Psycho-Pass - 14

"Sweet Poison"

"This isn't an ordinary crime. It's more like... something that shakes the very foundation." - Kougami

Makishima has declared war on the system, and it's so brutal that it's hard not to want to cringe. As is the case with Shinsekai Yori, the question being placed at the forefront of Psycho-Pass is a question to do with society and whether a system is worth protecting at all costs. I think the answer here, as it is in the other series, is also no.

No matter how much the proponents of the Sybil system can argue that the world has become safer because of Psycho-Passes, I think there's something horrid and disgusting about a world where people are so conditioned to think they're safe that they could be onlookers to a murder that visceral and hardly cloud their own Psycho-Passes. What's scariest isn't the fact that murderers are out there, unseen; that's always been a fact of human life. No, what's scariest is that people trust too much, that they have no sense of precaution, and that this is something that already exists in our own society.

Of course, a murder like that in a crowd of one of our high-tech societies would cause panic to some degree (or so I'd like to think), but that lack of sense of danger shows itself in subtler forms. Have you ever heard someone tell you that "nothing's going to happen" when you're invited to do something risky or dangerous? Have you ever thought to yourself that the statistics of whatever it is you're about to do will probably guarantee your safety, that people have done that activity hundreds of times without getting hurt? I might sound a little paranoid, but when you really think about it, this comes down to the same idea. The people in Psycho-Pass are so sure that nothing bad will ever happen to them, that murder is impossible, especially in the middle of a busy street, that they're able to walk away afterward without even calling the police. The implications of what that means about humans in this world is horrifying to think about, and when that woman was asked by a drone if she was stressed, even as the entire street stopped to watch her be brutally beaten to death, I'll admit I almost threw up. Of course, I don't have the strongest of nerves, but again, the psychopath doing the killing wasn't the one who made my blood freeze.

As it is, the reaction to the crime is exactly what Makishima was expecting, and in the production of these helmets, he's found a clever way to spread psychopaths, undetected, into the city, leaving behind both a challenge to the MWPSB and a message to the rest of the people who are "living idly" under Sybil. As screwed up as Makishima's methods are, and as much of a psychopath as he is himself, he continues to be one of the few people in this system, other than the Enforcers, who is making real sense about Sybil and what it means to live in quiet acceptance of such an oppressive society. He and his mysterious assistant are at the brink of creating total chaos for Akane and her team, and as the Dominators are proving less and less useful, they may just find themselves as helpless as the rest of the populace when he decides to engage them directly.