User blog comment:Awayorafk/Believe. The Indoctrination Theory./@comment-5916798-20151009123613/@comment-186.30.77.161-20180309081812

I agree with everything except your reading of the three endings.

In Control Shepard becomes the Catalyst itself, acquiring all the knowledge that the Reapers have accumulated through millions of years of harvest and thereby helps to rebuild the galaxy. However, it is easy to deduce, with his discourse of "saving the many", that at the moment he becomes the Catalyst, the programming protocols essential to the Catalyst (understanding and solving the inevitable conflict between organic and synthetic life) eventually make their own logic derive in using the Reapers for the harvest, again. It is precisely the idea that life is in itself an object of value (as if life itself were an absolute value, that is, a value that is not measured by its relation to other values, such as freedom) that feeds the justification for the harvest: the harvest is the only solution that allows life to continue to develop, with the cost of it developing without purpose (Shepard convinces Starchild with this argument, the AI ​​of Leviathan, that another solution is necessary. Shepard says something like "but the harvest leaves us with no future, and without a future there is no hope, and without hope might as well consider ourselves as machines, doing only what the programming dictates).

So in Control we eventually end up with the same central problem of the game: without the need of indoctrination, the logic of 'preserving life at any cost' is precisely the logic of the Catalyst and the harvest. By fusing Shepard's consciousness with the AI, we simply remove all that was left of the previous Shepard (and, indeed, the same Shepard-Catalyst says it). Shepard-Catalyst first reaction is to say something like "the **other Shepard** said words like 'eternity' or 'immortality' without really knowing how it feels to experience the concept. As previously explained by Javik in an angry conversation with EDI, the problem of all synthetic life is that they are not in any symbiotic relationship with other life forms (they are not creations of evolution), they are self-sufficient and Virtually immortal, therefore, it is a matter of time for them to realize that they do not need us, for them, time is an illusion, and eternity their existential condition. This explains why all the humanity that was left to Shepard before his conversion to Catalyst was completely decimated with his own experience of being a collective synthetic intelligence 'eternal, immortal' (that encompasses all the Reapers, almost like the Geth collective AI, only that way infinitely superior, since it also includes ancestral knowledge of all other life forms that preceded the present cycle). Precisely for this reason throughout his speech the Shepard-Catalyst distinguishes itself from the original Shepard (and the Catalyst itself warns him that he, Shepard, dies at the moment of his merger with the Catalyst, albeit his consciousness and his memories of his 'past life' remain - the pure consciousness of being and the memory of another person does not constitute a personal identity, it is the awareness of the experience of being as present being, or of being like a being-here-in-the-world-existing, what forges the personal identity as such (the I-am-this self-perception).

With respect to Synthesis, I consider that this ending is even more cruel than what is usually said, even in the places where Synthesis is considered as the worst ending. Synthesis does not solve the conflict between organic and synthetic, it is the last victory of synthetics over organic, and choosing this end is in fact in accordance with the logic of 'preservation of life at any cost' of the Catalyst and, therefore, of the harvest. Not only is it problematic to assume, without further ado, that the synthesis will solve all the possible problems that AI actually causes (being the most obvious and dangerous the mere possibility that there is programming based on a wrong premise but with high capacity for adaptability and learning - the Reapers themselves are this-). The problem is that the mere existence of AI threatens the most valuable aspects of organic life, which are necessarily tied to mortality as an existential condition.

As discovered in Leviathan DLC, it is said that the Catalyst (the AI ​​created by the Leviathan race to solve the ancestral conflict between life spontaneously created by the laws of the universe and life created artificially for concrete and closed purposes) takes millions of years to first study the behavior between organics and synthetics and, second, to develop a solution that satisfies programming. This is because the problem is ontological, and therefore the conflict is really inevitable (no contingent aspect of reality can change the neccesity for the conflict). The solution is to wrest from life all possibility, close its possibilities, let it grow only to a certain order, which is, in essence, reduce all forms of life to a single way of life (and with it, all purpose is eliminated, all hope, every form of 'humanity' -let's say that by 'humanity' I do not mean qualities that, say, the krogan or the rachni do not have, but rather general qualities that we attribute to all conscious living beings, such as moral decision, ability to imagine the non-existent through symbolic orders, etc.- that life can bring on is eliminated), just like the Reapers tell Shepard over and over (we are 'ORDER', you are 'CHAOS').

