Fallout New Vegas: The Case for Caesar's Legion

The Case

We have all heard the stories of Caesar's Legion, how they rape, pillage and murder their enemies and their families. How they cultivated and mastered the art of fear. As backwards as this army of slaves conducts itself in the name of conquest, there is something much larger at play than simply to wage war and dominate.

At face value, there is no logic to their strategy or tactics or their beliefs. So, I had to allow myself to keep an open mind and seek out the one and only man I could think of who would answer the many questions I had.

When I decided to finally allow Caesar to explain himself in one of my play-throughs, I asked a lot of questions, and many he was willing to answer, but only after I demonstrated my loyalty to him. However, when I stand around, he references and directly quotes from many books that actually exist. And there's one author he refers to a lot when he takes the time to explain himself.

"The NCR is a loose conglomerate of individuals only looking out for themselves. It's not built to last. I will destroy it because it's inevitable it will be destroyed. It's Hegelian Dialectics, not personal animosity."

For those not versed in the art of philosophy, Hegelian Dialectics is a real world philosophy of the German philosopher, Georg Hegel - one of the most important philosophers of his time and to this day.
He left his mark on Philosophy by studying the past, and from this he was able to decipher a pattern in human behaviour over the course of thousands of years of recorded history.

He discovered that with every conflict, from a minor argument between friends to an all-out war, had a recurring pattern. A constant in human history. It was through this truth that he was able to define what we would now know as Hegelian Dialectics;

He found that with conflict there is always an action he called a 'Thesis' that, consequently, created an opposing reaction called an 'Antithesis' and that the eventual conflict between them would inevitably birth a solution called a 'Synthesis' in some form or another.

This chain reaction as described by Hegel can be simplified in a way that is easier to digest. Think of it as a complicated explanation of human conflict: a Cause, a Reaction, and a Solution. Two extremes fighting until compromise was reached. This was the predictable pattern Hegel found in his study of the past.

Hegel believed that modern problems could be solved by looking into the past, to find a familiar pattern of events in a specific period in history as a way of knowing the future. This way he could see into the future by looking into the past.

Before you're disillusioned by this concept, this is not seeing into the future, but simply the observation of patterns that have occurred in the past repeating themselves in the present, and if left alone to its natural end, we can predict what that end will be in the future. Whether you have heard this before or hearing it now,

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana.

The method of learning before books and written language was through imagery and storytelling. Someone somewhere down the line had this brilliant idea of turning that imagery, symbols, into abstract concepts of meaning we know today as letters to both tell those stories and print events and history as they happened.

Someone realised we could not continue to take the path of abstract imagery and storytelling, we needed to progress to truly learn and perhaps add to that knowledge.

Like all new and wonderful things, written language and books were subject to rejection and outright condemnation. Those that encouraged the learning of written language and books were ostracised by religious organisations, outdated concepts of conservatism, and were once thought of as ridiculous by the common person.