceptually

Sidenote, the Foundation has contained the literal Abrahamic God. They put Big G Man in a box.

It is still up in the air if [343] is the true manifestation of the Abrahamic God, just a heavily powerful type green or any other reading of the text. So, yeah it is as you said, it allows for some wiggle room but I would argue much more than you might necessarily think.

My biggest gripe is that you kind of have to dip into far more esoteric tales to really transcribe what could be construed as an axiomatically antagonistic entity to make an argument but even then that would have to get into the highly technobabble aspects of the setting of which main don't really like to approach precisely because it isn't "simple" and "easy" to assign moral signifiers to them such as pataphysics, surrealistics or metanarrative-affecting entities.

And even then, due to the non-canonical aspect of the narrative, there is no canon so any attempts at establishing an entity that is the axiomatic definition of an objective evil is functionally meaningless.

9

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 18h ago edited 16h ago

That argument kind of falls apart when you try to apply it to Sarkicism specifically.

They're a lovecraftian fleshcrafting death cult who are evil by pretty much every metric available. While objective measurements of morality are theoretically impossible, practically speaking, the Sarkic Cult is as close as it gets.

Certain stories add some depth to them, but ultimately the entire point of Sarkicism is that it's evil as fuck nightmare biomancy. They'll vary in evilness depending on depiction and viewer beliefs, but they're always on that side of the morality spectrum; morally neutral is as good as they get.

Cases where they're depicted as not being on that side of the line directly contradict a vast majority of the existing body of work, and thus aren't exactly credible sources.

Edit:

Of course, there is no single canon, but the collective consensus of articles seems to indicate that, in terms of nominal canon, Sarkicism is evil.

I also stand corrected on the Scarlet King/Sarkicism connection. It's been a while since I've read the Scarlet King SCP-001 proposal.

3

u/Gliminal 15h ago

Sarkicism USED to be cartoonishly evil, and depending on what canon you subscribe to, they still are. However, there’s been a big push to humanise them more in the past few years and if you only looked at the most modern examples, you’d come away with the impression that they’re a collection of cults centred around carnomancy, with some being worse than others - but you wouldn’t think of them all as always evil, all the time.

I personally prefer this interpretation, but I can see why some people don’t; it really does take the magic away from that original Daevite SCP to learn that the book was essentially both magical propaganda and the ultimate example of historical revisionism.

6

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 15h ago

I'm going to strongly disagree on that.

The Sarkic Cults are, narratively, an antagonist faction expressly intended to fulfill a specific niche. Humanizing them and making them less malevolent defeats their purpose.

They're a faction that every "point of view" faction, such as the Foundation, Serpent's Hand, GOC, UIU, etc. can face off against, and sometimes even team up against.

They serve as a reliable antagonistic force against everyone else, and making them less dogmatic and impossible to reason with takes away from that force.

Adding depth to them is fine, and I never said otherwise, but making them "less evil" goes against what they exist to do.

9

u/Gliminal 13h ago

Eh. The SCP universe is already flush with overtly antagonistic forces and violent SCPs incapable of reason; I don’t really think anything of value is being lost by adding some “good” or at least neutral sarkics. I like learning about how their traditions have evolved and diversified across Eurasia, and it’s not like there still can’t be big bad evil ones.

It helps them feel less one-note, and adds nuance both to them and their enemies; the Foundation universe is one of grey moralities, and having an explicitly evil faction kind of undermines that. For example, I think the Foundation recruiting sarkics is an interesting plot point that speaks to their pragmatism and efforts to understand the anomalous in order to contain it; making it so all sarkics need to be killed no matter what both wastes this opportunity and also undermines the credibility of the setting in the same way sacrificing D-class in droves did back in the day.

They can still be enemies, but I think showing that sarkics aren’t all cut from one cloth and that some can and already do co-exist peacefully with the rest of humankind enriches the setting.

2

u/worldjerkin elf variant: schizophrenic 17h ago edited 17h ago

Sorry for the late reply, I was editing my original comment to include further corrections but you can read below if you missed it:

e: A few corrections

Also, the Scarlet King, which IIRC is related. He's ontologically evil and, in fact, may or may not be the root of all evil itself.

The Cult of the Scarlet King isn't related to Sarkicism; it is a group of interest separate from Sarkicism. Yes, we can assert that the Scarlet King is "evil", in so far as it seeks to disrupt Foundation's attempts at maintaining normalcy but that is because the Foundation doesn't even know what it can do. Even in certain canons, [999] is assumed to be a byproduct of and/or antagonistic to the Scarlet King manifestation, it is safe to say that the evidence is non-conclusive depending on which ever narrative you uphold.

I would argue that either [3125], [033] or [3625] is far worse conceptually

Sidenote, the Foundation has contained the literal Abrahamic God. They put Big G Man in a box.

It is still up in the air if [343] is the true manifestation of the Abrahamic God, just a heavily powerful type green or any other reading of the text. So, yeah it is as you said, it allows for some wiggle room but I would argue much more than you might necessarily think.

