An incredibly un-edited ramble about the Cosmere's problematic politics that was too long for a single Reddit post

The politics of the various Cosmere novels are incredibly liberal, by which I don't mean socially progressive, I mean the philosophy of Liberalism. Even then, they aren't really what liberalism is on paper, but are concerned with a lot of the things that liberal pop culture idealizes, and ways that liberalism squares the circle of things like systemic structural violence. That last bit especially relates to Moash.

It's not something unique to the Cosmere or Sanderson. Star Wars, especially with the information from the prequels, is essentially about a revolution to restore a broken system. It's the Alliance to Restore the Republic. Which is even what happened with the fall of Nazi Germany. The Weimar Republic wasn't restored, but liberalism was. At least in one half, and frankly what happened in the other half wasn't significantly different from liberalism, but I'll stick to criticizing one political ideology here. The Lord of the Rings trilogy really cemented the "restore the rightful king" narrative in liberal pop culture.

Even though liberalism is ostensibly about freedom, the power of government and law is given weight over everything. It's a political ideology built on exceptions. "All men are created equally" unless they're too poor to own property, or are enslaved, or one of the many people we believe to be savages. And of course only men. People are said to have rights and freedoms, until they commit a crime of course, and then we remove freedom and rights. Criminals especially are treated as less than human. The rules and laws that create criminals are also subject to the whims of the people in power, and by and large serve to protect power, not people.

In the real world that power is usually capital, and capitalist interests. Violence against property is often seen as more meaningful than violence against people, as you can see whenever a riot happens. The structural violence of Walmart bleeding communities dry and exploiting the labour of millions of workers, both directly employed by them and the literal slaves that make their products, whether they're prisoners or in sweat shops. The violence police apply to protesters is seen as justified, while violence protesters apply to police is violent and evil, and people try to claim those people are "bad protesters". Good protesters meanwhile are ones who cause no conflict and therefore achieve no structural change.

Structural change in a liberal framework is impossible, or at least incredibly difficult, because the structures that exist benefit certain people over others. Legislators will at the very minimum need to put forward policies that benefit enough of the people who vote for or fund them. They're very likely to put forward policies that benefit them financially. The police will prioritize property over individuals because the people who own that property are more valuable to the system of capitalism. So long as these structures exist, real change can't ever happen. Money and power will always influence things, and obtaining money and power is much easier when you oppress people.

In short, liberalism is an ideology that justifies structural violence.

Which is what makes it problematic and uncomfortable to read incredibly well written stories about people who hold or obtain political power but seem to believe that the structures and systems that we see to be corrupt are ultimately good or simply in need of minor change. Elend Venture outright denouncing democracy in favour of becoming a tyrant is one big example, with this big thing about how democracy means everyone squabbles and nothing ever gets accomplished, so the strong leader needs to ignore the will of the people (which was already just a bunch of wealthy people) and maybe sort of be a dictator. Dalinar is similar, in that his narrative arc is essentially becoming a benevolent dictator.

None of the characters who hold power ever question the structure of society. At best, there's things like racism against the lighteyes or parshmen that gets commented on, or things like men reading and writing, but these are ultimately window dressing. Elokhar trying to slightly tweak the government so that the king isn't the ultimate authority isn't really changing much, and you don't really need to go much further than Sadeas to see how good intentions don't mean much, since he's a piece of shit. This is why Moash did nothing wrong. Elokhar is a likeable character and someone that we as the audience came to love. He was also the head of state of an oppressive and unfair system that profits off of the oppression of others. There's literally a caste system. Darkeyes in general are legally second class citizens and Moash was personally harmed by Elokhar's actions in jailing his grandparents and allowing them to die in prison, all due to the manipulations of a Brightlord.

Moash had every right to want to murder Elokhar. Elokhar, no matter how much we as the audience liked him, was responsible for deaths. Politicians kill more people than any serial killer. And that's not even touching on the fact that Elokhar allowed the war against the Singers to continue. A war that claimed many lives on both sides, and especially many slaves' lives, but that was profitable for the lighteyes.

In Warbreaker there's this whole thing about how it looks like the people who keep the oppressive system of feeding the Returned and the nation of Hallendren running are the villains—and their actions do certainly cause complications—but it turns out that it's actually a band of rebels from the oppressed country that was colonized by Hallendren, and we're apparently supposed to disagree with their desire to violently overthrow the government of the nation colonizing them for 300 years. At the end of it all, the system is more or less still there, and now the God-King has a tongue. The system hasn't changed, it just has nicer rulers.

I would say that at least Mistborn has a better view of revolution than Warbreaker, it still does an extremely liberal thing that not only shows up in fiction but often shows up even among political pundits. The Final Empire is firmly told from the perspective of the skaa, but after the time skip there's a lot of waffling about "well maybe the fascist was onto something", and much of the sequels are spent essentially redeeming Rashek and making him into a sympathetic character, as if the god-king needed to be a sympathetic character who was simply looking out for his people and thought the best way to do that was through a system of fascism and slavery and brutal oppression.

Liberal pundits on both sides of the incredibly short political spectrum in America will justify all sorts of things. Even under Democrats you get oppressive tough on crime policies, and PRISM. Democrats voted to keep the ability to spy on citizens throughout the Trump administration and even as they were beginning to foolishly attempt to impeach him for something other than the fascism—which apparently isn't as much of a concern as trying to dig up dirt on Biden's son—signed off on a massive defense budget. Meanwhile it was distressingly common on Twitter to see liberals with no tact or sense of perspective more than willing to favourably compare Hitler to Trump, or to say that they'd vote for Hitler over Trump. Such comparisons often rely on myths about the efficiency of fascism. "Fascism makes the trains run on time" is treated as a truism, a sardonic silver lining to fascism, but the trains literally did not run on time. The railway system can't even handle neoliberal privatization with efficiency.

