Psycho-Pass is an series set in a world where r-type behaviour has taken over the population, and psychopaths rule. This requested review comes from Arthur; thank you for your support!
Further information on psychopaths: www.ponerology.
My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini
Download in MP3 Format: http://www.youtubeconvert.cc/
My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DMJAurini
Want to request a video? http://www.staresattheworld.com/aurinis-insight/
Just want to help out with a couple bucks? http://www.staresattheworld.com/donate/
Credits:
I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Psychopaths is a truly amazing anime series that I heartily recommend to anybody in the alternative right.
It makes me wonder if the creators had read the evolutionary psychology behind politics, because this perfectly nails the R-type society that the social justice warriors are pushing for.
And it also expands upon technology that we are presently developing, which could very well make all of this come to pass.
Now, in this review, I'm going to be spoiler-light.
I'm going to discuss the broad trends of the series and the themes brought up in it, but I'm going to try and avoid the major spoilers.
So you should be able to watch this without ruining the series.
If anything, hopefully it will improve your appreciation of it when you do sit down to watch it, if you haven't already.
Now, the Society of Psychopaths.
It's set in Japan, about 50 years in the future, thereabouts.
And the title comes from the fact that everybody has a psychopath, a psychological passport, which measures your level of affect.
Essentially, if you go above a certain level of anger or distress, or quite frankly, probably even you stress, you will be arrested.
There's monitoring equipment all over the city streets that will record your psychopaths as you go past it to make sure that you are a sane, obedient little sheep.
And yes, we are developing this technology right now.
There's actually thermal imaging scanners that will record your level of anger.
So if you're in a bad mood and you're walking down the street, hypothetically, the cops could come have a chat with you.
Sir, is anything wrong?
Sir, are you upset?
Sir?
Sir?
And of course, in this world, so if you get to a certain level of stress, the cops are alerted to you.
And you get locked into a cube for probably the rest of your life because very few people get better because being locked in a cube tends to stress you out.
And if you run from the police and if you engage in any violence, in fact, like if you hurt another person or another person witnesses the police arresting you, there's a very good chance that they will need to be arrested because of the amount of affect it will create in them.
Their psychopaths will reach an unacceptable level, so they now need to be arrested.
Or if it gets too high, lethal enforcement.
So Japan is living in a completely peaceful society with robotics that maintain all of the technology, all of the food supply, everything.
And with holographic technology that essentially everybody is living in a holodeck.
So you're living in a completely plain gray cubicle apartment, and every day you change the holodeck to look like something else.
So it is perfect, rabbity, unlimited resources, and the only goal of society is to keep everybody calm and relaxed and obedient and going to their jobs the way they're supposed to.
It is the perfect rabbit utopia where nobody ever does anything interesting.
So the police force is in this.
We've got the sheep.
They're the bulk of society.
And the police force is a very interesting combination of sheep dogs and wolves.
You see, enacting violence on somebody else, that's the sort of thing that tends to make your psychopath go dark.
You get too much affect.
And so the sheepdogs, the people that corral the wolves, can't do it.
They only corral the wolves.
Once the hunt begins for a thought criminal, the wolves do all the hunting.
And the wolves, for the most part, the wolves are ex-sheepdogs that they got into a violent confrontation with a criminal, with a thought criminal, and it wound up darkening their past so much that they had a choice.
Become a hired gun who, if you disobey the sheepdog, gets put to death instantly, or get locked up into a prison cell for the rest of your life.
And each one of them, each time that you go out hunting one of these thought criminals, your psychopath gets a little bit darker.
So really, being a wolf is just a short-term stop on the way to your permanent prison cell.
It really absolutely nails the K-type versus R-type dynamic.
And like I said, this is the world that we're building right now.
The conflict in the series comes from the fact that there is a very rare occurrence of individuals who don't trigger the psychopath system.
Individuals who can remain completely calm, showing zero affect whenever they commit these crimes.
The psychopaths.
This society, there are psychopaths that just go under the radar.
And so none of the guns are all set up to only shoot thought criminals, so the guns won't work against them.
They can pass in plain sight.
They can do whatever they want.
And the antagonist of the series is one such man that decides to make war against the entire system.
Now in describing this man, there is an absolutely brilliant quote about what is the nature of charisma.
And it's broken down to three parts.
Making people feel good whenever you are around them.
The intelligence to speak competently on many topics.
And the nature of a hero or prophet.
And although this antagonist is very dark, he seeks to overthrow all of Japan in just a violent, destructive, pointless revolution.
It does describe him.
It's a very choleric description of charisma, of weaponized charisma, of leadership.
It's a very compelling description as well.
If you feel called to be in a leadership position, it's a very useful thing to keep in mind.
Try and make other people feel better when you're around.
You know, achieve professional competence.
Know what you're talking about and have a wide variety of interests.
And the nature of the hero or prophet, a very Japanese thing to say, but one worth meditating upon.
So this antagonist is a psychopath, but he is a very charismatic, self-directed, even heroic psychopath.
Although he is a monster that's going to cause the deaths of millions.
He's a very interesting character study.
He's certainly not a hero, but he is very interesting nonetheless.
