Like many fans, my favorite part of psycho-pass was shogo makishima, the villainous mastermind whose love of literature left me in awe. when he wasn’t serially killing (or killing grain), he was reading, chatting about books with his latest accomplice or even killing people with books.
Ranging from ancient political philosophy to English theater to pulp sci-fi, Psycho-Pass casts a wide net of references. While many bookish names get dropped in the story, these titles also have a ton of influence on the story and ideas of Psycho-Pass, as well as many other classic cyberpunk anime. So, whatchu talkin’ bout Shogo?
You are reading: Books mentioned in psycho pass
1984 – George Orwell
the dystopia to end all dystopias. if you’ve read anything on this list, it’s 1984. Makishima even carries it with him for a while, as if he is bound by the law of literary dystopia. (I think it’s because it matches his sweater).
1984 revolves around the idea that constant supervision can be internalized by individuals in a society and used as a tool of fascist control. The gist of is that you’ll behave if you think you’re being watched at all times, even when you aren’t, so nobody has to actually watch you. All that matters is that you believe it. This is true of Psycho-Pass as well. There, the terror comes from the fact that Sybil – like Orwell’s Big Brother – always has the authority to check your Crime Coefficient, so citizens are perpetually on trial. If they’re not criminals yet, they’re just latent criminals, and preventative measures will be taken to make sure they don’t enter the caste of second-class citizenship.
Bad things that will increase your crime quotient include but are not limited to: reading books, watching TV, playing video games, sleeping too little, sleeping too much, chewing with the right side of your mouth, enjoying jojo’s bizarre adventure, and existing 100 kilometers from a French post-structuralist text. everyone else is always looking at you, and you are looking at everyone else. everyone sells everyone else out, and the government only needs to enforce it to maintain the illusion of omnipotence. (This idea was made more famous in another text discussed in psycho-pass, michel foucault’s ultra heady discipline and punish. foucault argues that governments are getting wise with this phenomenon and using it as a control method.)
In the end, the 1984 protagonist winston smith loses when he is brainwashed by the government into loving the current regime. that’s also the ultimate goal of the sybil system: they eventually want people to happily accept being ruled by a network of disembodied brains. however, that will require a couple of generations of brainwashing and de-education first. A few years before the show started, the inspectors were educated in criminology, but with Akane’s tenure that was phased out. The enforcer Masaoka is old enough to have been schooled in history, but no one else knows anything about it. as in 1984, sybil is slowly rewriting human curiosity.
Johnny Mnemonic and Neuromancer – William Gibson
William Gibson is an American science fiction author. he’s the man who popularized cyberpunk, which is why he’s also the reason why people in futuristic tech dystopias always wear black leather and know karate. cyberpunk and anime have had a reciprocal relationship from the beginning. Here it comes full circle, as Makishima is pleased to learn that his hacker partner, Choegu-sung, is also a Gibson fan.
gibson’s first novel, neuromancer, won the 1985 nebula, philip k. dick and hugo awards. (that’s the sci-fi version of an ego). it’s hard to underestimate the novel’s importance in the story of disturbing body modders: without neuromancer, there would be no full recall, ghost in the shell, or the matrix, and definitely no psycho-pass . (remember when major kusanagi merged with the puppeteer and fled to the internet at the end of ghost in the shell? well, in the play of gibson, their names were wintermute and neuromancer.) the word “cyberspace” also comes from this book. gibson invented the idea of presenting the inside of a computer as a physical space, which psycho-pass explores during the spooky boogie case. As a Gibson superfan, Makishima even names a hacking show after one of his short stories. After so many philosophical treatises, it’s good to know that Makishima can kick back and enjoy a terrible keanu reeves movie.
See Also: The 5 Best CBEST Study Guide Prep Books [2022] | Conquer Your Exam
Titus Andronicus – William Shakespeare
Titus Andronicus has a reputation as Shakespeare’s most brutal work. In Psycho-Pass, Rikako Oryo – a serial killer who creates installation art out of dead bodies – has a fixation on a character from it, Lavinia. Lavinia is a princess who is raped as part of an elaborate scheme for revenge against her father. The perpetrators then cut off her tongue and hands so that she can’t identify them. The work luxuriates in Lavinia’s maimed image, displaying it in a number of setpieces. She eventually outs them by writing their names in the sand with a stick held in her mouth. However, Rikako finds this story empowering and erotic. She’s inspired by Lavinia’s expression of agency in spite of the handicaps imposed upon her by an overpowering male force. Rikako herself exists in a gilded cage, a private academy meant to keep girls “pure” (both in terms of virginity and Crime Coefficient) so that they can become proper elite housewives.
The problem is that Rikako expresses her artwork by chopping up her classmates and turning them into meat bouquets. Killing ladies isn’t exactly the most feminist thing in the world, but I guess that’s what happens when you hire Makishima as a teacher. (Gender studies is a notable gap in his reading list.)
cyberpunk is also constantly concerned with the deformed human figure, particularly the female one. think of the major (ghost in the shell) and lain iwakura (lain serial experiments) enshrined in cables. mardock scramble turns its cyborg protagonist into a woman, rune balott, while angela balzac from expelled from paradise wears heels so severe her feet must be deformed. It’s no coincidence that Sybil also decided to make her her female face.
the most dangerous game – richard connell
This is a short story about the hunt for the most dangerous prey: man. Basically, a crazy old hunter gets tired of killing animals and sets up his own preserve to hunt humans. This short story lives on as the idea behind The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, and Predator. The idea behind it – that an individual with enough resources and fortitude could begin treating people like animals in the most violent way – strikes a nerve. Hunting for sport is essentially refusing to empathize with another creature, marking the hunter as superior to their prey.
