The culture war of Serial Experiments Lain
"They won't understand this. I don't want them to understand this. This work is based on the sensitivities and values of the Japanese people. America is different from Japan. This work itself is a sort of culture war against American culture and the American sense of values we adopted after WWII. So I want american people to react to this work" - Yasuyuki Ueda, 1999 Animerica interview
...
Serial experiments Lain is all about transcendence to a higher state. The earth wants to transcend, Eiri wants to transcend, the knights believe in a transcendence, and Lain Iwakura finally transcends to a higher spiritual state. Not to mention all the inferred topics such as transhumanism, posthumanism, gnosticism, buddhism etc. It's all about transcendence, about ascension.
But while Lain iwakura transcends through a spiritual evolution of the self, Eiri exmplifies this transcendence as a product of "freedom": Information should be free, humanity must be free from their body state and the eventual collective evolution of society on a large scale.
I used to think Eiri was just an evil "mad scientist" trope, but subsequent rewatches of the series make me think that Eiri's philosophy, his larger goals of making humanity a higher species and him being their rightful god isn't as simple or straightforward as I used to think it was.
Eiri's ideas of "information being free" is a direct quote of the hacker ethic from back in the 1990's, except for man to become god it must be the information locked within people that must be freed. I believe that in a subtle manner, the show uses Masami Eiri as a means to criticize American ideals.
Masami Eiri is literally "beast wih red cheeks", a tie into both Lain's gnostic influences as well Nietzche, but I want to talk more about this in relation to how Francis Fukuyama directly uses this idea of the beast with red cheeks in his interpretation of the "End of History" , a term directly influenced by Hegel's idea of the Absolute. This essay deals with it better.
But to summarize, Man is an animal motivated by the desire to not only be recognized by others, but to be recognized as being better than others and it is this struggle that essentially drives the course of history: Megalythymia or the struggle for recognition as a superior form.
A few quotes from Fukuyama's book "The end of history and the last man" (especially the seventh chapter The struggle for recognition) might put this into perspective:
"Nietzsche believed that no true human excellence, greatness, or nobility was possible except in aristocratic societies. In other words, true freedom or creativity could arise only out of megalothymia, that is, the desire to be recognized as better than others. Even if people were born equal, they would never push themselves to their own limits if they simply wanted to be like everyone else.
For the desire to be recognized as superior to others is necessary if one is to be superior to oneself. This desire is not merely the basis of conquest and imperialism, it is also the precondition for the creation of anything else worth having in life, whether great symphonies, paintings, novels, ethical codes, or political systems. Nietzsche pointed out that any form of real excellence must initially arise out of discontent, a division of the self against itself and ultimately a war against the self with all the suffering that entails: "one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star."
Good health and self-satisfaction are liabilities. Thymos is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice, that tries to prove that the self is something better and higher than a fearful, needy, instinctual, physically determined animal. Not all men feel this pull, but for those who do, thymos cannot be satisfied by the knowledge that they are merely equal in worth to all other human beings."
"For Hegel, freedom was not just a psychological phenomenon, but the essence of what was distinctively human. In this sense, freedom and nature are diametrically opposed. Freedom does not mean the freedom to live in nature or according to nature; rather, freedom begins only where nature ends. Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself. The emblematic starting point for this process of self-creation is the struggle to the death for pure prestige."
"The possibility that liberal society does not represent the simultaneous satisfaction of desire and thymos but instead opens up a grave disjuncture between them is raised by critics on both the Left and the Right. The attack from the Left would maintain that the promise of universal, reciprocal recognition remains essentially unfulfilled in liberal societies, for the reasons just indicated: economic inequality brought about by capitalism ipso facto implies unequal recognition. The attack from the Right would argue that the problem with liberal society is not the inadequate universality of recognition, but the goal of equal recognition itself. The latter is problematic because human beings are inherently unequal; to treat them as equal is not to affirm but to deny their humanity."
- Francis Fukuyama, "The end of history and the last man"
Fukuyama is politically an American freedom loving liberal ( the original sense of the term being someone who believes in the freedom of the individual over the rule of the government, vs American politics contorting it into some weird synonym for a leftist), which makes SEL use Eiri as a critique of American individuality and the horrendous cultural wound it inflicted upon Japanese society.
To start off, Eastern and Western societies are essentially very different, with Marshall mcluhan claiming that the western hemisphere is very focused on individual actions, versus an eastern society that lays more focus on communal spirit. Differences in these attitudes play out in the structure of these societies, where on one hand American justice systems blame criminals as individuals wholly responsible for their situation instead of the the flawed socioeconomic systems that create them , while Japan becomes a hivemind society that is extremely insular to the point of non-acceptance of any outsiders.
It also plays out in the structure of both hemisphere's philosophies. Western theories of perception stemming from the ideas of Locke, Descartes, Kant and Husserl support a generally individualist perception of the world, saying that all things we perceive are filtered through our sense and therefore we cannot "know" them as they are. However, Eastern and Buddhist philosophy both espouse that cause-effect relations can most definitely be deduced from our senses, since in eastern ideas of the world there is no distinction between me and things outside me.
