Relax, folks. No TED talk to wade through for today’s blog entry. I finished the TED series I was watching, and now I am onto another fine product of Funimation, an anime series called Darker Than Black.

And I must say, I am really enjoying it. The setting and premise are fascinating and the story is suspenseful, intense, and complex. The end of every episode makes me want to watch the next one. The show has me thoroughly hooked.

Oh, but fair warning, being Japanese, it’s also extremely violent and gory at times. This is not a gentle and lighthearted show like XXXholic or Fruits Basket.

As you can tell from the title, it is very dark and gritty. Even the hero of the show, or at least the primary character, is ruthless and brutal. Strong stuff.

The central premise of the show is that, ten years before the first episode, a strange and deadly region know as Hell’s Gate appeared, and ever since then people have been developing superpowers.

The people who do so are called “contractors” because they all have a signature compulsion that overcomes them after they use their powers. One person felt compelled to make a perfect grid of small stones. Another feels compelled to smoke a cigarette, even though he is not a smoker and loathes smoking.

One guy even felt the need to break his own fingers. That power strikes me as not worth it.

People getting superpowers is, of course, very interesting and cool, and I think adding the compulsions (called “the price” in the show) was a stroke of genius. It makes the “contractors” more interesting and gives them a reason to exercise some restraint when using their powers.

But the compulsion is only part of the price. The real price is that becoming a “contractor” means losing your conscience. All contractors are sociopaths.

This helps the show in a few ways. For one, it means that we don’t feel too bad when they violently murder one another. They are all pretty nasty people. The protagonist, at least, seems to feel something for others, despite being an agent for a shadowy and as yet unnamed group who often call on him to kill people. He seemed concerned for the girl in the first season of the show, and in the episode I watched most recently, he wants to know where his sister is.

If he was completely without conscience or human feeling, presumably his sister would be as meaningless to him as all the other human beings he no longer cares about.

Oh, and there is a thus far completely unexplained talking cat. I am hoping it turns out to be a cat that became a “contractor” and its special power is sentience and speech.

Talking cats aside, this notion of characters without consciences fascinates me. It allows for an intriguingly pure sort of storytelling because characters without consciences act purely out of self-interest and hence they are like the players in a mafia drama, or a corporate intrigue novel.

And there is just something compelling about people who have something so important and vital missing. It makes the characters inherently unique, and interesting because their motives are in one sense impossible to relate to, and in another sense very easy to understand.

As a student of ethics, I find it really highlights the role of conscience in human ethics. All of ethics is based on the assumption that it matters what happens to human beings who are not you. Ethics presumes that you want to be a good person and are just looking for a guide via which you can do it.

A sociopath does not care. All they care about is their own self-interest. For a sociopath, ethics have no meaning. All that matters is what benefits them.

This, of course, makes them horrible human beings. They are the ultimate in evil. People who do the wrong things out of anger or greed we can at least understand, if not condone.

But someone without a conscience is just purely repellent. I completely understand why people, even very experienced psychologists who have treated all kinds of monsters, say things like “Until I met that man, I never knew what evil really was…”, or “Today I met the Devil.”

Even fairly unpleasant people have some kind of conscience. The leader of the KKK probably loves his wife and kids very much. The biggest monsters brought to justice at Nuremberg had families, friends, people who they loved and who loved them.

A sociopath has none of that. They feel no human connection whatsoever. To them, there is no difference between a person and a car. Both are potentially useful tools and nothing more.

Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Perhaps that is what draws me to the subject. I am inherently fascinated by things which are difficult to picture in my mind’

Another thought while watching the show : could a sociopath develop something like a sense of ethics given the tools they have left?

For instance, they could refrain from harming others not because they genuinely care about others, but because they find it an interesting and stimulating challenge to their self-control.

Or they might restrain themselves out of a strong dedication to the ideal of civilization. It would wound their self-image as a civilized, refined person to do something as base and animalistic as harm others without an extremely good cause.

And so forth and so on. Like all things about sociopaths, it would be a very chilly kind of ethics, but it might be enough of an approximation of real ethics to be indistinguishable from the real thing as far as anyone but the sociopath could tell.

And perhaps that is exactly what most of them do. They develop para-ethics in order to blend in with the rest of us, and we never know just how truly and deeply cold they are.

At least until they become Ayn Rand fans.

Spooky to think about, isn’t it?

Yup. We are gonna do another TED talk based blog entry.

What can I say? TED talks are one of the best things in the world right now, in my opinion. Smart people with great ideas giving fascinating, moving talks about really important topics.