I bring all of these real world politics up because "well, the fascism is bad, but at least society is safe and stable" is a myth that constantly shows up in things that are considered liberal both in terms of the philosophy of liberalism as well as liberal as in socially progressive.

Star Wars does this a lot in the post-Disney audiobooks I've listened to. Characters across many different books think about how the New Republic doesn't have the strength to obtain stability. The Legend of Korra makes it's final season a fight against fascism, but where their cartoonish portrayals of communism, environmentalism, and anarchism are treated as bad, or even manipulated by villains who don't believe in the cause, Kuvira is a character we already knew, and her fascism is treated as being efficient and providing food and defense to people. So it's not just Sanderson, but that doesn't make it easier to not notice.

This next bit is a bit poorly segued into because four paragraphs later I went back and added in the last four paragraphs or so.

In Elantris we even get the story of a heroic prince who loses his title and is cast into leperhood and works to save the day. At least in that case the return of Elantris is a massive shift in the politics of the world that might, possibly, result in structural change happening.

Alloy of Law really frustrates me because in some ways it's got the most progressive character with Marasi and her views on policing, but even those are still very liberal. She believes in the broken windows theory and wants to therefore repair the windows, but structurally she doesn't want to change anything about society. The problem with police reform in the real world is that police have a vested class interest in maintaining power. Fiction often ignores that to feature police who, while they might be rough and gruff and occasionally extremely violent—because, as I previously mentioned, anyone who commits a crime is seen as being less than human and deserving of suffering and violence—are ultimately seen as a necessity for civilized society, even though the very notion of what police are—agents of the state imbued with the legal authority to commit violence—as frankly not very civilized.

Except they are civilized. That's what civilization really is: A neat and orderly form of violence. The indigenous peoples of America and elsewhere were systemically subjected to violence to kill or assimilate them, and we called it "civilizing" them. Marasi wants to patch up the windows, but she also wants to increase the number of police. She doesn't want to address the structural systems of liberal capitalism that cause poverty and need. She doesn't want to undue the representative parliamentary system that advantages some over others.

It's really messed up that the very embodiment of Harmony had a hand in creating the world and influencing the structure of government and then liberal capitalism is the result. Bleeder also did nothing wrong. That one is a little harder to justify since even more than Moash her actual praxis was terrible, but she's fighting against literal God, though I doubt that she was really interested in a radical socialist revolution, because much like in American political discourse, that seems to be outside of the realm of conceptualization.

As someone else answered to OP's question, the world is grimdark, but most readers don't realize it. That understanding just makes it really hard to ignore the fact that many of the characters come into great amounts of power and do nothing to change the systems they live in.

Oh, also Sanderson is a Mormon and while he seems to be rather progressive for a Mormon, describing himself as a "progressive Democrat" who voted for Bernie Sanders, he's still got some very conservative real life views and has in the past written some frankly pretty heinous "I'm okay with gay people but if they get married it will bring pain and suffering to all involved" shit that he doesn't reeeally seem to have walked back much even if he no longer talks about it.

Also he was a missionary and missionary work is colonialism, the church has historically been spread through violence and colonization and missionary work is ultimately a form of genocide intended to replace foreign or indigenous culture with the church's. While many modern missions aren't landing on the beaches with Conquistadors or colonists, it's impossible to overlook the history that lead to missions being able to simply set up and invite people in and do work in communities.

I feel like a lot of people overlook his religious beliefs because religions are often villains in his books, and he's a progressive guy, but at the end of the day Mormonism is not a neutral religion. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is an organization with political power and political policies. Material support of that organization causes material harm.

In a previous post on r/fantasy where someone brought that up he even said "Why can't a Mormon and a bisexual atheist actually just TALK about things?" but the answer is that a Mormon is someone who supports a religious and political system that, if it has power over a bisexual atheist causes harm to them. Why should a bisexual atheist want to talk to a Mormon? Most people don't want to talk to someone who views their ability to get married as condemned by the church, or supports an organization that oppresses them.

I still love the novels. I've spent over two hundred hours listening to the audiobooks of the doorstoppers, and they're one of my two favourite novel series. The other being The Dresden Files, which has it's own problematic politics, particularly concerning the police. I don't know where I might draw the line on not reading a book due to it's politics or the politics of the author. But at the same time I don't really think I'd want to have a conversation with Sanderson or Butcher. Which is one reason I rarely go this in depth, since I know he's a redditor.

Even assuming people clicked through, I doubt many people have gotten this far through this extremely long comment that I spent several hours pouring over because I don't know how to edit for length and these are the kinds of things I think about constantly. Hopefully no one will see this and it will just serve as me collecting my thoughts for if I ever make a more ordered essay on the subject. Because I'm also not really interested in the replies that quote long sections and tell me how actually I'm very wrong and this or that is justified by the narrative. Even though the narrative was chosen by an author, none of these worlds are real, and they aren't even subject to the laws of reality.

But, hey, since I had to put this is on my site instead of a Reddit post, if you actually liked all this you could check out my other stuff or even donate some money to me using one of the links on the main page so that I'm encouraged to format this into a more structured essay. (You can't get to this post on the main page)