Now, the best scene in the series comes about halfway through when a murder happens in broad daylight in the middle of the street amongst the rabbit population.
It's an amazing scene.
And it calls to mind necklacing videos I've seen come out of South Africa.
Now, if you've never seen one of these, you know, and you don't want your psychopaths to go dark, you probably shouldn't look at one.
But in these videos, what will happen is you'll have just a crowd of people murdering the one individual, beating him, stoning him, and then the necklacing is where they put a car tire full of gasoline around his neck and light it on fire.
Truly horrific stuff.
But what I find really striking about the videos, what really stands out to me, is how the victim of the thing shows zero affect.
They just dissociate.
And they don't seem to be aware of their environment.
They don't seem to be responding rationally.
They'll just try and keep walking down the street as this giant crowd is trying to murder them.
You know, they won't really fight back or they won't try and escape.
They'll just try and walk away.
And it's almost like something's possessed them.
And in this series, with this murder happening in the middle of the street amongst this population that does not know violence, that's exactly what happens.
The man walks up to this woman, woman he doesn't know, and just he hits her with a club or whatever, knocks her down, and just starts violently murdering her in the middle of the street.
And she doesn't react.
When she falls down, she just looks at him with confusion because the system has always protected her.
The system said that this is impossible.
This could never happen.
And all around her, it's just one guy attacking her.
The rest of the population could have easily done something about this guy.
But they just stand around looking confused, saying, what's he doing?
Is he murdering that woman?
What's going on?
You know, who was it?
Who was it that was saying this?
Might have been Stefan Molyneux.
Might have been somebody.
It might have been on Cantwell's channel.
But rose-tinted glasses.
Do you know where that saying comes from?
According to rumor and hearsay, which are almost as good as fact, they used to put rose-tinted goggles on cattle at the slaughterhouse because the rose-tinted goggles would prevent them from seeing blood.
Thus, they wouldn't be upset.
And so we recently had Bono at the, he was at, what was he, talking to the Senate or talking to a bunch of people that some jag-off musician has no business speaking to.
And he was talking to them about how instead of using force of arms, we just need to ridicule Islam.
You know, that's how we start terrorism, is ridicule.
The R-types are unable to understand violence.
You know, it's been discussed elsewhere.
They have malformed amygdalas.
You know, their threat assessment center has been short-circuited.
They use other circuits to avoid assessing threat.
Or they never developed any.
They never had any competitive sports in schools.
They never got into a fist fight as a kid.
They've been perfectly coddled and kept safe.
And so they have an underdeveloped amygdala and circuits that go around it.
Well, when one of these people, when they encounter violence, it overwhelms them.
They dissociate.
Their head, it breaks and they don't know what to do.
They freeze.
And this is what happens with the necklacers.
These are happening in very R-type societies.
And the R-types in this, yeah, they respond the exact same way.
They see violence.
It just confuses them.
They don't know what to do.
They're not hardened.
They're not toughened.
They're obedient.
So how do we fight evil?
You know, that's a very real question in this series, because this solution of creating the sheep, you know, that's inhuman.
That's certainly not the answer.
And what's eventually revealed, and I won't give away too much, but the people ruling the society are the very psychos that can't be detected by the system.
It is a system ruled by psychopaths.
And folks, that's a perfect metaphor for our modern day.
In fact, I was recently linked to some psychological research that only recently got released publicly prior to this.
Much of it was redacted.
I'm still going through all of it, but there's a link down below to the guy's writing and to his article.
So yes, we do presently have psychopathic rulers that don't care about anybody.
They just want to manipulate.
And they don't have any affect.
They don't understand good and evil.
They're completely spiritually autistic.
And they're creating this system of R-type behavior.
Everybody gets a trophy.
We need to keep everybody safe.
We don't want any bruised feelings.
And we have R-types that are so damaged nowadays that, you know, a kid chewing a Pop-Tart so that it looks like a gun gets them sent home from school.
Because they're terrified of pictures of guns, right?
That's enough to terrify them.
But if they actually saw a fist fight, they would freeze up.
They would dissociate.
They wouldn't know what to do at all because it just completely overwhelms their emotions.
And so, how do we deal with this?
How do we deal with the society?
And I think this is, the series doesn't answer this question.
But it really is something worth meditating on.
The series meditates on.
Because the protagonist is one of these sheepdogs who discovers the system.
is absolutely disgusted by the system, but at the same time, she's not about to overthrow the entire system and cause mass suffering and blood in the streets.
And if there is an answer to how do we deal with an evil system that encourages people to be dependent, pathetic, weak, and broken rabbits, how do we deal with that?
The heroic persona.
Going back to that definition of charisma, the ability to make people feel good for being around you, the intelligence to speak on many things, and the nature of a hero or prophet.
The series closes, each episode closes with a J-pop love song, which might sound a bit cheesy at first, but it does point to the way out.
Somebody heroic that can set the example that improves the quality of people.
Ultimately, the only way that we can win back our civilization from the psychopathic monsters that are running things, to not let ourselves be dominated and destroyed by the rabbits,
is to embrace the spirit of heroism, is to live the best lives that we possibly can to achieve our maximum potential and help others in the process.