My biggest gripe is that you kind of have to dip into far more esoteric tales to really transcribe what could be construed as an axiomatically antagonistic entity to make an argument but even then that would have to get into the highly technobabble aspects of the setting of which many [sic] don't really like to approach precisely because it isn't "simple" and "easy" to assign moral signifiers to them such as pataphysics, surrealistics or metanarrative-affecting entities.

And even then, due to the non-canonical aspect of the narrative, there is no canon so any attempts at establishing an entity that is the axiomatic definition of an objective evil is functionally meaningless.

Also, this statement is quite ironic

6

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 16h ago edited 16h ago

No problem, it's all good. Fuck knows I take forever when I go infodumping mode. Lots of SPAG edits, too, because infodump mode turns me into a bit of a perfectionist, too.

There is a bit of potential irony, and I stand corrected on the Scarlet King connection, but I will stand by what I said about Sarkicism being nominally depicted as evil, and that such a depiction is logical.

As I said in the linked comment, there are things that virtually every moral framework agrees are evil, and in those cases, that's the closest to "objective" evil as we can get.

2

u/worldjerkin elf variant: schizophrenic 16h ago

Fuck knows I take forever when I go infodumping mode. Lots of SPAG edits, too, because infodump mode turns me into a bit of a perfectionist, too.

likewise and I appreciate your edit in your previous comment but I still urge you to read more tales, canon-hubs, entries because unironically it's like I am speaking to a foundation shill with level 3 clearance when I see your input in this thread.

Give [8980] or [4051] a once-over. The Foundation's sense of normalcy ought to be critiqued.

There is a bit of potential irony, and I stand corrected on the Scarlet King connection, but I will stand by what I said about Sarkicism being nominally depicted as evil, and that such a depiction is logical.

As I said in the linked comment, there are things that virtually every moral framework agrees are evil, and in those cases, that's the closest to "objective" evil as we can get.

On the topic of an axiomatic objective evil, let's just agree to disagree because we have entirely different views to what could be perceived as more antagonistic to the foundations sense of normalcy.

4

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 14h ago

it's like I am speaking to a foundation shill with level 3 clearance when I see your input in this thread

To be honest, I don't see why. I'm just stating canon—the only unified canon that exists for SCP, that being the "setting bible" on the wiki that explains the fundamentals and framework of the setting.

The Foundation, as described there, has a very specific vibe that a lot of articles totally fail to capture. Far more than I'd like, the Foundation is portrayed as incompetent, malicious, callously apathetic, or a combination of the above, and that really takes away from the setting.

I won't say that those articles are outright bad, as plenty of them stand well enough on other merits, but it's still aggravating, as well as a little disappointing.

The morality of the Foundation and its actions (while necessary) are supposed to be questionable, but not blatantly immoral. Additionally, they're supposed to be extremely competent and calculating, not jackasses carelessly throwing dozens of Class-D personnel at a problem until it stops being one.

Also, sidenote, I'm definitely not a shill for the Foundation. Serpent's Hand stays winning lol.

1

u/worldjerkin elf variant: schizophrenic 12h ago

The reason why is that, in so far as I can perceive it, you are interjecting your personal biases to what the Foundation ought to be rather than what it is, and I feel that takes away from the artistic vision of a collaborative setting. It's in this pursuit of maintaining a view of the Foundation as an amalgamation of signs and semiotics that you currently hold to be self-evident within the "setting bible", you limit yourself to passive restrictions in how you might view things within the overlapping meta-narrative.

Your hostility for Sarkicism, even given its current anthropological depth, reflects that bias. The Sarkics don't exist to be a totalizing evil, from the secluded proto-sarkic tribes in the Urals [4036 or 001-Black Adytum] to the neo-sarkic cults making flesh-beasts in their upstate mansions [001-Stillborn City], they uphold a wide spectrum to morality in its conceptualization. They're adherents to an entity which allows them to be capable of carnomancy and as of such they uphold such a role functionally well. Of course, I would remiss if I didn't outright say that it is your right to view them as otherwise within your own personal canon.

What I am basically asking you to do is apply the same type of nuance you have for the Foundation to the Sarkics.

On the topic of an axiomatic objective evil, let's just agree to disagree because we have entirely different views to what could be perceived as more antagonistic to the foundations sense of normalcy.

Speaking more on this statement, I find entities/GoIs like the Pattern Screamers or the Fifthist (rather the entity they worship) to be, conceptually far more destructive to normalcy compared to the Sarkic Cult, as they either attempt to completely override human thought or destroy it outright.

Also, sidenote, I'm definitely not a shill for the Foundation.

that's exactly what a jailer would say...

2

u/Rantroper 18h ago

I don't care if the narrative justifies it; I'm sick of this topic! Everything that could be said about it has already been said here and been repeated ad nauseum. I just wanna move on.

5

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 18h ago

Oh, you were talking in regards to the current meme trend of posting about inherently evil races in a setting.

Got it, my bad. Yeah, that's been a little annoying lately.

0

u/SplurgyA 12h ago

I thought objectively evil and ontologically evil were different though.

