Years race on with time; resolve ebbs with the days.
This essay attempts to reconstruct the transformation of Sakurada’s political framework through a reading of the anime Sagrada Reset. In the series, Sakurada is a small city in Japan. Yet the Japanese authorities are absent throughout—not only at the level of the signified, but also at that of the signifier. This essay therefore treats Sakurada as a fictional autonomous polity.
Political philosophy often begins its constructions with the original human condition. This is not because there actually was a historical age before society existed (Hobbes did, to a considerable extent, believe this, but the view has long since been abandoned in contemporary thought). More importantly, political philosophy rests on human nature. One way to clarify that nature is to consider human beings apart from society, examining the individual in ethical terms. Only then can we answer how, under ideal conditions, political society ought to be established, and decide whether to use this as a standard for judging the existing order. An analysis of the human being in this original condition is thus an appropriate starting point for this essay.
I. The Supreme Good Falls into the Mortal World
Hobbes was the first explicitly to make the state of nature the starting point of an argument in political philosophy. But we can find its roots in Christianity. In Thomas Aquinas’s understanding, original human nature should be considered in two ways: first, the innocent nature of Adam and Eve in Eden; second, humanity’s corrupted nature after eating the forbidden fruit and being expelled from paradise.
A human being in the first of these original conditions could not exist in this world. Yet we can indeed find an example in this anime: Misora Haruki.
“What is sad?”
“Everything. It’s sad that someone must die one day. It’s sad that everything will eventually fall apart. These laws we take for granted are all sad.
Since everything ends in sadness, it makes no difference what you choose.”
All life in Eden exists under God’s glory. Provided they obey God, people and things need only rely on their God-given endowments to attain the good appropriate to their nature. Without the Fall, there can be no question of redemption. In other words, human beings humbly give themselves wholly to an absolute Other, hoping to realize themselves within that Other. But Misora Haruki, living in this world, encounters finite things, not an infinite God; nor does a godless world offer eternal redemption. Unfortunately, then, as the embodiment of the supreme good, her nature still unfallen, she has lost the possibility of realizing herself. All she can do is feel boundless sorrow for others. For her, since she cannot help other beings attain eternal salvation, no finite action has any meaning. To avoid doing nothing, she devises rules for action. But the rules have no meaning either.
Political society clearly cannot begin here. Even according to Aquinas, human society was established only after the expulsion from Eden. The serpent leads Eve to eat the forbidden fruit; Kei Asai helps Misora Haruki become an ordinary, less pure person. In both cases, an external influence seems to bring about the transformation. Read the two stories as allegories, however, and the key turns out to be the awakening of human self-consciousness.
“I saw Kei briefly this morning. When he left, I said, ‘Off you go, then.’
Not ‘Goodbye’ or ‘See you later,’ but ‘Off you go.’
It was as though I were asserting my right of possession over him, reminding him that coming back to me was a matter of course. I’ve become so selfish lately.”
As this passage from episode 18 reveals, the first attribute of awakened consciousness is selfishness. Misora Haruki no longer directs her consciousness indiscriminately toward everything in the external world, but turns it toward herself. She is no longer a vacuum attached to the external world, but a subject capable of realizing herself through consciousness’s return to itself. Hobbes exemplifies a common misconception: human beings in the state of nature are imagined “as if but even now sprung out of the earth … (like Mushromes).”1 They have no emotional ties to one another; there can be no family or friends as we ordinarily understand them in the state of nature—it is a condition of solitude. Such isolated subjects fall into the war of all against all in pursuit of their rights, and then, for the sake of self-preservation, have no choice but to establish an absolutely despotic sovereign.
Yet at least within the natural-law tradition, such isolated human beings have never existed. Even in the original condition, people enter the world through families. Just as Misora Haruki’s consciousness remains directed toward Kei Asai after her transformation, the Stoics take οἰκείωσις (oikeiōsis)2 as the fundamental starting point of human conduct. People certainly love themselves most, but they also extend their concern in concentric circles: to those close to them, to others, and ultimately to the whole community. For Grotius, this necessary human sociability is sufficient to serve as the foundation of natural law.