To me, that is intellectual ambrosia, which is of course my favorite kind. And when something fills my mind with inspiration and ideas like a TED talk does, I just have to pass the overflow on to you.

I’m an intellectual, and that’s the sort of thing we do.

On with the show. Ladies and gents, one of the funniest and most adorable intellectuals I have ever heard, Emily Levine, talks comedy, life, and the trickster spirit.

She is my kind of person. Funny, questioning, always seeking perspective, wanting to see things from all the different points of view before she makes up her mind about something.

She seems like someone it would be a hoot to hang out with and talk about everything under the sun and have wonderfully wacky adventures with going where we aren’t supposed to go so we can see what we are not supposed to see.

And I love how she is clearly a person who loves on making connections between things and finding the delightful and often quite illuminating and humbling ironies of life that most people never see because they are too busy dealing with the objects of life to wonder about the spaces in between them.

I don’t like how she using the phrase ‘Newtonian science’ though. I know that feminist philosophy uses that phrase as a shorthand for all that is rational, mechanistic, logical, and well, male.

(And don’t get me started on that!)

But when I hear “Newtonian science” I want the person to be talking about the actual science Newton did. Perhaps that is excessively literal of me, I don’t know. But it’s pretty hard to argue with Newton’s science when we have already used it to put people on the Moon.

I mean, it’s not like Newton’s laws of motion and light are difficult to test.

And I completely do not get what she is talking about when she says objectivity has something to do with the object dominating the subject. That sounds like more hairy-brained feminist fuzzy philosophy to me.

All objectivity means is that you remain focused on the search for the truth, and that you are able to remove yourself from the equation in order to get at it. I would agree that some people use objectivity to deny their own subjectivity, and we can quibble about whether total objectivity is possible for any human being, but striving for objectivity is still a worthy pursuit.

I get the feeling that she and I could have some really interesting arguments. I’m sorry… discussions. She doesn’t do serious arguments.

I can respect that point of view, and even partially endorse it. Certainly arguments (outside of politics) are never more important than the relationships in our lives. The feminists and I agree on that. And an argument is, after all, just a game between two people, most of the time.

And a game is only a game if both people are still having fun, right?

But me, I was born to argue and I doubt I will ever change on that subject. The world of ideas and ethics are very real to me, and so what happens there is of extreme importance to me.

So I will always love a good argument, as long as everybody can stay calm and not make it personal. It might be nothing more than an intellectual arm-wrestling match, but I like it.

And when the other person says they don’t want to talk about it any more, you drop the matter instantly, even if you think they are only saying that because they are losing.

If you pursue it after that, you are the asshole. You’re the one who is forcing the other person to submit to your desire for blood and dominance.

Nobody has a moral obligation to let you “get” them. Back the hell off.

But what I really want to discuss is the whole notion of “the trickster” that she addresses in the second half of her talk. I recognize a lot of the trickster nature in myself, but that has always troubled me because the trickster is a confusing and confounding figure for someone who cares as much about ethics as I do.

Basically, the trickster always seems callous or cruel to me, and that is simply something I cannot accept. Kindness, benevolence, consideration, sensitivity, and understanding are all crucially important to me and form the core of my ethical being, and this creates a conflict between my ethics and my being able to accept the trickster spirit in myself.

So I suppose I would have to call myself a trickster who strives to only uses his powers for good. I have a chaotic streak underneath my desire for order and efficiency, and I am perfectly capable of playing tricks and laying traps and using my imagination to create illusions if it suits my purposes.

I believe there can definitely be such a thing as constructive chaos. Sometimes, you just have to shake things up to wake people up and make them see what is really going on. It’s why I loved carefully violating unspoken rules and undeclared assumptions.

What better way than that to make people aware of them? They know something is wrong, but they don’t know what, exactly. And out of that creative confusion comes enlightenment.

But unlike the followers of Eris, I cannot just sow the chaos for it’s own sake. I am too responsible for that. The trickster spirit often does not seem to know why it does what it does, but I must know, and understand, so I can maintain my ethical standards and preserve my ethical being.

Hence, when I used to play D&D, my characters were always Neutral Good.

Both chaos and order have their uses. I just want to make things better, whatever it takes.

I will not victimize people purely for my own amusement, which is definitely part of the dark side of the trickster spirit from what I can tell. That, and a dark rage at people for being stupid and not thinking that can lead to cynicism and even nihilism.

But I will use making them laugh as a way to make them think.

That’s still okay, right?