Final Fantasy VII: Functionalism and Corporate Tyranny

The beloved 1997 video game teaches us about what happens when business becomes government

Rufus Shinra, President of the multinational Shinra Electric Power Company, effectively ruled the entire globe.

What is the difference between a business and a government? The answer is: it depends.

Government can take many forms. A socialist state is very distinct from most businesses, but what if a government has no specific ideology behind it — as could be said of most democracies? The difference becomes fuzzier.

Next, imagine a business that begins to take on roles usually attributed to government — one that has enough market share to be quite powerful. Any company that grows enough in power has to the potential to work as a form of government itself.

This is the situation that we observe in the 1997 game Final Fantasy VII. The Shinra Electric Power Company (one of lead antagonists of the game) has set up power generators all over the world, snuffing out all of its rival electric companies and becoming immensely profitable from its monopoly. The profits are reinvested into a private military that officially protects these generators but later comes to coerce the local populations into keeping them, even when the generators begin to destroy their ecosystems. The town authorities are powerless to change this, be they intimidated or bribed by Shinra. As we take on the role of Cloud Strife at the beginning of the game, we see that what started as a multinational corporation has become hard to divorce from the notion of a global state.

Shinra Electric Power Company’s logo

Most analyses of the moral theme of Final Fantasy VII purport it to be one of nature triumphing over industry. This is undoubtedly a central idea in the game, but what is just as much a factor (if less often discussed) is what is said about the relationship between government and business, as well as the impact of when they merge.

Moreover, in giving us a picture of how this power company came to be a world empire, the writers of FFVII stumbled into a concept that political scientists call functionalism.

In layman’s terms, functionalism is the idea that the success of a system triggers the expansion and complexity of that system. To see its application in politics, a chief example for which there is ample research is the European Union (EU). Many of us consider the EU a fact of life today, Brexit voters notwithstanding. When it was first formed, however, in 1951, it was called the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), and it only consisted of Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. The main idea was to deter a third world war by having European powers (namely France and Germany) share markets in the key industries of — as the name implies — coal and steel.

It could be argued that it achieved that goal — France and Germany have remained friendly — but it also proved to have economic benefits on its own. This made European leaders aware of obstacles to trade that they had not noticed before. For example, if coal and steel are to be traded actively among the member-states of the ECSC, then some ability to travel across borders was needed. This implies another situation to be solved. If the amount of traffic by land, air, and sea from other countries is going to increase due to a common coal and steel market, then it would simplify the process and reduce costs if there were common rules regarding transportation. Homogenizing those rules implies that vehicles will need to be built to a common standard. This implies that the means of producing vehicles, such as authorized sources of raw materials and legal labor practices, will need to be made uniform as well.

In the ensuing decades, Europeans came to the conclusion that a coal and steel market was easiest to unify when all other markets were unified as well, and they realized that a such a market was easiest to manage and regulate under a single political union. This resulted in the formation of the EU in 1993. The success of the ECSC and its implied needs caused it to follow functionalist lines from a six-member market in 1951 to a twenty-eight-member supernation in 2018. Unlike FFVII, the EU is not a tale of a grim dystopia, but there are examples of those in history, and one that follows an equally functionalist line stands out: the British East India Company (EIC).

The EIC is, in many ways, the Shinra Electric Power Company of human history.

Formed in 1599, its mission was merely to establish trade between England and the lands of the Indian Ocean, in the hopes of accessing spices and similar goods in the foreign lands. The first efforts were slow, owing to the primitive technology at the time, but by the 1610s, the EIC had a ground presence in India, with the blessing of the British Crown and the Mughal Empire. By now, it already exhibited militaristic tendencies, not against the people of India but against the rival traders of Portugal and the Netherlands. Over the next century, it defeated its rivals (much like the Shinra), set up outposts along the coast, and secured complete control of trade with India.

