[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by karice67

I disagree with your premise that Sibyl is as harsh a dictatorship as you (and a few others) are presenting, so I'm not sure if we can debate this detail.

Perhaps it would be good to examine why we differ over how harsh a dictatorship Sibyl is.

Here is what I see with Sibyl: It has the power to institutionalize kids the age of five, and drastically limit the life choices of such kids. It has the ability to jail people indefinitely, for no specific crime (and such jailing appears to be exclusively of the solitary confinement type). Sibyl obviously has no respect for basic human rights.

Solitary confinement, outside of rest/sleeping hours, is an exceptionally cruel punishment. This is why prisons in most (all?) democratic countries at least allow their inmates to mix with one another during daytime. Humans are social creatures by nature. Cutting us completely off from socializing with others is psychologically harmful.

So of course these latent criminals aren't getting better. If anything, I'd expect them to get worst.

But I'm not surprised that this is the situation in Sibyl Japan given what Sibyl itself is like. Sibyl looks down on empathy, and generally lacks it. So there's certain emotional truths that I don't think Sibyl is getting, and that is causing the situation to be far worse for these latent criminals than it has to be.

The work that I'm referring to is the notion of changing the value that people place in Sibyl's judgement about what is right and wrong, such that they can stop relying on it and return to making judgements by themselves. The first half of the show clearly demonstrated that most people in society place a lot of trust in Sibyl's judgements, to the extent that it is expected that once a PP reading passes a certain point, it can never return. Is it by propaganda that this belief - which Akane was able to prove is a mistaken one -

How did Akane prove this was a mistaken belief?

has come to pervade the society? Or is it just by rumour? Or was it because people started to believe in it?

Or is it because it's true? How do you know it's not true that it really is extremely unlikely for people to come back from a poor PP reading once it passes a certain point?

You know, a person can get psychologically scarred to the point that full recovery may be impossible. In other words, they may never be like a person who was never psychologically scarred in the first place.

But let's just say, for argument's sake, that most people are able to recuperate from their PP reading going into latent criminal levels. If so, don't you think there are better ways to go about recuperating such people then locking them up in solitary confinement? If Akane's goal is to show that PP readings are more fluid (and hence recoverable) than people believe, then that should just give her even more reason to try to negotiate for better treatment of latent criminals.

Here is one of the major points where our opinions differ. Your contention is that the only way to overcome this problem is to destroy Sibyl.

That's not necessarily my contention. But given the lack of any evidence to the contrary, it is my default position. We simply do not have any evidence that Sibyl can be moderated from within.

My contention is that it may also be possible to do that from within the system, provided that this belief is changed first. Akane has started doing this within the CID itself - Kougami and Yayoi, and arguably even Gino and his father are proof of that.

I really don't see how Akane has done anything to change this belief when it comes to these four characters. Kougami, Yayoi, and Tomomi never recuperated from being latent criminals (to the best of our knowledge). Gino worsened into latent criminality, and there's no sign of him recovering from it.

Her work with the victim from her first case is another example of it,

One example of a person recuperating from a bad PP reading is not much to go on. It really isn't. She could be a rare outlier of a certain sort just like Makishima is.

I disagree, even if only because of what Sibyl says it hopes for: to be able to reveal the true nature of the system to the people and still have them choose its governance.

Sibyl's hopes for the future doesn't change what's true right now. Sibyl's secrecy does make it currently impossible for people in Japanese society to truly choose the rules and system of order that they want to follow. They're not making informed choices.

The lack of societal change, of the potential of people to evolve, that is implied by this statement is something I disagree with.

There is no such implication in the statement of "Emotion based on truth has more legitimacy to it than logic based on lies."

Are you saying that emotions prevent societal change? If so, that's frankly pure nonsense. Emotions often help fuel societal change. Emotions played a huge role in the work that Martin Luther King Jr. did.

And isn't it better if social change is rooted in truth rather than rooted in lies?

I definitely stand by this statement - Emotion based on truth has more legitimacy to it than logic based on lies.

If you disagree with the statement, then address it directly. Don't read bizarre implications into it that aren't really there.

*snip democratic peace bit*

Thank you for elaborating. Nonetheless, it has no bearing on my main point about the key difference about dealing with a bad government in a democracy as opposed to dealing with a bad totalitarian government.

No matter how liberal or illiberal a democracy is, you can still vote to change the government once every few years.

As other people have already pointed out, she was not in a position to do that.

Sure she was in such position. Sibyl wants to win her over, and Sibyl made that abundantly clear. That gives Akane at least one card she can play.

"If you want to win me over, then there's a suggestion that I'd like you to consider, and here it is..."

To clarify my point, think of Sibyl as a man courting a woman. That woman is Akane. A woman being courted by a man has the ability to wield some influence over that man. She can let it be known, or subtly imply, that if the man does certain things for her that his likelihood of successfully courting her goes up.

Akane has the ability to wield this sort of influence over Sibyl. There's nothing at all "completely unbelievable" about that ability. But she doesn't appear to be even trying to use it.

One thing I'm seeing in this sub-forum is not so much a difference in opinion about what to do with an oppressive government, but rather a difference in opinion about putting trust in people.

Even if you put massive trust in people, those people still need to know the truth in order to make informed decisions.