A Dystopia or Not?--Absolute Justice and Self-Determination
I. A Disturbing Ending: Self-Justified System and Absolute Justice
The ending of the season 2 has provided a final solution for the self-evolution of the Sibyl system, and left an especially innovative and disturbing comma, if not the period, of the story for the viewers. It is innovative because after the development of the collective Psycho-pass measurement, the Sibyl system can be brought in front of the judgment which issued by itself, and under such circumstances, there are no individuals can escape this absolute order since the judge itself, or judges themselves have to face the same law. Therefore, the society and the socio-political order that depicted by this show have become morally self-consistent ones. The previous contradictions within the self-justification of the Sibyl system and the order it has imposed on the whole society have been eliminated. It is this point that differentiates the show from many other dystopian works, for there are no dictator, no deliberate oppression, and no obvious sacrifice of a group of people for the interest of another group of people. The law and order developed by this fictional world, though cold-blooded, sometimes even terrifying, is able to realise a form of justice in the sense that everyone is equal in front of the law and literally no exceptions can be permitted. And for most of the people who live in that society under the control of such order, there is more or less a happy life awaiting. As one time the heroin Tsunemori imagined her old friend, who were killed in the first season’s show, asking her in self-doubt that if she had lived a happy life when she was alive, though she was a little bit lazy, not clever, had limited choices in life and no further aim or ambition, the answer was a definite “Yes".
At the same time, this ending is quite disturbing. As viewers, we have to ask this question after we finishing watching this special show: is this a society that we would accept? If not, what will be the main reason to reject it, when it can be self-justified intellectually and seemingly morally? Intuitively, we would say no to it. It seems that, at first glance, it is not a desirable society compared with the one in which we are living. But we cannot instantly think of a very valid rejection when we have considered all aspects of its self-justification. Moreover, if we neglect various bloody and violent scenes that highlighted in the show (which means that the real practice of such socio-political order in an imaginable way might be much more mild than what we have witnessed), and if we just examine the Sybil system in the show’s own settings (that this is a chaotic world after a series of wars and Japan with the “equipment” of the Sybil system is one of the few regions that could keep a peaceful order), we may have fewer reasons to reject it.
Firstly, one ambiguity points to the question that is this society a genuine dystopia or not? Evidently, it is not a utopia since initially it has not been conceived as a society better than us. But its dystopian features are also not very distinctive compared with other works in a similar strand. On the one hand, it has already been motioned that this society seems to be morally self-consistent. On the other hand, it also has a moderate and practical ultimate aim, which is to keep a peaceful and ordinary domestic social order. Many other dystopian worlds, in contrast, would have a much more ambitious purpose like improvement of the mankind or transforming the way of human life through new technologies. They try to display a way of life that apparently not better, but most of the time an alternative one compared to what we already have. From this perspective, the Sybil system, which no doubt contains high degree of technology, is just trying to provides an old-form way of life which is not very distinctive from which we are familiar with, and a practical solution within a chaotic world, although inevitably under some new conditions and limitations. So the central question still lies on what grounds we could consider the society as a dystopia and fully reject it as a practical response to a chaotic social order.
Indeed, we could easily identify a major problem of this society that makes us feel morally unacceptable. After all, its peaceful order is based on a systematic and sometimes dogmatic exclusion of a group of people in this society. It is not a fair order because the excluded are deprived of all the rights to live a normal life, though with a chance to regain the opportunities if one recovers from the “muddy” psycho-pass state. If someone could be put into the isolation centres just because of his or her temporary mental state, it is unfair to those who naturally carry a high psycho-pass disposition or fall into a condition that would increase psycho-pass only by chance. Actually this unfairness of the Sybil system society might be the main reason why it feels intuitively unacceptable according to our modern moral standards. Yet, such a society can hardly be called a dystopian one. Even if we do not borrow Foucault’s criticism on the modern human society that has reflected a quite similar picture of systematically excluding people with certain “defects” that are considered deviant from the normal society, we could still see a multitude of similar cases that have appeared in the human history. Exclusions based on gender, ethnic groups, races, to name but a few, are all not unfamiliar in our history, and we could still witness such phenomena in our daily lives. Hence, in this aspect, the Sybil system society is not an unfair dystopian world that possesses greater evil than that of us. And it is also imaginable that through the possible improvements and designs of the Psycho-pass measurement, the standards for the law enforcement, and the recovering facilities and methods, etc., when technology develops and the Sybil system expands, the formerly explicit exclusions will become more implicit and less offensive. Such changes will naturally come into beings if this society continues to develop, since it coincides with Sybil system’s own logic that its ultimate aim is to keep a peaceful order. There are no reasons for it not to implement such measures if they could reduce dissatisfactions and further harmonise the society.