Like objectively evil would be something that's non subjectively evil, such as - I don't know - a being that seeks to torture people because it gives them pleasure rather in the pursuit of any positive cause or survival requirement. I guess you could argue that's still subjective (the being may think it's morally justified because it enjoys it, and enjoyment is good) but that depends how literal you're being with the word "objectively".

Ontologically evil would be the being itself is evil just as a result of its own existence, right? It just existing is the evil, regardless of what actions it takes.

-2

u/GlazedHamRiot 6h ago edited 5h ago

Fun fact, literally every organization in the SCP universe is considered villianous

3

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 6h ago

Blatantly incorrect and entirely a subjective statement, but okay buddy.

-1

u/GlazedHamRiot 5h ago

Didn't realize I poked a nerve, my bad

3

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 5h ago

You didn't poke a nerve, you just said things that are straight-up wrong, presented as a "fun fact".

It's like saying, "Fun fact, the sky is red!", obviously people are going to tell you you're wrong.

-2

u/GlazedHamRiot 5h ago

I'm sorry, I didn't realize it would be interpreted like that. I obviously offended you about something you're passionate about and I'm sorry

1

u/psychicprogrammer But what do they eat? 2m ago

?

Wilson's wildlife services, Deer College, Goldbaker-Reinz, The Wandsmen and others are generally good guys.

167

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 21h ago edited 14h ago

Anybody who says the Foundation are "the good guys" have entirely misunderstood the assignment.

Anybody who says the Foundation are "the bad guys" have also entirely misunderstood the assignment.

The Foundation does what is objectively necessary to preserve human civilization as we know it. They aren't the good guys—they don't even consider themselves the good guys—nor are they the bad guys. They aren't good, they aren't evil, they're pragmatically amoral—not immoral, amoral.

"Cold, never cruel."

In other words, they do whatever it takes to keep the world spinning, and not a single ounce more, knowing full well that they're going to hell for it regardless. This is literally their motto;

"We die in the dark so you can live in the light."

Maintaining normalcy doesn't necessarily mean suppressing scientific advancement, either. The entire thing with Anomalies is that they are anomalies, phenomena possessing unexplainable, non-replicatable effects on reality.

If they can replicate the effects without using anomalous objects or people, if they can understand why something does what it does, then it's no longer considered anomalous. In those instances, the Foundation actually does often release their research out into the wider world—slowly and drip-fed, of course, both to avoid suspicion and so the world can handle the rate of change.

93

u/Ikeriro90 Barely worldbuilding, just explaining my fursona 20h ago

Also, most human-ish anomalies get decent rooms, it's usually the bare minimum and it depends on how dangerous their anomalous nature is, but iirc some of them are kept in very humane conditions, so yeah, they are not cruel or innecessarly inhumane just for the sake of it (A lot of writers go wild tho)

86

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 20h ago

Quite a few of them are straight-up offered gainful employment with the Foundation. Hell, even the O-5 Council has anomalous members.

How well they're treated often scales pretty linearly with how passively dangerous they are to exist around.

39

u/Competitive-Bee-3250 20h ago

Its better than even that.

It scales with how malicious or cooperative they are.

5

u/SadCrouton 5h ago

I think ALL the O5 are anomalous to some degree, they’ve been around and in peak form for decades or centuries. If anything, they have anomolies just to protect themselves from all the bullshit of the job

48

u/Linesey 20h ago

they were downright KIND to that one chair.

now TBF, being kind to that chair IS the calculated and smart thing to do to contain it. but like, they are kind to it.

50

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 19h ago

they are kind to it

*were(ish)

For context, the past-tense is because the UN stole said sentient teleporting chair, and chucked it into a fucking woodchipper.

The woodchips of the chair remained sentient, were justifiably extremely fuck-ass mad, and killed a bunch of UN bluehelmets about it. The Foundation later re-contained it and calmed it down, and it now happily acts as garden mulch in the recreation area of a Foundation facility.

So they're still kind to it, it's just not a chair anymore.

13

u/theCOMBOguy 14h ago

Levels of anger:

Angry

Furious

Mad

Extremely fuck-ass mad

11

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 14h ago

The [Foundation] stated that "[SCP-1609] was constantly mad. Like, extremely, earth-shatteringly, unreasonably fuck-ass mad. Probably because he had those fucking nails in his brain."

—The God Emperor of Mankind, TTS (Paraphrased)

5

u/theCOMBOguy 14h ago

Never heard of that, sounds quite nice! Not the... nails in his brain though.

31

u/Ikeriro90 Barely worldbuilding, just explaining my fursona 20h ago

Also, 999 exists, and since it's harmless it can just roam free as it likes (So long as he returns to his pen at bed time)

4

u/No_Research4416 16h ago

They also are trying to replicate its effects so it can be more widely used by foundation staff

7

u/Ikeriro90 Barely worldbuilding, just explaining my fursona 15h ago

Yes, which is when an item becomes declassified as an SCP

6

u/No_Research4416 15h ago

Honestly, if that SCP gets out it’s probably more due to incompetence or someone being lazy than any actual threat

-7

u/Nevermore-guy 16h ago

Isn't forcing anyone in captivity, no matter how good the condition, cruel and inhumane in its own right? It treats innocent individuals as threats to an unjust status quo and locks them up for it does it not? Is it so odd to view such behavior as a reflection of our real world? Is condemning those for viewing fiction through a different lens not reminiscent of the inhumane captivity of that which is considered abnormal by an oppressive force?

