Here's an idea.
The Titans from "Attack on Titan" may or may not be evil.
All right.
Before we get too much further, this
will serve as your spoiler warning.
And also, we are talking principally
about the anime, and not the manga series,
so that's an important thing to keep in mind.
OK.
Let's get started.
"Attack on Titan" is the English name
of an anime series called "Shingeki no Kyojin," which
is based on a manga of the same name.
And it is bonkers.
The show focuses on three friends, Eren Yeager, Mikasa
Ackerman, and Armin Arlert, who live
in a city that is bordered and organized by three
concentric circular walls.
Why, you might ask, would someone
live in a city bordered by massive walls?
I'll tell you why, but you might not like it.
It's because of these, the Titans.
About 100 years ago, they just appeared and ate everybody,
most of humanity, actually.
Just gulp, gone, like it's their job,
hellbent on terrorizing and devouring
nearly helpless little old us.
So people went inside the walls.
Titan stayed outside.
Problem solved.
Until like minute five of Episode 1,
when a colossal Titan bursts through the outer wall
and begins a conflict that @Icemelter00 on Twitter
describes very accurately as a roller coaster
that only goes up.
The humans do their best, but it's usually not good enough.
A wave of Titans enter the city and do their usual smashing
and smooshing, gobbling and chewing.
And though they are creepily complacent-looking,
they are also undeniably driven by-- well,
it's unclear, actually.
Instinct, compulsion, craving, ideology?
Depending upon why the Titans hate humanity,
or I guess love it as snacks, it's
interesting to wonder whether or not they are evil.
Now, evil is certainly a word that
has suffered some semantic expansion.
Many things, including people, corporations, and hot sauces,
are referred to as evil.
Let's figure out where and if Titans fall on that continuum.
Classically, evil is badness multiplied.
It's an extreme expression of that which is undesirable.
And I think it's fair to say that the Titans are exactly
that.
Evil people do stuff that significantly
transgresses a common understanding of that
which is good.
You could call that common understanding a moral code.
For instance, stealing candy from a baby is bad and mean.
But stealing all of the candy and all of the babies
to work on your baby-stealing machine
fueled by stolen candy, that is evil.
Immanuel Kant said that it's not just the degree
to which someone performs unthinkably not nice actions
either.
The evil person does so willingly and with intent.
Radical evil, as Kant calls it, is
when someone ignores their categorical imperative to be
and do good, and instead makes actions based on their own
wants and desires.
But lo, certainly not all expressions of the undesirable
have to involve people.
Titans certainly aren't people.
Moral evil requires that someone transgress a maxim,
as Kant would say.
Natural evil is all of the badness
with none of the people.
Cancer is a natural evil.
Tornadoes and earthquakes are natural evils.
New York in the summer is a natural evil.
It's so hot!
And what about animals?
They're certainly agents of some kind,
but certainly don't possess a moral code
or any idea of right or wrong.
The question is then, where Titans
stand amidst all of these distinctions
other than over them, I guess?
Most important is determining if they are rational.
Seems like no.
Your run-of-the-mill Titan has the brains and motor skills
of a toddler.
They run around naked, banging into stuff
and putting things, mostly people,
in their wide, creepy mouths that give me the jibblies.
Jibbly, jibbly, jibbly.
It's hard to make a case for their moral agency.
Even the Titan shifters, humans who can turn into Titans,
have talked about or demonstrated
that even though they're in there somewhere,
they feel brainless and not totally in control.
It's almost like the Titan form itself creates
irresistible violent urges.
Assuming that Titans and shifters are similar,
this could reveal some interesting things
about the mysterious monsters, but also
provide some insight into their monstrous motivations.
Are those violent urges instinct or maxim?
For comparison, could we place the Titans alongside
say the Daleks?
Calling the Daleks evil is like calling grass green or Carlos
the scientist dreamy.
The Daleks are our perfect opposites.
They love hate and hate love.
They revel in destruction and suffer.
But the Daleks do it because they believe in it.
The Titans do it because-- well, it's unclear, actually.
Maybe they can't help themselves.
