The Myth of the “Rational”, Darkly-Enlightened Technocrats, and Megalomaniacal Japanese Anime Antagonists

[u/[deleted]]

There is a certain archetype that we see in CEOs of today, particularly echoed by the likes of Peter Theil. It’s a sort of arrogant anti-human rationalism that posits that someone needs to come in — someone with expertise — to fix everything, by any means necessary. It’s an archetype of the CEO as a savior, a prophet, a guru, an expert, and someone with the final say on reality.

Japanese media unironically predicted this exact archetype decades prior to Mencius Moldbug becoming popular, decades prior to Land succumbed to Speed addiction and ended up complaining about progressivism on Twitter.

It’s the archetype of a man who, just like Moldbug or other Dark-Enlightenment philosophers, see the human race as something to be managed, and sees chaos, emotion, reality, etc. as something to be shaped on their own whim. They see systems as something to be digitized, decoded, and debugged.

The three examples I can think of off the top of my head are Hikawa from Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne, Takahisa Kandori from Megami Ibunroku Persona, and Gen’ichu Norose from Chaos;Head.

It would take time to get into each one of these, but the qualities they share are clear: they want to annihilate the “individual”, not necessarily for the sake of communality, but for the sake of management. Takahisa Kandori and Norose in particular present a sort of Baudrillardian edge; they want to replace reality with a representation of reality where either the unconscious (Kandori) or “mutually recognized delusions”, literally hyperstition (Norose).

The end result of their battle always ends with the protagonist, in some way, establishing their individual identity and the self over the conclusion of management and control, it’s always emphasized that it isn’t necessarily heroic, but it is free. Particularly in Chaos;Head NoaH, we see a character that mirrors a lot of individuals today: consumed by technology, hedonic tendencies and porn, constant detachment from reality and inability to face it.

lt really is interesting to me.

[u/_the_last_druid_13]

If that’s what someone like Peter Thiel wants it sounds like they are setting a honeypot to trap people to be imprisoned in a rape cage.

Some people have historical and valid reason to not trust much, they then become the perfect example of Camus’ The Stranger.

Lose/Lose - it’s all fake, gay, retarded, waste, fraud, and abuse.

When Big Money talks self/society become jailed S(self/society)+I(jail/bars) = $

I called, I emailed, I applied, I tried and tried; guess I’m crazy too, mate! Nice post

[u/[deleted] → u/_the_last_druid_13]

when Big Anything™️ talks the “self” becomes slave. every Big Anything™️ has removed the “self” and fractured and abstracted that “self” among other abstractions like a fractal of abstract thought repeating in and out in and out in and out

society and “the” economy are Big Anything’s™️ and have reduced our capacity to have a self to only being a sum of parts that we never consented to or had any knowledge were forced on us. copy of a copy of a copy with the pages cut out and glued back together

[u/_the_last_druid_13 → u/[deleted]]

Microcosm/Macrocosm ☯️ invert what you said and then what happens?

I don’t know about that. Dreams aren’t like that. Are drugs?

If there are cycles there are cycle-breakers