Furthermore, when we look back to the major invention of this science fiction, and also which would seems to be the symbolic dystopian feature, the constitution of the Sybil system, we might find it less alienated than we initially feel. One way it could justify itself is that actually it is not a form of artificial intelligence that controls the human society, but pure human intelligence with the support of the highly developed biotechnology. In this sense, although quite different from our common sense, it still can be counted as a form of self-government of human beings, not government by machines or high-level AI like in many other dystopian works. An instant response to this system, apart from a natural antipathy to such a human minds combination, would claim that it is still a system that subjected to authoritative and maybe arbitrary decisions of some people, and it cannot breed true justice if a society’s fate is determined by a number of outliers. But this problem has been solved after the collective psycho-pass measurement was adopted. The outliers are also included in the whole system and are subjected to the law made by them. And based on the settings of the first season of the show, the Sybil system can continue absorb individuals with criminally asymptomatic feature or other distinctive features to improve its diversity. Based on the setting of the show’s ending, the system can renew itself and replace the old members with newcomers from the society. Under such circumstances, the society and its judges are closely interlocked as a fate-sharing community. They are not isolated as an authoritative ruler and the rest who are ruled any more. To use a literally fitting but meaningfully a slight different analogy, the Sybil system can even be seen as "a government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Only the second “people” here does not indicate every member of the society, instead they are “elites” who naturally possess certain features. So in the end it is more like the perfect form of “philosopher kings government” than a popular control democracy. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily make the Psycho-pass society a dystopia.
II. Slave, or Man As His Own Master?
What will, then, be the reason for us to consider this society as a dystopia and fully reject it? How should we solve this “puzzle” if the above accounts are not convincing enough to characterise the society in Psycho-pass as a dystopia? In fact the show does give us a clue to reflect on this question if we try to examine its main characters. Although in the first place it was the genius rebel Makishima who is Criminally Asymptomatic in the show’s first season renouncing this system and it was the main male character Kōgami who had to go into exile after he defied the will of the Sybil system and lynched Makishima, and even if the rebel Kamui in the end of the second season became satisfied with the solution to incorporate Sybil system itself into the psycho-pass system and accepted his death peacefully, it is the heroin, Tsunemori, who still firmly rejected the legitimacy of the system after it has evolved into a more just form. Before joining the police department, she was an innocent and outstanding graduate who lived a normal life, had close friends, and followed the instructions of the Sybil system as others did and achieved the highest score in the capability assessment test. So, what changed her views towards the whole system after two years experience as a law enforcement agent? What is the source of the influence? Has her position in the system also changed after all these stories?
If we want to explore the reason behind her firm rejection, we need to place ourselves in this society, and to examine it inside from Tsunemori's point of view and try to feel what she feels. Since she naturally possesses a very low degree of psycho-pass coefficient and a high capability according to the standards set by the Sibyl system, Tsunemori is a pure beneficiary of this society. Yet in the last scenes, we saw a lonely figure who turned her back towards the system and finished a cigarette by herself in her department, a habit that she acquired after Kōgami’s leaving, and the cigarette’s brand Kōgami’s favourite. Though she is and will be determined, she is alone and dissatisfied as well. The dissatisfaction comes from her not agreeing with the Sybil system and the effect that the imposed order has caused to the society, it also comes from the fact that starting from this point, she has no companions, no friends, and does not belong to the both sides of the society. She is not a member of the majority anymore, and this detachment process started from the moment she became a police working for the Sybil system, and completed after her former close friend was killed and she witnessed the real constitution of the system. Nor she is a member working for the system as instructed anymore, and since she rejected the offer to be absorbed into the Sybil system, she is not a member within them as well. Thus it becomes that she does not belong to this whole community that interlocked by the system and the society. She is not within the One and hence she is Another One, an outlier, like those who rebelled and those who were exiled. She becomes self-determined, acting only upon her own will, and here exactly lies all the loneliness.
It is interesting that in an interview the writer of the first season’s script were asked about Tsunemori’s thought and hope, he replied that “Tsunemori’s justice is the spirit of democracy, therefore she is not satisfied with Sybil system’s obscurantism. She thinks that the procedures have their values even if they do not have concrete meanings.” But is this really what in her mind and the feelings lingering in her heart? What lies behind “the spirit of democracy” and how should we interpret it in the context of Tsunemori’s story? As her final refusal to the Sybil system stating that “it should not be the society to determine a future for the people. It should be the people to choose a future for the society.” She is not satisfied because under the control of the Sybil system, she sees no room for genuine autonomous choices. However, we still need to ask what does it truly mean to have choices for the people in the society? What does it mean to Tsunemori, if she admitted that her friend once lived a happy life without thinking much about choices and autonomy?
