Why Robert Edwin House is the best hope for the wasteland and humanity

Regardless of whether you think House is an authoritarian tyrant, he doesn't fit the bill of imperialist IMO. Purely because he has as much of an argument of being a native power as any of the tribes do. He was born there, he has strong investment there, he has committed himself to his native land and his territorial claim does not expand beyond that. In the post-nuclear world the historical clock is set to zero and all that defines a native power is originating from there and having the power to hold influence over it. Largely because obviously the civil/legislative authority has literally been erased. To argue otherwise is to say the only legitimate government in the Wasteland would be the Enclave, and even they don't fit the bill. If House doesn't have recognition as a legitimate native power, nobody does. House ticks the boxes of both. That's without appealing to the argument that House has a stronger claim to the region considering he spared it from nuclear annihilation, which is a step above the claims of the Slither-Kin or the Boot Riders (People who were born there and held the violent power to hold it, of which House has both).

To argue that the Mojave tribes have a more legitimate claim over New Vegas than House is to argue that they do so by the merit that they did something, instead of House who simply observed. By the same logic, the NCR and the Legion have about as much right since in this line of argument, native birth is irrelevant (since House is explicitly born in Las Vegas.)

As Benny says (as nativist as it gets considering he's the progenitor of Indie Vegas) "Respect where it's due but the man's about as square as it gets" - the division between Indie and House Vegas is not one of a people versus an outside power but rather more simply how the people are governed.

Authoritarian and repugnant do not equal imperialist.

 

Disappointing. I expected the head to explode.

 

I don’t see how House will benefit the people of New Vegas. Looking at Freeside, you see exactly where his priorities are. Yeah, he’ll be great for business, but I don’t think he’s going to deliver prosperity or services to the average person. Yeah, the NCR has problems, but it also has avenues to address those problems. The people of Freeside are not going to be given any tool or remedy to deal with any injustice or indifference from House.

 

Except you forgot that the Followers gotten all those help from you, and still they ended up getting too much on their hands. Or perhaps even Obsidian forgot that you did all those sidequest for them, from helping their junkie workers to get back on tracks, and procure constant supplies of chems to produce meds. Doing all these and achieving the optimal outcome should, theoretically, help the Followers face everything that's coming their way, but alas. Obsidian probably ran out of time to implement an extra ending slide to take those sidequests into consideration.

 

OK.... thats fantastic for the Followers and people of Freeside, however my point was that the Followers have to get involved because of the terrible conditions under House's dominion.

 

To be frank, the NCR is only about a couple steps away from becoming some crony-capitalist oligarchy and no matter what happens in the Mojave, its going there. If we factor in courier involvement post-game, the Courier would be the most limited in the NCR ending. The player character is really just a tool that did it's job and will be paraded around and forgotten about by the administration fairly quickly. All the tasks performed, while very important for the Mojave, were really just merc/contract work and its doubtful politicians or top brass would really care too much after the fact. Honestly just look at Hanlon if you want to know the Courier's future with the NCR.

That NCR currency, society, and due process that we get to see in the game context is weak and ineffective at best. I'm not an expert in extended lore but from what I understand, the currency is massively devalued, the government is completely compromised by special interest groups, and that standing army is drawing hard on the population and nation at large. Getting the Mojave would probably prop it up for a bit, keep it pushing a little longer, but would ultimately fall flat. At least with House he isn't going to go anywhere anytime soon and with his fairly limited scope, would be-with Courier involvement-much more capable of handling local issues properly.

Freeside was an absolute hole along with the entirety of Vegas pre house. The Followers would've ended up there one way or another

 

Sure. But the issue is that there exists a remedy in the NCR and liberal democracies: you can vote people out. You remove that with House.

Yeah, they're weak for sure. Not sure how much of it is NCR's incompetence versus you being in the outer rim of NCR's influence. I think your buck probably goes further in the more developed concentrated NCR territory.

I think the way I feel is that yeah.... the NCR's special interest group SUCKS, but I don't think House is interested in serving the people; he's only going to serve people with credits. Yeah, he'll leave people alone to live in destitution. I'd imagine he would just be interested in serving his interests. Arcade says something similar to this.

 

In theory, yeah liberal democracies are supposed to cater to the people at large, giving them power over the government.

