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?