As silly as it sounds, I've been viewing a lot of my life through the lens of an anime about magical girls.
Really, I know, it sounds silly, but hear me out.
Gen Urobuchi is a writer who likes to use the medium of anime to express his stories. He has worked with a few different animation studios on a very diverse set of topics. Because he uses anime, he's expected to follow certain really stupid conventions. One of the popular genres of the medium is the magical girl show. They're usually unrealistically bubbly, and downplay the immense amount of danger these girls would be in if they were literally fighting destructive, immaterial monsters that defy the laws of our dimension. For whatever reason, Gen thought that this particular genre needed a deconstruction, and so he made a show about magical girls that explores a lot of very interesting themes, trapping a viewer expecting something carefree in an intensely beautiful narrative of raw character development: Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
As it stands in production, Madoka went through a 12-episode television series and a movie sequel, titled "The Rebellion Story". I highly recommend the series to anybody who's intelligent, likes hefty literature, or appreciates fine art. Since most people in those categories won't have already seen it, I'll avoid spoiling the plot. What I want to do is simply to frame my own introspection in a way that those who've watched Madoka up to "The Rebellion Story" will recognize as familiar. To those unfamiliar with the narrative, it should make enough sense on its own.
One of the major conceits of the Madoka series is the dichotomy of despair and hope. It explores what people do when they're caught between these two emotional forces, and it paints a very pure picture of the two. It creates a mythology that revolves around these two concepts. It also explores an emotion that Gen wants to portray as something on a different spectrum, and which is altogether more powerful than the two: love. He considers love equitable to a certain kind of evil.
The way that everything played out, the decisions that the characters made as a matter of course--it all resonated with me in a very profound way.
I have a mission in life. It is an extension of my nature, what I value, what my priorities are. I have a purpose that I can't shake off. As teleological as it sounds, I don't believe there's any way I could live without pursuing my goal: to engineer a linguistic bridge between humans and nonhumans. I've been untangling this dream for a long time, trying to figure out how to do it. I've started to pursue it a few different times, in different ways, realizing each time the path I choose is somehow doomed to failure. Like Gen's Homura, I began to feel that all the work I was doing was useless. Instead of actually following my paths to completion (each of which would take decades), I used to spend a lot of time imagining how they would play out, analyzing as best I could all the factors that I could see contributing to my plans' success or failure. I made predictions about how my efforts would or wouldn't matter. I measured my hopes against my predictions, and ultimately concluded that the manner by which I intended to fulfill my dream was not something I had enough hope in.
Specifically, I wanted to learn enough about neuroscience that I could genetically engineer talking animals. But that dream just wasn't tangible and secure enough for me to sustain hope in it. There were too many things that could go wrong - such as it being made illegal to do the necessary research or clinical trials. It might have turned out to be the case that it required way more research than I could accomplish in one lifetime. I might die before I could make a lasting and change-making contribution to my mission. There is just too much that needed to be learned before we can engineer talking animals.
I lost hope in that dream. Or maybe I lost hope in my ability to fulfill my own dream. I fell into despair. I had sunk too far into despair to function. In the midst of a college career in which I was to prepare myself for a graduate program in neuroscience, I concluded that a career in neuroscience was insufficient. So my despair, my loss of hope, my disillusionment all threw me off track. This last year has been an academic tragedy for me.
I was utterly trapped in despair. The only feeling I knew was a deep-seated frustration submerged in an impenetrable ocean of depression.
I needed help. I sought out everything that could heal me. I found it in medicine. Fluoxetine was my salvation, my deus ex machina. After trying for so long to escape my despair alone, I was lifted out of it by the work of countless people trying to save those like me. I was saved by the medical researchers who spent their lives coming up with a means for people in my position to escape their despair. Like Madoka, there exist people whose work is to make people healthy, whose passion is to save those who are in need of salvation.
The analogy is imperfect, because the motivations of real-world researchers are perhaps overshadowed by the economic interests of companies who can profit off of medicine. There are economic forces at work to keep people mentally healthy. In that sense, Madoka was a more pure force than the one that rescued me. That doesn't, however, mean that I don't appreciate the opportunity that I've been given.
Like Homura, I've gained a unique perspective by facing incredible suffering. I've suffered because of things that matter to me, but I've never lost that love for the future I envision. I have never stopped loving those I strive to protect, those without the ability to save themselves. I understand that my dream may be a selfish sort of love, but it's an ambition that I've thought incredibly hard about, and agonized over for years. I've spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating the ethics of humanity's relationship to nonhumans. I've reconsidered my plans countless times. And ultimately, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: that I need to engineer a linguistic bridge between us and them.