Of course, merely speaking of concern for others is still not enough. Otherwise, we encounter the same problem that confronts Misora Haruki as the supreme good: ultimate salvation does not exist, and so no action is possible. The key here is to acknowledge human finitude and construct values on that basis.
In short, the pursuit of transcendent, absolute values seems entirely natural. Yet as finite beings, we should pay greater attention to the foundation of our inquiry into the world: finite beings themselves. From Misora Haruki’s earlier perspective, the opposition between finite beings and the world is obvious: against the world’s endless ages, each individual exists for only a brief instant. What this perspective sees is clear, but the point from which it looks is less so. Once we clarify that starting point, it is not hard to see that the external world does not stand opposed to finite beings. Rather, it is precisely through their participation that the process by which things are concealed and disclosed becomes intelligible. The horizon of temporality, too, is given by death: time manifests itself as we deal with the world and project our own futures. Concealment and unconcealment form a tension whose terms belong together. The world operates through this ceaseless process of concealment and unconcealment, and finite beings belong to it. If we try forcibly to eliminate the concealment of things, we will only forget the finitude and richness of both ourselves and the world, ending up with an empty, formalized categorical imperative. Our only course is to answer the call of conscience within our finite capacities (at least for Aquinas, good and evil are not things awaiting clarification, but self-evident concepts arising from within; moral philosophy should build upon them rather than investigate their foundations). Following the call of conscience, then, we arrive at the figure Kei Asai calls the hypocrite—and Kei himself is an exemplar.
II. The Bureau’s Former Mode of Governance
As a modern city, Sakurada can clearly guarantee the basic resources its residents need for normal life: material goods, security, prospects for future development, and a degree of negative liberty. At one level, these depend on the discipline that schools, hospitals, and prisons impose on everyone. (Occasionally, some people refuse discipline. If they choose to submit to it again, that is naturally the best outcome for everyone—think of episodes 3 and 4.) This discipline operates at the micro level. Although the Bureau monopolizes legitimate violence, this disciplinary power is exercised by everyone in society, potentially including those who resist it. At another level, gathering statistics on life expectancy, birth rates, death rates, the distribution of property across society, and so forth—and regulating these through public policy—provides another basic guarantee of the city’s normal functioning.
With these twin guarantees, Sakurada is orderly, stable, and peaceful—at least on the surface. The existence of superpowers, however, introduces a systemic risk. Or rather, human societies already face all sorts of systemic risks, and superpowers can be understood as a metaphor for them. They allow a twenty-four-episode anime to present, in simplified form, problems common to human societies.
As a bureaucracy, the Bureau is intensely averse to risky events as such. It combines knowledge and power to govern through the operation of power at the micro level. To this end, it readily relinquishes a substantial share of its power, permitting civil society to govern itself through shared norms. Governance thus comes to focus on Sakurada society as a whole. What it seeks to serve, keep secure, and keep functioning is the whole of society, not the individual. Episode 2 offers a simple but crucial depiction of the failings this system exposes when confronted with risk.
“The power to create life has to be kept secret. So the Bureau chose a method that required sacrificing only one little girl, giving priority to the happiness of more people. That’s how the Bureau works.”
Its response to risk is to open up what Agamben calls a state of exception. The Bureau carves out a sphere of exception within Sakurada. Individuals placed in this state no longer enjoy the protection of law or morality: each is expelled from the space in which they ought to be protected and reduced to bare life. Specifically, in episode 2, the Bureau seeks to conceal a threatening power. Faced with the suffering of Mari Kurakawa and her mother, it chooses the crudest and simplest solution: advising the mother to leave Sakurada. Mari’s own feelings are not taken seriously. She becomes bare life, no longer sheltered by morality.