Traits from the short story’s old hunter, General Zaroff, seem to have been lifted directly for Psycho-Pass‘s Toyohisa Senguji. Like Zaroff, Senguji has a habit of humming classical music while he prepares his weapons. Senguji’s design is deliberately anachronistic. He lives in a European-style mansion and decorates his home with hunting trophies. He even wears an old-fashioned hunting suit. So he’s a bit of a poser. Look dude, you may be a 100+ year old cyborg, but that still means you were born in 2002. We had camo by then.
heart of darkness – joseph conrad
Do you know the saying “look into the abyss and the abyss looks back”? that’s this novel. (Okay, it’s Nietzsche, but we’ll get to that later.) Heart of Darkness is about a ship’s captain, Marlow, who travels down the Congo River to hunt down Colonel Kurtz, a rogue agent for an ivory trading company. Away from European civilization, Kurtz has established his own society where he is worshiped as a god. the story is framed as a journey away from civilization and towards all that was cast out of it, i.e. evil. In the end, Marlow concludes that evil and civilization are not separate. civilization can only frame itself as good when it maintains and expels evil. however, that makes society complicit in maintaining evil for its continued existence.
kogami is the core of makishima’s kurtz. Like Marlow, Kogami’s obsessive hunting brings him closer to his prey both inside and out. He has been seen reading Heart of Darkness at the midpoint of the show, just after he had his first encounter with the mastermind of the crime.
See Also: The Best Books of 2016: Novels – Paste
Throughout Psycho-Pass, Kogami’s soul is torn between Makishima and Akane. Makishima wants a kindred spirit in Kogami. He wants him to be a ruthless survivor who shares his love of literature and disdain for Sybil. By contrast, Akane values Kogami as a friend (or maybe more.) She wants him to help in her eventual ambition to reform Sybil from the inside out, but that doesn’t happen. By killing Makishima, Kogami grabs darkness by the balls. He ruins his chances of ever being reaccepted by the establishment, goes renegade, and parts from Akane forever. (Translation: until the movie.)
Beyond Good and Evil – Friedrich Nietzsche
oh, nietzsche. he is the grumpy old man of a discipline full of grumpy old men. he wrote a bunch of books, each one advocating a different flavor of the abolition of common morality. Beyond Good and Evil is where he addresses so-called “Judeo-Christian morality,” which he claims favors protecting the weak rather than allowing the strong to flourish. he argues that good and evil are entirely arbitrary concepts determined by the strong.
Makishima is in alignment with Nietzsche – he believes that Sibyl’s limitations weaken humanity because they prevent the development of exceptional people. Like Psycho-Pass‘s protagonist, Akane, he’s a humanist who objects to Sibyl on moral grounds. However, his issue with the system is that it impedes people, not that it fails to protect them. There are certainly non-murderful ways of living up to Nietzsche’s ideals, but they are extremely conducive to murder, at least on the surface. They say that, if you’re strong, you “reject the current moral reality and substitute your own,” so to speak.
Makishima is a very moral person, oddly enough, if you define morality as having strong inner convictions about what is right and what is wrong. his morality is just the opposite of what we associate with good and evil, because it does not give an inherent value to human life. he does believe that the strong should have the unlimited right to act upon the weak, for their own amusement or otherwise. but he is the strongest
The Parable of the Sower – the Bible
Finally, the conclusion – Makishima has learned the truth about the Sybil System and resolved to take it down once and for all. He plans to destroy Japan’s food supply in one fell swoop by messing with its agriculture, which has become one huge wheat monoculture. Before his final showdown with Kogami, Makishima sits around reading the bible, particularly one famous passage – the Parable of the Sower. The parable describes a man who sows seeds in various locations. While the majority die from falling on infertile ground, the bounty from those that survive far exceeds the initial supply. In the Bible, Jesus uses this to say that despite short term obstacles, his preaching will prevail through individuals of deep faith. In other words, the truth will prevail.
by the way, makishima also takes advantage of this moment to totally crush kogami even more than akane.
In his own twisted way, Makishima takes on a similar role to Jesus in the Parable of the Sower. Sure, Makishima is a terrible, destructive person, but he was a “messiah” set to shatter Sybil’s essential dysfunction. His actions awaken Akane, who becomes a force for positive change under Sybil’s administration. While Kogami’s ultimate moral standing is ambiguous, he progresses from a powerless extension of Sybil’s authority to someone who acts on his own beliefs. Makishima is a very bad man, but he’s not Psycho-Pass‘s symbol of true evil. That’s the Sybil System, which operates on the misguided belief that one group of people (psychopaths) are superior, capable of judging the rest, and ultimately penalizes people just for having emotions. Sybil isn’t the objective, omniscient arbitrator that it claims to be. It kills people unnecessarily and gently leads society towards a crisis of repression.
Perhaps the biggest lesson psycho-pass wants to impart is that sociopaths are not inhuman monsters. instead, they are a profoundly human phenomenon: people with mental deficiencies in empathy, like any other type of person with an unfair deficiency. makishima is human, he only becomes “inhuman” by a system that dehumanizes, and that’s the truth he wanted to leave behind.
Still doesn’t excuse all the murder, though.
See Also: 80 free lesbian books for you to read – Jae