Why did the EIC fight? Functionalism was at work. Once trade was established, it needed to protect that trade by removing rivals. The only certain way to do that was by the barrel of a gun.

Still, the militarism was small at first, as it initially employed only a few hundred troops to protect its sites overseas. Over time, its enormous profitability made it a target in wars between Britain and other European powers, and so more armed personnel were hired after 1750. By the end of the century, the number of troops had entered into the hundreds of thousands, with personnel recruited from the Indian people themselves.

The parallels with Shinra become clear, as it began recruiting members of SOLDIER not only from Midgar, but wherever they built reactors, such as in Cloud’s hometown of Nibelheim. The EIC’s fleets came not only to consist of cargo ships but also warships, and at its peak, the EIC’s army was twice the size of Britain’s!

This successful company also became aware of obstacles to its potential presented by local leaders who resisted some of its initiatives. At this point, in order for this company to secure its profits, it had to deal with local authorities by conquest. The first area truly conquered by the EIC was Bengal in 1757. From there, region after region fell, as each one proved to bear some kind of hindrance to an ever-growing, ever-complex, and ever-needy operation. Trade for spices, cotton, dyes, et cetera were no longer the main focus. Functionalist thinking took over: how could trade in India work without making improvements to India?

Public administration of the Indian subcontinent was now a leading consideration. Taxes were collected. Efforts to develop the roads and railways took place. Even a drug cartel was established, in order to smuggle opium into China and reverse Britain’s losses it has sustained in the tea trade. This created an epidemic of opiate addiction in the Eastern empire. Not only that: the manipulation of local agriculture to create products like opium weakened the native food supply, resulting in multiple famines across the country that killed millions.

For Shinra, what started as merely the production of electricity led to the development of not only a military but a news organization, civil engineering, genetics testing, and a space program. In addition to their own wars to subdue regions that resisted them, numerous other atrocities occurred. Cruel experiments were performed on human subjects. An inability to control the product of these experiments led to the destruction of Nibelheim and most of its inhabitants. When given a chance to eliminate a handful of eco-terrorists, Shinra chose to drop an entire city platform onto every innocent person in the slums below. How many people perished under Shinra’s rule is hard to say, but it was surely several thousands.

As we can see, for a work of fantasy, Final Fantasy VII has a lot of basis in history. It therefore serves as a cautionary tale against the excesses of unchecked business, in addition to its lessons about the value of nature and life. What we, as the audience, must then do is apply those lessons to our own lives.

This begs the question: Could something like Shinra or the British East India Company occur in the world as we know it today?

It is unlikely that modern states will ever be overcome by private interests this successfully, but corporations could still (and often do) wield undue influence in the political process, and they can still grow powerful along functionalist lines. Consider Amazon, as an example. It was just meant to be an online bookstore when it was founded in the 90s. Now it publishes its own books. Why is that? It realized that, in order to be successful at selling books, it helps if you own the copyrights. Like Shinra and the EIC, it has expanded its operations beyond that. It sells all kinds of products now, it owns streaming services like Twitch, it produces original television programming, and it even sells groceries through its merger with Whole Foods. Now, in the news, city after city is pining to become the home of its new headquarters. Amazon is suddenly a very powerful entity.

The point is not that Amazon will necessarily grow to become a tyrannical organization that rules the world. The point is that these functionalist growth patterns still exist, and it might be better not to sit around and wait to see what the ceiling on all of this growth is.

A corporation that is a few pegs below “global empire” can still inflict a lot of harm on the world. We already live in an era where the whole planet is threatened by climate change, which we cannot address because companies wield the power to block the legislation that would correct it.

It is just worth considering that before we’re forced to form AVALANCHE and become terrorists, we might want to keep an eye on these companies. We might want to choose the products we buy carefully and vote for the right leaders who will keep things under control.

On the other hand, you could be abducted, infused with Mako, and turned into a supersoldier.

Hmm…maybe we should give this fascism thing a try after all.