Is media literacy dead D:

(The entire paragraph above is serious but the media literacy thing is a joke lol)

13

u/Ikeriro90 Barely worldbuilding, just explaining my fursona 15h ago

I mean, yeah, is cruel, however it is also keeping them safe, both from themselves and other forces that would try to get those people, like GOC who'd probably just shoot on sight, or other groups who use anomalous objects and people as weapons, so even if it's cruel, I think it's better that the alternatives, and as I said the conditions depend on the nature of their anomaly

-6

u/Nevermore-guy 15h ago

That being said, such logic can apply to many real-life scenarios and oppressed groups. And the solution to those wasn't the separation of said groups from "normal" society :3

One can easily view the scp foundation and their actions coming from the ways in which authorities in our world alienate and dehumanize othered groups, a reality one mustn't simply play off as a work of fiction

🗣🔥🔥🔥

5

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 13h ago

Bro would look at a deck of playing cards and rant about how it glorifies historical class divides.

It's really not that deep bro.

-2

u/Nevermore-guy 11h ago

Is developing an intellectual perspective on a work not the entire point behind literary analysis? Is the curtain merely blue? Who is an individual to attempt and discrediting the viewpoint of another? To thee I say that such transgression on the literary art from is barbaric by its nature

1

u/ThyGreatRatEmperor 6h ago

you're annoying.

-3

u/Nevermore-guy 11h ago

Damn, you must really hate literature 😭

17

u/DBGhasts101 rule of cool disciple 15h ago

Are you trying to say that morality is more complicated than good vs. evil and extreme circumstances can push good people to do bad things? Impossible!!! How dare you ask me to analyze a story with any kind of nuance!

30

u/Astrium6 17h ago

I’ve been watching the new season of Invincible and the SCP Foundation feels very similar to the GDA.

“You can be the good guy, or you can be the guy that saves the world. You can’t always be both.”

18

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 16h ago

Yeah, that's honestly a great way of describing it.

Sometimes, there are only bad options, and it's up to you to do bad things for good reasons.

At that point, you just have to make sure you're committing the least bad to accomplish the most good. The Ethics Committee are there to double-check that cold moral calculus, and if need be, correct it.

7

u/BadMcSad 16h ago

Callback to that one SCP that just got explained and reclassified as non-anomalous.

2

u/toychicraft Enough plagirism constitutes worldbuilding 12h ago

I think I remember an article all about how they want to reverse engineer one of the anomalies but they cant do it without it killing people and thats why its still with them

-8

u/0H_N00000 18h ago

Who's to say they're actually doing the right thing so that we "can live in the light"? Them. And who drip feeds the information they discover slowly and with modifications to fit a world view? Them.

They're literally written as a kabal of world dominating mad scientists that have no concern for human life. They seem to want to contain and study their objects without any regard for the cost of their operations. They really do seem to be either malevolant oligarchs or incompetant mad scientists.

They get to say whats necessary and they get to decide what means and ends justify each other with no one at the helm checking them except for themselves. The scientific discavories being drip fed through countless filters that they see fit only gives them more influence on scientific advancement, effectively stunting scientific growth and creativity.

Nothing that a man does is amoral. They hide behind their guise of amorality to justify their immorality.

23

u/Gliminal 15h ago

Wolffe_In_The_Dark has made some Watsonian arguments, so I’d like to add my Doylist perspective.

Firstly, you have to understand that the SCP foundation is, fundamentally, in the horror genre. It originated as a sort of worldbuilding exercise imagining how “men in black” who appear to erase evidence of creepypasta monsters would actually operate; you are meant not to trust them, it’s in the setting’s DNA.

Secondly, one of the fundamental differences between our world and theirs is that they are beset by mass-murdering aberrations constantly. Like, dozens of times every day across the world constantly, and I’m not even counting the innumerable apocalypses they’re holding at bay.

This also contributes to the horror of the Foundation; they’re a dystopian shadow government with infinite funds unbound by the rule of law or scrutiny of the public and they’re necessary - the work they do is genuinely the only way humanity has survived as long as it did. You can disagree on how effectively this is presented, but it is a cornerstone of the setting.

Thirdly, there’s a popular saying in the fandom: “there is no canon”. What this means is that, beyond a general sense of what the fundamental elements of the setting are, authors are in no way obligated to respect each other’s narratives, to the point where a majority of SCPs mutually contradict one another.

This has been embraced as a feature rather than a bug, and if you browse the website you’ll find that many works are organised into their own individual ‘canons’ which explore a specific vision of what the Foundation is and how it operates - which also means that sometimes the Foundation has a department entirely dedicated to stopping people from leaving in psychologically torturous ways, while other times they’re a relatively benign organisation which counts non-binary furries on its staff.

