Reddit reviews The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

>Does this refer to the original Wisemen's committee formulated before WWII? And if so, are the Patriots funding Philanthropy by using the name of one of their original dead members as a proxy?

Here's the thing, I'm uncertain who Kojima intended for the Patriots to be at the time of its release. The Colonel had this to say:

>To begin with -- we're not what you'd call -- human. Over the past two hundred years -- A kind of consciousness formed layer by layer in the crucible of the White House. It's not unlike the way life started in the oceans four billion years ago. The White House was our primordial soup, a base of evolution --We are formless. We are the very discipline and morality that Americans invoke so often. How can anyone hope to eliminate us? As long as this nation exists, so will we.

I find this description fascinating. To anyone who has watched the Ghost in the Shell anime, it very much resembles the way the Puppet Master artificial intelligence came to life as a collective construct of information on the internet. Except in this sense, The Patriots are more of "Memetic Collective Conscious" of American culture--so to say--that achieved self-awareness.

In my opinion, who they were originally was irrelevant upon the game's completion. To expand further upon the Ghost in the Shell analogy, it was like Stand Alone Complex's Laughing Man incident. Who was the original Laughing Man? It doesn't matter. His memetic persona evolved and took on a life of its own. It'd be as useless as trying to deduce "Anonymous's" identity. The Patriots weren't individuals in the sense that the Colonel offered. They were the "discharge" in democracy that Kojima described in the Grand Game Plan.

This leads me to my other point. When the game named its "founders" as "The Wisemen's Committee," [this book] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Wise-Men-Friends-World/dp/1476728828/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398120542&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Wisemen) came to mind. It seems like a stretch, but Kojima is also more well read than many of his fans or detractors realize. It also seems a little bit too coincidental that Olga adopted the alternate monicker of "Mr. X" under her Cyborg Ninja guise, when one of the more prominent "Wisemen" (George F. Kennan) wrote an influential article with the same pseudonym. Most of these chief figures, by the way, shaped the policies that made America what it is today.

And one other thing, about the Patriots being dead, these policies aren't just limited to "Wisemen." Some would say, as the Postmodernists do, that we've been heading in this direction for a long time beginning with the European Enlightenment. Apparently, Kojima wants to do a video game about "The Boss (The Joy)." It wouldn't surprise me if he revealed that different iterations of The Philosophers existed way before WWII.