The thing is, those special interest groups effectively control the government. The whole idea that House is interested in serving people with money is true to a certain extent, but more in a business sense. With the NCR, those well-heeled individuals are the ones that the presidents post Tandi serve. Explicitly. Oh yeah, they are also the senate and most of the economy. There really isnt any getting rid of them through traditional democratic methods. The entire system seems to be irredeemable especially considering this is the same governing body that pulled rangers from the dam to go to Baja for Brahmin baron interests. The amount of manpower lost in the first and second defense of the dam and extended Mojave campaign probably wont do wonders for internal stability either, especially if the dam is lost. This all without considering the period of rapid inflation that the NCR is going through due to financing the war with a fiat currency and no gold reserves to speak of even if they wanted to fall back on a gold standard.

With House, its fairly explicit what his immediate goals are for New Vegas. Profit and not a whole lot else. Logically speaking, Due to increased traffic and interest in the Mojave due to a fully functioning strip and extremely available water and electricity, it should see an economic boom by proxy. It is implicated in the end slides House would step in the affairs of the wider Mojave if it started to interfere with that stated goal. Overall, he definitely serves the Strip better, and the Mojave at large by proxy.

 

Yeah I disagree with that read. There is certainly lots of problem with the NCR, but with those problems you are given tools to fix it. Like, America had these problems with oil barons and big corporations in the past, but it wasn't game over because there was a way to navigate through those shortcomings and do antitrust.

I disagree that isn't any way of getting rid of them, its just harder than it should be because ultimately I think the biggest problem with liberal democracies is that people with wealth are able to exercise way more control and influence than regular people.

But I digress, even though there is an uphill battle, there is still a path way to fix or at least put bandaids on these problems under democracy.

And yeah, I still don't see how House is a better solution unless you're an autocrat. I can definitely see the appeal of a smart guy saying fuck democracy im going to get shit done and invest a ton in infrastructure/social services, but House isn't that guy.

 

America has always had and continues to have massive issues with cooperate and financial interests being seen as more than equal in the eyes of the federal government. Voting is irrelevant when the candidates are all carefully selected through a seditious two party system, wherein both parties are cooperate machines utilized extensively for money laundering and future policy breaks. All current senators serve more or less life terms, being constant fixtures with large and complicated webs of influence and connections. This results in events such as Enron execs being handed a golden parachute due to personal connections to the Bush family, Theranos' credibility being bolstered by the inclusion of Kissinger, Shultz, and Perry on its executive board, or the entirety of the 08 financial crisis. A quick look at the US cooperate landscape and see how the anti-trust laws are working in the newer sections of industry. Google is an undisputed tech monopoly, same with Meta, Twitter-possibly, same with Apple. Telecom is a trust-rampant price fixing promoting lack of competition. This is without considering the fact the trillions of dollars of debt that America incurs is to the Federal Reserve, so named to deceive and not much more.

The only meaningful difference between the NCR and the states is that the NCR's senate members represent explicitly cooperate interests as opposed to implicitly. Ironically the shift from the Tandi dynasty, autocracy in all but name, to liberal democracy was the start of all of these issues. America has mild issues with interest groups by comparison. Oligarchy masquerading as democracy really. We live in a quasi-tech oligarchy (similar to pre-war America), the NCR citizen lives in an agricultural oligarchy. As a sidenote, the NCR still has large problems with organized raiders in its own central territories, something not even the Legion deals with. Even though House might be some cold unfeeling corporate entity, his scope of control is ironically narrow given his goals. He preserves most of the personal liberties of the general Mojave dweller and provides infrastructure from the water pipes from Mead and electricity from the dam. That limited scope would make his management much more efficient. One of the biggest problems with both Legion and NCR in game is the amount of territory they intend to cover with little to no thought of actually civilizing that land. Though to be frank, I said in so many words that House summed up in so few, "If you want to see the fate of democracy, look out the windows".

 

I don't see voting as being irrelevant when its a tool used to remove congress people all the time?

The average senator serves less than 2 terms. Granted, I don't blame you for taking 1 look at Patrick Leahy and think to yourself we basically have House serving in the Senate.

And yeah, the current state of corporate influence is bad but we had this same problem before with barons with a different name, and we broke up those baronry using democratic institutions.