In the newly released Psycho-pass movie, we are able to compare a Sybil system society with a more primitive form of social order—a community of a rebel army. After his exile, Kōgami left Japan and went to this region to help the rebel army to resist the implement of the Sybil system. Tsunemori encountered him and tried to convince him to go back to Japan. She failed, but she also once again experienced genuineness in the interactions with Kōgami and witnessed a sense of brotherhood and family-hood in the community of the rebel army which she could seldom feel in the Sybil system society. They are something that can even be nurtured in a chaotic and unstable society but cannot exist in a peaceful psycho-pass society. Certain essential elements for an individual to become a human being have been shadowed by the order of absolute justice of the Sybil system society.
Consequently, as a lonely figure that stands in the whole system, Tsunemori's dissatisfaction also derives from a natural longing as an ultimate individual. It is a longing for companionship, for friendship, for a kind of intimacy that includes trust and deep mutual understanding, for those human interactions which can penetrate one’s heart and soul, for forming relationships which we can find in this show that only self-determined individuals are capable of. A life that is not ultimately self-determined cannot nurture such relationships, and sacrifice would be meaningless in this Sybil system society. Without struggles for autonomous choices when one is faced with a dilemma, and without a certain degree of sacrifice for another human being or for values larger than oneself, a deep personal relationship and genuine mutual understanding cannot be formed. Such a friendship will be missing when there is not enough room for deeply emotional tangling and a choice made fully upon one’s will. It is ironic that in the show the enemies of the system and whom despised by the system often have more trust and mutual understandings with each other. Instead, the attempts to self-define and the pursuits of autonomous choices in interpersonal relationship within the system lead to scenarios like son against father or friendship abandoned. Therefore, Tsunemori's rejection to the Sybil system can also be seen as a natural response and a renouncement. A response to a society that eliminated every single self-determined individual. And a renouncement to a system that should be responsible for her loneliness.
Then it becomes evident that the truly excluded in this society is not people with unstable mental state, but individuals with a self-autonomous mind. The dystopian feature of this fictional world finally emerges in the full scale, and it is the extinguishment of the self-determination. The Sybil system society is not one filled with tyranny, disorder, or sense of insecurity. It is a peaceful and just society, yet after all, a “slavenised” one. People become slaves in respect that they have to give up the ultimate self-determination in order to live a peaceful and happy life. Although it is imaginable that they still possess an amount of choices in their daily life, the area for autonomy is limited and has been delineated. Within this sphere they can be free from interference, even make self-realisation to a certain degree, but still it can be said that they live a slave-like life because once exceeding this sphere, they are no longer masters of themselves and the final realisation of ones life is determined by the whole system. People degraded to the worst form of “the last man” in the sense of Kojeve’s and Fukuyama’s conceptions. A full self-realisation becomes impossible, since the final source of control, to determine someone to do this rather than that, lies beyond one’s sphere of autonomy.
From this perspective, the spirit of democracy that the producer of this show talked about, and the statement Tsunemori made when she rejected the system, are all demonstrations of self-autonomy, other than the procedures of democracy per se. And the revolution that was tried by Makishima in the first season, was not equipped with a better social envision, instead, it was just an attempt to reclaim the right of self-determination from the whole system.
And more importantly, the image of a slave is actually first and foremost represented not by an individual in the society, but by the Sybil system itself. Before it incorporated itself into the whole system, this socio-political order is at most an autocratic one. After the combination of the Sybil system and the society, a full circle of absolute control has been created, and no one or any group could evade this cage of “absolute justice”. From now on, even the Sybil system cannot turn the direction of the society, and becomes a slave of this whole system for it also loses the control to determine itself to do this rather than that. More like a highly efficient machine that execute an absolute will, the logic of actions has been set beforehand and the later will cannot exceed this. Moreover, collective measurement means that the sphere for personal autonomy is further decreased, and the worst scenario would be that it would rule out any room and possibility for genuine self-determination, since everything becomes collectively based and each personal action can be scrutinised by a collective. Finally, a solution that was meant to solve the problem of the Sybil system has made it into a complete form of dystopia, a dystopia that extinguish any possibilities for personal autonomy in the practice of a true absolutely just order. Wisely enough, in the last scene of the second season, the Sybil system pointed out this possible scenario to Tsunemori, and attributed it to her decision. Tsunemori, on the other hand, holds a more positive prospect of the evolution of the society. Although I doubt there will be any further authentic solutions and a way out, I look forward to the subsequent stories, if there would be any.