We have now broadly outlined the Bureau’s mode of governance in the era of the nameless system. Its basic logic, we can see, is to keep risk within certain bounds; the misfortunes of a few are of no consequence to the whole. For the bureaucracy, there is no comprehensive moral philosophy of the good: the good itself has left the stage entirely. All that matters is the practical aim of ensuring the stable continuation of society and of the Bureau as the agent of power. After the Witch finally meets her death, Masamune Urachi’s approach—abolishing superpowers altogether—is in fact a continuation of this logic of governance. We might focus on his personal understanding of “the good”: everyone should attain happiness through their own efforts rather than pin their hopes on superpowers. Yet his approach still accords with the depoliticized Bureau’s consistent line of thought. Put another way, the Bureau is the practical product of these ideas: resolving the risks that superpowers bring to human society, and replacing the pursuit of “miracles” and “the good” with instrumental rationality.
III. Constructing the Political Order That Ought to Exist
One common vision of the political order that ought to exist is a community in which every free, equal, rational citizen accepts the doctrine of “the priority of the right over the good.” In other words, the fundamental principles of justice in political life must be acceptable in light of each reasonable citizen’s understanding of what is reasonable. (Such principles necessarily presuppose no comprehensive conception of the good; they are merely second-order political principles regulating conceptions of the good.) Each citizen’s understanding of what is reasonable has equal standing. We cannot reject B’s value orientation on the grounds that “A’s value orientation is better than B’s.” Rather, in offering a public justification, we must give A’s and B’s value orientations equal consideration.
But the anime subjects this liberal formulation to rigorous interrogation. The exercise of power in the political sphere necessarily involves coercion. As discussed in the second section, contemporary urban governance operates, on the one hand, through the warm, endlessly attentive discipline of “normalizing” power; on the other, through violence against particular individuals, unleashed by a state of exception. Once the Bureau makes a decision, people must obey it and endure whatever violence may follow. Liberal principles of justice cannot eliminate this despotic power over individuals, because sovereignty itself is constituted by the power to suspend the administration of justice. The normal order establishes itself through the state of exception (unless sovereignty is wholly beyond the possibility of war and subversion and no longer needs to monopolize violence to secure ordinary governance—but such a form of sovereignty exists neither in the modern world nor in Sakurada, which must confront the risks posed by superpowers).
Even setting this objection aside, under normal conditions free of arbitrary rule, the proposed “political order that ought to exist” still faces enormous difficulties. Take episodes 3 and 4: a particular second-order principle of justice—that the Bureau must not use superpowers to interfere with the normal social order—clearly cannot persuade Yōka Murase. The reason is obvious. Decisions in the political sphere bear on all the facts of an individual’s life, not merely matters within a particular sphere. I can acknowledge the value of certain works of art while not liking them at all. But Yōka Murase cannot accept her brother’s death just like that. For him, it is the end of every possibility in this world; for her, it is a profound transformation of her lifeworld. Under the Bureau’s decision, Yōka can take no action to undo what has happened. Naturally, then, her only recourse is to reject the Bureau entirely on the basis of a comprehensive conception of the good. Thus, in the political sphere, there is no possibility of securing people’s actual consent without appealing to comprehensive conceptions of the good.
Of course, a liberal can offer a different defense: what we seek is not people’s actual consent, but the consent they ought to give in the original position. The most characteristic contemporary version of this liberalism derives two principles from the original position: equal liberty; and fair equality of opportunity together with the difference principle governing distribution. The problem, however, is that establishing these two principles presupposes too many contemporary views. People hundreds or thousands of years ago understood concepts such as liberty and fairness in entirely different ways from us.
In fact, we have already clarified in the first section how human beings behave in their original condition.3 Perhaps we can indeed establish normative political principles—or natural law—on the basis of mutual concern. We may even say that such a natural law continues to exist in times of war; in other words, it may be possible to construct a community as it ought to be, without a state of exception. But the point is precisely that this construction proceeds from a particular understanding of value, or “the good.” A community constructed in this way requires that, at a minimum, everyone within it be saved.
“I want to manage superpowers, join the Bureau, gain all kinds of authority, and remake the system of administration itself to fit my ideal.”
“What is your ideal?”
“To fight every misfortune. If possible, I want to eliminate them all.”
As for whether this ideal will ultimately produce an all-powerful ruler, and thereby create the quintessential bureaucratic machine—who knows?
