Romantic Otaku Delusion
“You may as well know, also that every great leader, from the dawn of civilization down to the present, was a dreamer. Christianity is the greatest potential power in the world today, because its founder was an intense dreamer who had the vision and the imagination to see realities in their mental and spiritual form before they had been transmuted into physical form.” – Chapter 2, Desire.
I just finished watching Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider.
It’s about a bunch of middle-aged people who can defeat monsters by simply believing they are superheroes. Actually, it’s much more specific than that, but I don’t want to disrespect true Kamen Rider fans by explaining their franchise badly. The important point is that it’s another anime which explicitly presents consciousness as having mastery over matter. Now obviously, this is a comedy, but the characters are also earnest and intense and lacking in common sense because of their obsession, so I count this as an otaku anime, though I suppose the right term is chuunibyou.
Significantly, the characters are adults because, as people get older, they have less time and their thoughts get clouded by their physical decline. An otaku, at his best, is someone who refuses to give up that childhood optimism.
Chapter 3: Faith
“To make this “deceit” more realistic, conduct yourself just as you would if you were ALREADY IN POSESSION OF THE MATERIAL THING WHICH YOU ARE DEMANDING when you call upon your subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind will transmute into its physical equivalent, by the most direct and practical media available, any order which is given to it in a state of BELIEF, or FAITH, that the order will be carried out.”
This quote really does sound like chuunibyou behaviour. There are studies which show that self-affirmation and autosuggestion work and others that don’t, but I think the problem with all this psychological research is that it’s all based on averages, so I don’t think it’s useful as much as it would be if you could run the tests on yourself, because really the only thing which matters to you is whether this works for you. If psychiatrists could provide these tests to individuals, and people could see their own EEG results and such when they try different methods, then I think they would be a lot more convinced and amenable to continuing the treatment.
However, since there is no way to acquire this equipment and data on an individual level, except by doing primitive self-reporting surveys, the only way to gauge the effectiveness of self-affirmation/auto-suggestion is to try to do them with as much belief as possible.
The reason why faith is necessary is that otherwise it will not be translated into actions. True, you might believe that by just changing your behaviour, you can change yourself or worse yet, someone, but if you are forcing yourself with motivation to do something you don’t really believe in and so you don’t really want to do, then you will give up.
Perhaps you may not believe all your self-affirmations and auto-suggestions, but if at least you can remember them through repetition, then you can tweak them until you reach something positive which you can approximately believe which you can achieve.
In short, rather than changing your behaviour first and expecting your self-image to follow, you should try to change your beliefs through self-affirmations and auto-affirmations. The greatest evidence for the effectiveness of this is religion; what is prayer if not autosuggestion? The only difference is that your self-affirmations and auto-suggestion should come from your beliefs. You should be a one-man church. I am not saying you can’t borrow the words and beliefs of others, and have to be this mythical Übermensch who can birth new values; in fact, feel free to steal freely and discard liberally when it comes to beliefs in general. However, remember that there needs to be a good reason why you jump from one identity to the next, because otherwise, you are just running away from your beliefs before they bear any fruit. Of course, there will come a day when you have to admit new values, and determining when is hard, but there is no easy way out. You need to be able to tolerate uncertainty, in other words, to have the courage to have certainty in your optimistic beliefs, while knowing that you will face tragedies.
Just finished watching season 1 of Yuusha Party wo Oidasareta Kiyoubinbou. The protagonist’s story is about a member of the hero’s party getting kicked out for being too weak. A few other things are going on in the story behind this generic premise, but this isn’t a review blog, so I will hold off on recommending whether it is worth watching. The protagonist is definitely a “hero,” by which I mean that he fits the moral ideal of our era. He is kind, courageous, and self-sacrificing towards his comrades. I think that there are both valid and invalid reasons for rejecting this ideal, which gets imprinted on many young otaku’s minds.
Rejecting heroic standards as unrealistic just because they are presented in fiction is pathetic, but on the other hand, questioning for whose benefit and at whose expense these ideals are set up is not necessarily wrong, as long as it’s not an excuse to give in to despair. Just because these ideals are set up as exemplary by society, it probably means the heroic exists for society’s benefit and at your expense; that doesn’t mean you should choose the hopelessness of a disappointed idealist who pretends to be an enlightened egoist.
“I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure unless built upon truth and justice. Therefore, I will engage in no transaction that does not benefit all whom I affects. I will succeed by attracting to myself the forces I wish to use, and the cooperation of other people. I will induce others to serve me because of my willingness to serve others. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness and cynicism by developing love for all humanity because I know that a negative attitude towards others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me, because I will believe in them, and myself.” – Think and Grow Rich, Chapter 3: Faith.
Some allege that Napoleon Hill’s life was full of scamming, and I guess the implication is that there is no such thing as a “heroic capitalism” as a path of success for most people, but maybe it is wrong to look at it through a purely political lens rather than a general truth. In other words, Homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man.
It is certainly tempting to see things this way when at the social hierarchy’s bottom, whereas in the eyes of someone with social (not necessarily economic) privilege, it might be easier to believe that “homo, sacra res homini” (man, an object of reverence in the eyes of man).
The question really is whether these views become self-fulfilling prophecies. That is to say, believing that man is a wolf to man is a poverty mindset; that is, a mindset caused by poverty, but also which causes poverty.
If so, then while being sceptical that these “heroes” presented to us as created to benefit the social order at otaku’s expense, we must not abandon them as unrealistic and idealistic, but must have faith in the heroism presented in otaku works of fiction. Or in other words: Scepticism (Thesis) + Faith (Anti-thesis) = Romantic Otaku Delusion (Synthesis).
