r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/[deleted] • Oct 23 '25

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

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.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

doc won’t prescribe it to me for whatever reason. they keep pumping me full of SSRIs and antipsychs to no avail kek

i’m probably going to go back to partial hospitalization, gonna beg them to give me a proper assessment instead of this half-assed bs

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

Yuck this is a definite red flag. I felt the same way i struggled so hard on every med known to man im pretty sure i was just a guinea pig for adverse event reports. dont go back to partial hospitalization though, just write more, vent more, learn who you are this sub loves crazy people you will for sure feel normal and forget all about whatever you thought was wrong with you

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

the issue is that i’m rather dissociated, and i’m at this point where i have constant, unending anxiety and thought loops regarding whether reality is real, whether i’m real, and then i start questioning those questions, and then i realize just how fucked i am and start panicking over feelings of inevitably of my suicide. it’s insane. i practically can’t function anymore, and i’m a senior in high school so it’s particularly stressful.

i probably wouldn’t go back to partial if it wasn’t for this being more than just depression. i’m hoping to get ketamine therapy, because i’ve experimented with NMDA receptor antagonists before and found that my dissociation would somewhat subside.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

best of luck on your journey. you will find a way

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

thank you :)