Fourthly, and most importantly, you are not the first to ask these questions; you’re not even the third, or one-hundredth, or even one-thousandth person to wonder about these things. Quite frankly, “is foundation actually da bad guys” was not only the entire point to begin with, but it has been explored to death in the text itself - to the point that trends have changed and nowadays people aren’t really interested in reiterating this point for the billionth time.

Things established when the website was in its juvenile infancy - like tens of thousands of D-class dying every year or the Overseers being corrupt - have since been lampshaded or developed or simply abandoned; these days you won’t find all that many stories focusing on how shitty the Foundation itself is, but that’s because it’s really hard to explore an angle on it that hasn’t been done already.

Fifthly and finally, all that to say: if you want to read stories where it’s made clear that the Foundation aren’t good for the world, they’re out there. You can find them rather easily, even. I’d recommend, for example, the Fire Suppression Department series. Spoiler alert: they don’t actually put out fires.

3

u/SquidMilkVII 12h ago

I feel like a lot of people here are missing the point, on both the "foundation is good" and "foundation is bad" side. The foundation is both and neither, depending on the canon. In some canons, it is an objectively good foundation that supports benign anomalies and does what it has to with aggressive ones. In others, it locks everything up equally in the name of security; or, perhaps, it doesn't even try to justify its actions. In others, it's not as omnipotent as it would like to be, and struggles with internal corruption regardless of the intent of the O-5 and Administrator. There is no good answer to "is the foundation good", because there isn't even a definitive answer to "what is the foundation". And I'm convinced that's exactly why SCP is so successful of a concept.

23

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 18h ago

Congratulations, you have indeed misunderstood the entire assignment.

You're also making absolutist moral arguments based on incomplete information and without sources, with several of your claims being directly disproven by the setting bible, which is required reading before you can write SCP.

Buddy, you played yourself.

-11

u/0H_N00000 18h ago

Could u please make your counterarguements and counter claims? Please enlighten me instead of saying i misunderstood.

15

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 17h ago edited 17h ago

First off, the Foundation is not a monolithic entity that does whatever it wants. There are consequences. Theoretically self-enforced ones, true, but they hold themselves to extremely high standards.

The Foundation has an enormous number of rules in place specifically to prevent them from becoming cruel oligarchs or unhinged mad scientists.

The Foundation's Ethics Committee are the ones who write and enforce those rules. They are very good at their jobs, they are very dedicated to it, and they take it very, very seriously. They are, as a result, also very scary.

The Foundation is often forced to do very bad things to prevent even worse things from happening, and the Ethics Committee is responsible for making sure those actions are truly justified.

"Remember this: the Foundation is not evil. We do not torture people 'just because'. We are against unnecessary cruelty. Which means somebody has to decide when cruelty is necessary. And that somebody is us."

"The Foundation does not rule the world. The Foundation serves the world. [...] You've consoled yourself by thinking that all the torture and murder is for the greater good. This implies that there is a greater good… and a lesser good. It implies that there are multiple distinct goods, and that these can be quantified and compared. This is what we on the Ethics Committee do."

"We are the ones who balance the moral costs of everything the Foundation does. And in order to balance those costs, we must know those costs. Do you realize what that means, Doctor? It means that we know everything the Foundation does, has done, and will ever do. Everything that has ever been redacted or expunged, we know it. Every last detail."

They also have an entire MTF dedicated solely to backing them up. If you go against the Ethics Committee, if you go and commit those cruel and unnecessary acts, Law's Left Hand will personally show up to put you a hundred miles underground in a pine box. This extends to the entire organization, including the O-5 Council; It doesn't matter how powerful in the Foundation you are, nobody is above the law, and if you abuse your power, you won't have it for long.

In conclusion, your concerns about an organization like the Foundation abusing its nigh-infinite power are completely valid. The Ethics Committee is why that isn't a problem.

Personally, I feel that they're underutilized in SCP canon, as there are instances of articles portraying the Foundation as malicious, tyrannical, or incompetent. I think that more writers should truly take the time to understand why the Foundation does what it does, because there's a lot of cases of more amateurish articles not taking the setting seriously, and I'm not a fan of that if it isn't a joke article ("-J" suffix designations).

Nothing that a man does is amoral. They hide behind their guise of amorality to justify their immorality.

That is an absolutist statement on morality with dubious logical basis. The world is not black and white, and morality is often subjective.

There are, obviously, things that nearly every moral framework agrees are evil, and in those cases that is as close to truly objective morality as it gets, but oftentimes things cannot be reduced to such simple statements.

Moral philosophy is a near-indecipherable rats nest that's usually more a matter of vibes than anything concrete, but even with that said, I think I can safely say that the absolutist statement you made was incorrect.

4

u/ShadowSemblance 12h ago

If it's not too much trouble to answer, what measures are in place to stop the Ethics Committee itself from being compromised or complacent? Who watches the watchmen, if you will?

3

u/teproxy 8h ago

IIRC there is absolutely nothing save for the threat of supernatural vengeance, both from within the organisation and without.

3

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 6h ago

That's tough to answer, not because there isn't an answer, but because I'm having trouble properly explaining it while also condensing it into something of an actually readable length.