And this leaves us with "Destruction" as the only possible end that is not tied to the logic of the harvest, however counterintuitive it may seem. Leviathan's DLC is radically important to understand this. In Leviathan, during Shepard's conversation with the race, he at some point denounces them angrily, rightly, for having created the Reapers and the AI that deduced the harvest in the first place. The race responds that, in their opinion, although it may seem unfortunate, they do not consider the Reapers to be a "mistake", because, although their method is brutal, it is effective (life in the galaxy continues because the balance is continually restored with the harvest every 50 thousand years). Then, later in that conversation, Shepard convinces them that **it was a mistake**, because not only is false that life is not threatened only because the most advanced races disappear (as the Reapers themselves proves it), nor is it true that all the possible conflicts between one and another form of life always lead to the total extinction of life (see the peace between Quarians and the Geth, or the 'humanity' that grows within EDI throughout the game). The latter point Shepard tries to refute (the "fact" that the ancestral conflict would always lead to extintion of all life) is in fact impossible to know, but Shepard does not need to be a philosopher to know it, he does not even need to say it or deduce it, he simply needs to remember that peace is a constant possibility, as constant as conflict - this last thing is precisely what the Catalyst does not understand, nor the Reapers, nor the logic of the harvest, and this last thing is exactly what makes the final "destruction" the only really 'good' ending in the game.

Destruction is the only end that leaves space for the POSSIBILITY of life with purpose. It is the only end where, first, there is in fact a high cost to pay, which is the death of all synthetic life (during the three games the issue of sacrifice for survival is constant, hence it is inevitable that members of the troop die, or the mini sub-plots around the game; none of those mini sub-plots, for example, the death of Joker's family, are 'happy' or utopian, they all are really tragic). In the remaining two finals, Control and Synthesis, the only charge there is is the most obvious and simple: Shepard's own life (no, Shepard does not live in 'Control', as I explained above, is another person who feeds the memories of Shepard, as well as the Catalyst, through each Reaper, feeds on the knowledge of the civilization that is harvested at the moment of the cycle), the rest of the galaxy seems to suffer no greater effects than those left by the war itself, at least in terms of actual suffering and loss (Because of course there are great changes, but at the level of existential condition, not at the level of sacrifice, suffering or loss: in the case of Control for Shepard himself, and in the case of Synthesis for the whole galaxy; this process of passing from a plane of mortal-temporal existence to another virtually immortal-atemporal plane is just the logical result of the Harvest, as the catalyst itself explains to Shepard when he explains 'Synthesis') Finally, someone can reply that if 'Synthesis' and 'Control' are merely the victory of synthetic over organic life, it does not seem that "Destruction" is the just one if it implies the destruction of synthetic over organic life. And the replica would make sense if it were not true that the synthetic life can be created again almost instantaneously after the destruction of the Reapers (only if "Destruction" was achieved with the maximum amount of EMS, that is, if you have completed at least all the singular player mode). If it has been understood what I meant by the discussion between Leviathan and Shepard, it follows that the problem is not the synthetic life per se, but the Catalyst itself with its deduction of the need for the harvest. Once the Reapers are destroyed, and with it the AI that deducted again and again the need for the harvest, THE POSSIBILITY OF COEXISTENCE BETWEEN THE SYNTHETIC AND ORGANIC LIFE IS ACTUALLY GIVEN, even if not right away. As Hackett explains in the high EMS Destruction ending, the damage can be repaired. And even when it is absolutely true that re-creating artificial life is not the same as resurrecting the previously created artificial life (so that if we re-create Geths or EDI's, neither Legion nor the original EDI will return, and this is so for the reasons I already explained above about how personal identity is actually forged -with the subjective experience of each consciousness itself-), the price to pay (the highest of all the possible endings) is nothing compared with the consequences of the other choices: the harvest as the only way to "control" the "chaos" of natural life. So Destruction is still the best ending, even if the IT is false (and it is false). The survival of Shepard is well earned and no, hes absolutely not selfish but the survival soldier he has always been.