Having escaped from despair, I am now at an interesting place. I am embroiled in the crucible of the emotions I remember having throughout the years. None of these powerful emotions have disappeared. The hope that I felt when I was young and naïve, the despair that I felt when overcome by predictions of failure, the anger I felt towards those who couldn't understand me--they all still resound throughout my soul, every day. I am continually conscious of these internal forces. I remember the ends to which each of these feelings has driven me.
Having these experiences as baggage feels very empowering. I feel like I have a better perspective on how I should live and work for the future. I am painfully aware of what it means to fail, but I'm inspired by the hope of a better, different world. So instead of following a dream blindly, I have stepped back and tried to understand myself more honestly. I have spent time studying how Power works and how people obtain it. I have thought long and hard about the many sociological and practical factors that will hinder and enhance my chances of engineering nonhuman language. I've come to the conclusion that I need not to devote my own life to solving this problem, but rather to set into motion a force that will reach this goal. I need to invent a movement that will gather millions of people under the banner of this cause. I have to explore every avenue that may give this movement the power it needs to reach critical mass, as well as those forces that will attempt to crush it.
What I have the most trouble seeing is my own role in all of these plans. I don't know where I fit in. But somehow, I'm now okay with that.
Because I'm not blinded by hope, I can think rationally about my endeavors. My ambitions require careful planning, which I probably wouldn't trust myself to do properly if I were childishly optimistic.
Because I'm not oppressed by my own despair, I actually have the capacity to act. Moreover, I can act rationally.
I've learned to channel my emotions, to pay attention to them, but not to be controlled by them. The best way to fulfill one's emotional needs is to think rationally about the course of action that will best satisfy them. It requires self-awareness, self-control, and patience. So I'm practicing the art of taking charge of my emotions, acting rationally in a way that does them justice.
There's yet one unanswered question: How do I feel now? How can I describe my state of being right now?
I suspect that's impossible. I have a wish that nobody understands. I have a feeling that is mine alone. I want to change the world, not help it progress. I will rewrite it forcefully. I have given immense thought to my desire, and I am completely confident about it. I will not allow anything to stop me. In this way, I entirely understand Homura's decision in "The Rebellion Story".
I feel impassioned and focused. I feel alive. I feel like the different emotions of my past are all alive and bubbling inside of me. I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a chaotic torrent of memories, between states of mind that are at odds with one another, amid inner conflict. But I've found the eye of the storm, and I intend to maintain that balance. I intend to stay focused. I've adopted the opinion that giving up my fight would entail a weakness that is unforgivable, and that I cannot be complicit in the cruelty of my species.
I tried for years to convince people that nonhumans deserve our respect and compassion. Nobody listened. I was ridiculed and dismissed. I despaired, but I despair no longer. Now I am simply flooded with conviction. Disregarding the criticism I've faced over the years for my beliefs, criticism that I carefully concluded to be without philosophical rigor or moral significance, I have criticized my own beliefs and honed them into something that I am entirely comfortable with, into a perspective that presents me no cognitive dissonance. I've thought about the ethics of our relationship with other species, and others have not. They rely on ideologies passed down to them by their ancestors, their elders, or their culture. I have no respect for the flimsy delusions that constitute mainstream cultural conceptions of cognition, language, consciousness, and morality.
Now my ambition is the only one that I am left caring about, and I'll do whatever it takes to realize my dream: a multi-species society. For millennia, my species has instigated acts of destruction that are far beyond anything perpetrated by any other. By failing to make amends, by failing to give due consideration to those that humanity has wronged, those individuals who would oppose me are complicit in a heinous ablation of the vital moral concept of consent. In return, I do not intend to get the world's consent. I intend to give a voice to those without a voice. I intend to give them the ability to dissent in a way that humans will be forced to recognize. I intend to bring about a world in which we can actually coexist in a meaningful way, where even more beings than humans can participate in the vast web of science, philosophy, and spirituality to which society has given rise. I envision community and love. I envision dialectics like none before.
I will always wish for a world in which we coexist richly with other species, in which we can communicate with them using language. I may not be able to build that bridge myself, as I currently am, but I will conceive the force that builds that bridge. I will demonstrate that love is a force to be reckoned with.
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