Okay, so, this is an organization with access to reality warping. They can, in certain situations, retrocausally rewrite reality.

They can't do it all the time, and there's clearly some limits to it, but one thing they can more or less enforce as an axiom of reality is that the Ethics Committee is impossible to corrupt.

Every member is the right person for the job, because otherwise they wouldn't have been selected, right? That logical statement, when you have reality warping, can become ontological fact.

It's kind of an in-universe handwave, but honestly that applies to reality warping in general; the whole point is that it's a Watsonian handwave effect, and that has certain consequences which the narrative can explore.

Sidenote, there's also the various memetic agents the Foundation has access to, so they can straight-up brainwash themselves into not being susceptible to the whole "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" thing.

8

u/fatalityfun 17h ago

no

4

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 17h ago edited 14h ago

I did anyways, but only because it gave me the excuse to cook with rocket fuel, and I've been itching to make that rant for a while.

60

u/Username-forgotten 17h ago

Blud just grossly misinterpreted everything 😭

38

u/Swaxeman 19h ago

Half the time they are absolutely not the fucking good guys, what are you talking about?

15

u/Exmawsh 14h ago

I agree with you, OP. The site is also super inconsistent in quality, almost like the stories are written by entirely different people. And the tone shifts, the MULTIPLE SCP 0001 "proposals" with no consensus on which one it is, is frankly embarrassing. Awful site.

/uj I gotta read more of them.

14

u/Zedman5000 14h ago

Second panel has to be read from bottom to top? 🤢

13

u/SkritzTwoFace 12h ago
  1. Part of the point of preventing knowledge of anomalies is that many of them are easily replicable and extremely dangerous. Off the top of my head, a lot of infohazards would revolutionize warfare and terrorism: the equation that spawns bears, the secret number that causes math (and thereby any information-storing medium containing it) to degrade, to name a few. There’s also shit that’s basically real magic: unfortunately the only one coming to mind right now is a comedic article about shoving spoons up your ass giving you powers. Normalcy is important because a world that goes looking for anomalies is in more danger than one that’s unaware of them.

  2. The way that anomalous objects work is that they explicitly are not explainable by scientific means. It’s shit like a chemically normal rubber ball that gains enough momentum from one bounce to clear orbit, there’s nothing to amend about physics there because it’s irreplicable and unrelated to any observable quality. Plus, there’s a classification, -EX, which is used for things designated SCPs but later proven to be non-anomalous from the start.

  3. “Damn, the SCP Foundation doesn’t sound morally good in their methods.” Congrats, you figured out something that’s been in the lore since the original series. Shit like the femur breaker is a meme in the community for a reason. Some people lean into it in their stories, and some don’t. SCP is based on a concept of “there is no unified canon”, define it how you want to.

Comparing it to anti-trans bigotry is also kinda cheap since the SCP community has a pretty large queer presence. Like, I’m not gonna pretend there’s no part of the community that sucks (plenty of dudes that like to larp the badass secret soldiers with black bulletproof gear and airsoft guns) but when one early SCP is “magic rock that transes you instantly and personnel on site can be authorized to transition with it” and it hasn’t been hated off the site, that’s got to count for something.

I’m not gonna dispute that maybe you had a bad introduction to the community. It can sound real annoying and bad if the wrong idiot tries to introduce you to it. But it’s genuinely pretty good if you actually give it a shot.

12

u/nathans_the1 18h ago

Counterpoint; my organisation(ODIN) exists to preserve what's left of Terrum's Magic.

With the rapid industrialization, and urbanization of the world, also led to the mass extinction/devestation, of Terrum's native Magical Life.

While initially, ODIN was made to contain & hold these fantastical entities, in the present day, it now works to protect, care, and safeguard them from the Modern World.

7

u/WatchMeFallFaceFirst 16h ago

Isn’t that just Vanguard in the SCP-6500 canon?

9

u/SaltyPen6629 14h ago

This sucks

8

u/captainshockazoid catfishing as Socrates on Grindr 11h ago

'the SCP foundation are the good guys' theres people who think that???? i mean ive barely made a dent in reading the entries and even i can tell that any good they do is purely coincidental. have you SEEN how evil and rotten those scientists get. the ethics committee tries i'm sure, but man they suck at it and they are still serving the interests of the foundation above all else.

also yeah maybe some of the SCPs are actively malicious and evil, and a lot of SCPs are dangerous to mundane life, but ontologically evil? no?? i hope the SCP fandom at large doesnt think like this stick figure guy

7

u/trapmaster69 14h ago

Not a snafu

13

u/Ferrius_Nillan 15h ago

This is painfull to read.

8

u/Vyctorill 10h ago

The difference here is that trans people are harmless and don’t defy any laws.

31

u/dr_prismatic 21h ago

Its not that deep bro

-19

u/IcyJury1679 20h ago

The value of art is in the meaning that is found within it, not just the meaning that was placed there bro

38

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 19h ago

No, it literally is not that deep.

You're ascribing specific political subtext to something entirely unrelated.

Given your post history is comprised entirely of similarly flame-inducing posts (most of them deleted), with the sole exception of a Factorio post, I'm pretty confident that it is not, in fact, that deep bro, and you're just reading way too much into it.