I don't understand your argument. Ya, voting is a slow and inefficient tool..... but it is a tool. Why abandon that? And for what exactly? House is not aiming to better people's lives, he's aiming to progress society's. If you don't have caps or wealth then you're not going to get much from House as we see how he treats poor people.... AND you have no voice or power in government.

You were arguing about lifetime senators so how would having 1 lifetime senator with no way of removing him be any better?

 

democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.
- Winston Churchill.

I would personaly say what it boilds down to is accountability. Power without accountability regardless of the system, is always bound to become a tyranny. Even a democracy can become a system where accountability doesn't exist or is meaningless. But only with accountability is there any meaningfull choice possible.

 

Right. Which is why House is a bad option because there is 0 accountability.

 

Yeah got sidetracked. To try and reel it back in, life is a definite overstatement, but regardless at the moment a third of senators have 12+ years of seat time not including prior tenure in the house. This peaked in the late 90s at 46%. 47% of senators have served previously in the house. This is a relatively modern trend too, with the numbers taking off in the 1900s. Main point is voting is almost a placebo with hand-picked candidates, career politicians who gain favor with existing political machines and pop on the ballot that way. From what I understand the NCR is fairly similar.

The trusts and monopolies are much different from the old meat trusts and standard oil. We have people and companies trying to monopolize reality, truth, and fact. The NCR still deals with those overt meat trust sort of things so maybe there’s hope for them.

Anyway, House obviously isn’t a charity and his primary goals are not to govern the wastes or really do anything overtly for the average Mojave citizen. At the same time, all that infrastructure that a high functioning society needs would have to be built in the Mojave, generally improving quality of life. With a flourishing strip, you get tourists and travelers coming to the Mojave in droves driving local economies. Again, there are humanitarian benefits that a House ending provides, though not directly.

The majority of the Mojave retains full autonomy as well, House only manages the strip and dam as far as I can remember. As far as governing the strip, House states that he would act essentially as a CEO, running his assets a business, not a nation. As far as corporate oversight would go, it’s the Courier and the ending slides promote this. The player through their choices become the “human side” of house dependent on karma level. Anything from promoting tyranny to ensuring safety and liberty for wasters.

Karma plays a big role in the independent and House endings and for good reasons. With House and Yes Man, your arnt just some decorated merc, you are invited to pull directly on the levers of society and your choices should play a large role in those outcomes. As a partnership, the House ending could possibly be both the worst and best ending for the Mojave with the couriers actions making a lasting impact on House.

 

My only issue with House is his treatment of the Kings.

 

The NCR is never shown to have any capability to deal with its monopolists. Even if we assume that they follow a similar trajectory to the US and are eventually able to reign in its gilded age*, that's hardly a ringing endorsement: The United States of today may have formally different issues to the gilded age, but it has rivening economic, social, and psychic crises. There is a very real chance that these crises may literally end up bringing about the end of the world as we know it.

What's more - in the world of Fallout, it's taken as a given that these things lead to the end of the world. So again, the NCR following America's path in parallel, managing to overcome its early growing pains with monopolist capitalism, is in no way an endorsement. NCR would need to show some capacity to transform itself into something fundamentally different than what came before. Ironically, even though Caesar and House both ape the symbology of the Old World far more on the nose, their systems promise something more essentially different than NCR.

*And we don't even have to grant that it ever really ended

 

Isnt that only if you get them to cooperate with the NCR though?

What do you think the results of Caesar’s synthesis would have been? I couldn’t really figure out exactly where he thought his new society might lead.

 

In truly Hegelian fashion, I don't think even Caesar really knows what would come out of it. That's the point, it's the promise of a radical departure from history up to this point.

Of course that's the optimistic way of reading it, I think it would just end up going the way that it does historically when barbarian societies encounter and conquer settled societies: Order is overthrown but within a few generations the barbarians have been subsumed by the society they conquered and things return to normal. But hey, maybe not.

 

I always figured the latter of the two with the results being similar to those Bronze Age Mesopotamian city states conquered by barbarous hill people. You are right though, through that philosophical lens the point is that it is unknowable. A new societal front completely unique to post nuclear America. It’s just that he must’ve had some inkling of what might be and I was curious if I missed something.