Review: PSYCHO-PASS

There are some stories that are made to enjoy casually, some that are made to make you feel happy & confident, some make you feel sad and make you cry. But there are some that I feel like are just made to raise questions. And Psycho Pass is definitely one of them.

From the moment you’re born, your actions are being monitored, to make sure you don’t do something that shouldn’t be done. When you grow up, you’ll be assessed based on your skills and abilities and you’ll be given a job according to your performance. Everyone’s mental state and all other things about them will be monitored constantly to prevent any behaviours that can be harmful to others, making the crime rate essentially none. And the system will ensure your safety and you’ll be treated immediately if there’s something wrong with your physical or mental state. And you just have to live your life doing the job you’re given and you can be rest assured that you’ve lived your life to the best of your abilities.

On paper, that sounds like a pretty great system for ensuring people’s well being and keeping a society running, it almost sounds like an utopia. But, there’s one thing that’s missing from your life, it’s you. You’ll be “given” a job, you can not choose one. You’ll be “treated” if you’re not well, no one will care for you. You’ll “live” your life, you may not enjoy it.

At that point can you even say that “you” lived your life. If you’ve lived your entire life following someone or something, irrespective of your will and desires, does your life even have any meaning at that point?

Psycho Pass is a story that gave me more questions than answers. What’s the point of life? Is it to be happy? Is it to make others happy? What’s the goal of forming a society? Is it to ensure a happy life for people? Or is it to control them and keep them safe? Where’s the line between people having free-will and people becoming senseless animals? Is it better to let people do what they like according to their will so that they’ll be happy or is it better to control their actions even if it means limiting their happiness?

This is the first time I’ve seen the idea of morality and free will so tightly integrated into the main plot of the story. It’s just fascinating how well the story blends these concepts with brilliant world design and makes me ponder my own existence.

The next best thing in this series is the villain. I’ve never seen a villain more charismatic than Shogo Makishima. Everything he says just feels right. This dude can’t be summarised with a simple word like “villain”, he is much more than that. Surely, the way he does things is a bit ethically questionable, but he’s right about the basics.

And his philosophy is so simple yet feels so right, I still think about his words when I’m not able to fall asleep. People should act on nothing but their own free will, whether it be good or evil, and they must face the consequences of those actions, otherwise they’re just mere puppets of other’s actions, they have no meaning for their lives and are as good as dead. Honestly, what a great ideology, pure from its very core, embracing the natural course of our minds. The concept that your life is only meaningful if you have control over it is just pure awesomeness. And yes, I am a proud simp of Makishima, if you can’t tell by now. He is kinda messed up but he’s right.

The story builds a prototype of a perfect system for society and breaks its own system, not to make a statement about how it’s impossible to create such a society, but how humans are just incapable of finding salvation even in a perfect world. It’s not that the world we have now is not good, it’s just we can’t fix the flaws of our human nature no matter how much we try, maybe those flaws are what make us human.