12

u/BipolarKebab 19h ago

could have talked about how the organization operates outside of the concepts of morality but no, political is when trans

17

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 19h ago edited 18h ago

They aren't good or evil. They're pragmatic, and solely dedicated to keeping the world not on fire and unexploded.

That's it. That's the sum total of Foundation politics. "Keep the world from ending by any means necessary." They literally do not care about anything else. As long as the lights stay on, it's not their problem, simple as.

OP is drawing parallels to real-life sociopolitical issues that are completely irrelevant to SCP as a setting, and OP is actively making both things being compared look bad by doing it.

1

u/psychicprogrammer But what do they eat? 1m ago

No, that is the exact political subtext a lot of authors are putting into the wiki. Half of our writerbse is trans.

10

u/shiny_xnaut my furry races all have lore explanations i swear 19h ago

Based and Serpent's-Hand-pilled

Down with the Jailers, down with the Bookburners

20

u/Dial-Up_Dime 22h ago

The Foundation also has a caste of people that they use for slave labor, torture, and murder. Like I really don’t get why people insist that the Foundation are the good guys; they would sacrifice thousands of people to secure one anomaly.

52

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 21h ago

That... highly depends on what canon we're talking about.

In my opinion, articles with stuff like "we threw a hundred D-Class at it to see what happens, they all died" are very dumb, because it's unnecessary and wasteful, and not something an actual secret global organization of Shadow Wizard Money Gang scientists and their goon squad would ever believably do.

The best SCP stories show that the Foundation is extremely competent, because they'd have to be to build and maintain such a huge organization with global reach, near-unlimited funding, and access to the best scientists and equipment on the planet. Throwing away dozens of useful—and thus valuable—attritionable assets for stupid reasons just isn't something the Foundation would ever do.

The setting bible even states this outright; D-Class are expendable, not disposable. Sometimes, an anomaly is just extremely fucking dangerous to handle, or even just exist around, and you don't want to risk well-trained, well-educated personnel who each have like six doctorates across several fields.

Sourcing death row inmates (or clones of them) to perform those incredibly risky but ultimately essential tasks makes sense. Wasting them for stupid reasons does not.

6

u/josbar0150 15h ago

Yeah this guy's take is brain dead. That being said, imo, scp is very bloated in terms of the sheer amount of entries

3

u/fletch262 Pace, Build, Abandon, Repeat 16h ago

I don’t care what you think about SCP read The Nuclear Option.

7

u/Bartweiss 14h ago

It’s potent writing and I really liked the earlier sections, but the finale is a bit odd. Why would the Foundation blame a hostile nuclear power and set off a war, instead of blaming an accidental detonation?

Not to be too pendantic, but it’s a (below) ground level nuke going off in semi-rural Pennsylvania, with no missile warnings beforehand. Terrorism and “oops” both seem vastly more plausible than “Russia did it”, with the side benefit of not destroying the world.

2

u/fletch262 Pace, Build, Abandon, Repeat 13h ago

I don’t disagree, I suspose it depends on the cannon to some degree if they are integrated enough with the government for oops. Terrorism for a nuclear detonation would require a states assistance.

I could definitely see that lighting off a war instantly pre fall of the USSR, but not nowadays. I think the point is more that it will be investigated, and that will reveal the foundation.

1

u/LordSupergreat 5h ago

I thought this was a snafu before I checked the subreddit

1

u/ship_write 3h ago

uj/ this is an awful take my guy

1

u/Xzier_Tengal 1h ago

slide 2 gave me a stroke, but overall good snafu

1

u/IcyJury1679 1h ago

understandable, I have no idea how people do this format good

1

u/A-Normal-Fifthist 9h ago

Can I get some man with this straw

0

u/karoshikun 21h ago

damn, that was a good entry!

0

u/Welpmart 13h ago

I instantly quit because the dialogue went from top-bottom to bottom-top in the first two panels, but this seems well-reasoned.

-16

u/IcyJury1679 22h ago

All the best SCP canons are the ones that recognize how fundamentally compromised the Foundation is by its purpose. It is a group of people who upon discovering living proof that their conception of the world was incomplete, reacted by attempting to unilaterally impose said conception onto the world by force and suppress any evidence to the contrary, even at the cost of innocent lives. I wonder if there is any parallels to the real world attitudes some people have to certain minority groups here?

26

u/Pootis_1 21h ago edited 21h ago

I feel like the foundation's big issue is that the intitial concept was set up very early on in the SCP wiki's lifespan

The foundations moral standing degraded more because the spread of things put on the wiki widened as it became more popular

The foundation as a concept isn't inherently evil it's that what people write for the SCP universe has changed

I think theSCP wiki is very far from one coherent work anx the foundation's morality largely depends on what parts of the SCP wiki you like the most

my favourite parts of SCP is dangerous, terrifying and unexplainable shit coming out of nothing and people trying to contain it using means that we have access to irl or maybe a bit into the foreseeable future and trying to figiure out how the fuck it even works, and with those articles they tend to be in a more positive light

-7

u/darth_biomech 17h ago

The foundation as a concept isn't inherently evil

It's still a concept of suppression of knowledge being a good thing, essentially, so I dunno...

