This one goes out to Marc Singer (with deterministic tongue in cheek):
IF: Adrian Veidt represents the rationalist enlightenment: the triumph of intellect and will over body, the absolute confidence in the ability of scientific reason to overcome all obstacles, the determination to improve the world through the exercise of reason.... which ends, as modernity does, in Auschwitz; and
IF: The Comedian represents the Hobbesian Realpolitik state: a status quo in which life is nasty, brutish (and short?), the harsh exigencies of life make considerations of morality a luxury, the state must define its own interests in terms of power, and ultimately no moral or legal frame of reference exists beyond that set by the sovereign state; and
IF: Rorschach represents a nativist, populist right wing, xenophobic and irrational and contemptuous of liberal society and mistrustful and prone to violence; and
IF: Dr. Manhattan represents Einsteinian physics elevated to the status of god-hood; and
IF: Daniel Dreiberg represents the liberal do-gooder, well-intentioned but ineffectual;
THEN: Alan Moore's philosophical smackdown consists of this: the Enlightenment (Veidt) succeeds in saving the world at the cost of millions of innocent lives (and his soul) by appropriating the technological contributions of Einsteinian physics; it succeeds in this project only with the tacit collusion of the sovereign state (the Comedian), which chooses not to prevent it out of recognition of its own obsolescence and thus hastens its own demise; in the end (though "nothing ever ends"), well-meaning liberal society (Dreiberg) lives happily ever after, while right wing populism (Rorschach) and authoritarian statism (the Comedian) both die, and God (Dr Manhattan) leaves.
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