Maybe they're under the command of some external force.
Maybe they do it because of belief,
or maybe they do it because of that part of your brain
that causes you to burn ants with a magnifying glass
when you're a kid, not that I'm speaking from experience
or anything.
Who knows?
But what the Daleks and Titans do have in common
is a perfectly unquestioning, unfeeling, unempathetic nature.
They will stop at nothing in their quest
to exterminate, or chew and regurgitate as the case may be.
And that might actually be the most important part,
the stopping at nothing.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about something
that he called master-slave morality,
and how the slave will always view
that which immovably oppresses them as essentially evil.
He writes that whereas all noble morality grows out
of a triumphant saying of yes to itself,
slave morality says no on principle
to everything that is outside, other, non-self.
And while it might take some work
to qualify Titans or Daleks or Cylons
as noble, outsiders and oppressors
they most certainly are.
So we call them evil and distance ourselves from,
amplify our struggle with this force that really might have
nothing to do with morality.
For instance, it's really telling that "Attack on Titan"
really hits you over the head with the humanity
as bovine herd metaphor.
A lot could be said about how this influences
the perspective of all of the characters, Eren, Mikasa,
Armin, the city dwellers, all of the soldiers.
But what about the audience?
Carl Jung said we need to depict and see depictions of evil
to exorcise those feelings within ourselves.
So maybe, whether they actually are evil or not,
there is a kind of moral imperative
to see the Titans as evil and to subject ourselves
by proxy to the idea that we are trapped
in a circularly walled meat grinder, being toyed with,
possibly from the very beginning.
What do you guys think?
Should we consider the Titans evil?
Let us know in the comments.
And you know what the "Attack on Titan" theme song really
goes with?
Subscribing.
I wonder if history will forget or forgive me
for all of those times that I said LEGOs.
Lets see what you guys had to say about the two Teslas.
Revya Raksha points out that this episode was sorely
missing some ideas of consensus reality
and social constructionism.
Totally fair point.
Revisit, maybe not.
But yes, definitely related.
So if you're interested in that stuff,
get some Google fu going.
To Quesly1, I think that there are probably at least 10 David
Bowies.
mfowler1992 says that the creation of history
is not about unveiling this portrait,
but about constructing one based upon the ideology of the people
who are doing the reporting or who
might be using that history.
And then Lucas Lodovico actually says that he would rather
embrace the kind of complex portrait part of things
and get the full picture.
So this is a really interesting sort of dual uses of history,
I guess.
Khimi Malaka'jin says that the characteristics of Tesla that
we said did not make it into the popular portrait might have
actually made it into a lot of people's ideas of what Tesla
is, and says that they don't really compare to maybe some
other famous people's shortcomings,
though at no point did we ever want to suggest that Tesla is
not someone who should be celebrated.
He certainly should be.
Alex Norman points out that some of our arguments
might have been misleading, especially the physics
skepticism idea, which came much later in Tesla's life,
and also the fact that everybody in the intellectual elite
around the time that he was alive was a eugenicist.
Nathan Hawks has a great response to this.
Patrick Davison raises a really interesting question about
the story of Tesla and asks if there is evidence as to why he
was left out of history, or why we think he was left out
of history if he wasn't.
That's a very good question.
I don't really know.
If anyone has any ideas or input,
let us know in the comments.
To Lon3Wolf65, yes, someday I promise
we will do an episode on furries.
I'm actually talking in general with a couple
furs about what the episode could be about.
It might be a little while, but yes, definitely sometime.
Sandro Bresba leaves a really interesting comment
comparing the history of Tesla to hagiographies
or hey-geo-graphies.
I've never actually said this word out loud,
so I don't know how it's said.
But this is a great comment.
You should check it out.
To Phoolz Gold and anyone else who saw me on a Think Geek
newsletter, that wasn't me.
That's just a guy who looks a lot like me,
and I want to meet him.
Maybe we're brothers.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these historical figures.
And the tweet of the week comes from @phampants,
who points us towards an article about the Japanese depiction
of themselves in anime and manga.
Very interesting.
[MUSIC PLAYING]