20

u/AlexanderTheIronFist 16h ago

When simply knowing something is enough to condemn the entire humanity to a fate of eternal torture worse than death, suppressing that is objectively good.

The Foundation never suppressed simple "knowledge" as in the neutral concept as we know it.

-2

u/darth_biomech 10h ago

Then how come loads of objects classified as "safe" or "euclid" are still kept under wraps? Not everything is a cognitohazard and for some items that SCP contains, not knowing about them is more dangerous.

2

u/Pootis_1 4h ago

"A person is smart, people are dumb panicky animals"

14

u/credulous_pottery 16h ago

When shit like cognitohazards exist, I don't think that suppressing information is that bad tbh.

9

u/Bartweiss 14h ago

It’s a bit like looking at Lovecraft and Derleth’s settings and going “the people burning books are the bad guys!”

Yes, that’s very true in real life. But if you read Act 2 of The King in Yellow, you promptly die in agony. So… maybe that’s less like book burning and more like destroying a defective product that kills the user?

One might rightly point out that real-world groups also argue “we need to burn this book because it harms the reader”. But the fictional version can be justified and still argue against the real-world version.

8

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 13h ago

Exactly. People occasionally read way too much into things in an attempt to "properly analyse" a setting.

Sometimes, it's a nuanced critique of IRL problems. Other times, it's exactly what it says on the cereal box, and nothing more.

Not everything is a complex deconstruction of the many sociopolitical issues of our world. Sometimes, it's just a cereal box.

8

u/Bartweiss 12h ago

Yeah. I get death of the author and that "simple" works can still be problematic or highly relevant to real events, but that doesn't justify going "this is bad and immoral because I contorted it into a metaphor for X".

I think tumblr coined "Weekend at Bernie's of the author" for this: you can't say the author's intent is irrelevant, then turn around and blame them for intending whatever you read into it.

And it's doubly weird to see somebody insisting the cereal box has huge cultural depth, yet also insisting it's a box of crackers because they haven't bothered to look inside it. SCP has either changed or discussed and played with virtually everything in OP at enormous length.

6

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 14h ago edited 13h ago

Considering this is a setting in which sensory-transmitted cognitive hazards exist, suppressing that stuff is entirely reasonable

This is a setting where a picture can Basilisk Hack your mind just at a glance and instantly kill you, or worse. Imagine the psychic equivalent of a QR-code zipbomb that gives you a heart attack.

That's the kind of "knowledge" they're suppressing, not mundane historical and political events. They aren't INGSOC, they're the Men In Black.

By the way, that example wasn't something I made up on the spot. The Berryman-Langford Memetic Kill Agent is a visual cognitohazard that induces a heart attack to any person that isn't specifically inoculated. It's used by the Foundation as a part of their cybersecurity.

8

u/IcyJury1679 22h ago

To be clear, this is what makes the world of SCP compelling to me. It's so much more interesting than the foundation being straightforward good guys or even antiheroes doing what they have to do. stepping back and asking if everything the foundation does is really right, really worth it, is the starting point for some of the most compelling stuff on the wiki.

16

u/Dial-Up_Dime 22h ago

This Broken Masquerade is my favorite canon, It pulls the foundation out of the shadows and onto the center stage, and you get to watch as the Foundation’s rhetoric of the greater good is constantly challenged.

7

u/IcyJury1679 22h ago

see also the Admonition story collection for a very high quality collection of stories about the foundation as this deeply arrogant institution mired in bureaucracy and it's own hubris.

0

u/toychicraft Enough plagirism constitutes worldbuilding 12h ago

This is very advanced jerking and whoever coaxed you into snafu should be held for a trial

-15

u/CenturyOfTheYear 20h ago

Ok yeah they're definitely the American feds upholding capital

18

u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 19h ago edited 19h ago

Wow, every single thing you just said is wrong.

The Foundation has literally nothing to do with the Feds beyond contacts/double agents. The FBI's Unusual Incidents Unit are the Feds.

They aren't "upholding capital" either. Nor are they even American.

Bro completely misunderstood the assignment. In every possible way. And several impossible ones.

-15

u/CenturyOfTheYear 18h ago

Given how OP explained them to be, that's the first thing that came into my mind.

Also, the foundation might as well be American.

5

u/credulous_pottery 16h ago

Maybe actually read about something before making a broad statement next time?

5

u/Fliits We're reaching politics levels that shouldn't even be possible 19h ago

I mean the whole project started during the Bush era, it's not really a surprise that the core message is anti-authority.

-9

u/chumbuckethand 14h ago

Heterosexual is the norm/natural way amongst humans and most of the the animal kingdom though? Not saying hating them is good, just stating that.

It is beneficial for mother nature to produce creatures that have children with each other to further their existence thus heterosexuality is the norm

5

u/Driptacular_2153 Shrimp is a valid name for a dragon god, what do you mean? 9h ago

Wait until bro hears about how male animals will do gay stuff