The "post-war" values that Ueda seems to imply he is showcasing through Lain is a product of Japan being a postwar country. Japan after their heavy loss in the second world war was rebuilt from the ground up through rapid technological advances and heavy American funding , but despite their master-slave relationship with America that persists even today, Japanese attitudes to technology highly differ from their American counterparts. These differences created a unique culture post the atomic bombing, leading to a society that rapidly adopted technology and its implementation.
Due to Japan being an ancient society rapidly brought up to a modern age, a crisis of conflict between older and newer values was created, leading to a new form of Japanese society that adopted values that simply created a degree of unprecedented distance between people. Such themes and values are represented in anime that were originally products by japan for japan, such as Evangelion, Fullmetal alchemist 2003 and Akira's ideas of technology's influence on japan, and how the connection between people is slowly severed with age and time. A large part of this isolation is due to Japan's economic position, a direct consequence of rapid post WW2 industrialization.
In addition, the vast majority of current day Hikkimori, individuals who have lost themselves to a fantasy culture are a direct product of these American values, when the subsequent economic collapse led to a period called the Lost decades. Japanese conformism is a product of Confucius and his teachings seeping into much of East Asia's cultural fabric, creating the complexes known as Honne and Tatemae, or True image and False image respectively, as well as interesting phenomena such as Smile mask syndrome. Japan's confucianist tendencies, coupled with the breakdown of social relationships due to the lost decades of economic development, further accelerated a polite yet fake society where no one could really connect with each other (This is speculation, I am not Japanese so it would be good to have a Japanese person comment on this).,
What seems to me to be happening is a Japanese crisis of self: Do we keep our old ways and maintain our rich history, or do we adapt to this new American-dictated future? We can argue that Japan has historically always had a crisis of self, going as far back as the history of the Shogunate rule and the Meiji era, as evidenced by the show's reference to the Suikoden. Why does Ueda reference this anarchy? Is Ueda constructing a cultural critique, suggesting that Japanese society is at war with itself?
To me, this crisis is exemplified by Eiri's rage at being called out. Eiri, as a metaphor for American individualism , was so wrapped up in himself and his power fantasy of being "god" that he forgot the full extent of his actions: the raising of the collective consciousness. It is a childish idea of god informed by judo-christian interpretations of the world. So when this individualism is broken, when he realizes that there IS a god and subsequently a world outside his ideas, the narcissism shatters and he lashes out.
American society is afflicted by Hegelian, christian and nitzchean ideas of the world, and like how Schopenhauer rightly criticized Hegel, American's think in a linear idea of time that makes every "new thing" a symbol of progress and freedom.
Thus, I believe what Ueda intended was for Americans to support Eiri and to see the show's villainzing of his and the MJ-12's "march to progress" as backward and wrong.
Unfortunately, he did not anticipate that people who watch anime are already somewhat Japanese in their mindset and beliefs as well. Ueda wanted a Hegelian synthesis of ideas to occur, whereby when both communities debate east vs west, individualism vs community.
In this manner, Ueda intended for the eastern and western ideas to converge on common ground and function as a a"brain" of SEL, like our own brain's left and right hemispheres.
Ueda, I believe, also wants to echo Aum shinrikyo's founder, Shoko Asahara's declaration of the United states to be the "Beast" of the apocalypse. Since Japan is a state that has been a victim of Nuclear technology, Serial experiments Lain's criticism is of technologists getting so wrapped up in their individuality that they fail to really realize the consequences of building these technologies.
It is American individualism that fails to recognize itself as part of the inherent structure of things, like how Masami eiri could not see past himself.
In the end, SEL is a sharp criticism of the internet being a "global village" and it is instead a broadcast channel for American values that infect other societies: Like an idea virus. And for a large part that is true, considering 99% of the world knows all of America's skeletons in its closet, but may not be even half as informed about the internal socioeconomic-politics of their neighbour state.
Eiri and Lain's dynamic is that of Master-slave, which if we interpret it in terms of American-Japanese relations, is a veiled critique. Japan was on its way to become a global superpower in the late 90's, but due to America's tight grip on Japanese policies via the Plaza accord, the lost decades happened, contributing to the growing nihilism and directionlessness of Japan's youth.
To combat this, I believe that SEL's political critique via the dynamic of Lain beating Eiri through Arisu is this: the Japanese should hold on to their communities as American Individualism is inherently self-destructive. I believe this observation is coming true as well, but sadly Japan was the first victim to this complex. Society is growing increasingly lonely at a rapid pace due to the way technology is designed with American ideals in mind.
Not only this, but largely western ideas of thinking and being have interrupted and displaced traditional notions of life until they attain the idea of "normalcy", meaning that living itself is an American Psyop. Two very subtle clues in the show point to this: The fact that Lain is in an girls school (meaning she's in a christian missionary school) and the second being Lain's family setup being a nuclear family. While this may seem to be an innocuous detail that can slip under the radar of someone who grew up in a western environment, Asian families in general tend to be of extended character, so a nuclear family is actually a very strange, alien setup in an Asian household. When you go into the disturbing and dubious origins as to why nuclear families were encouraged, this seems a little unnerving. This is exactly what Baudrillard meant by "simulation" where you are so divorced from reality, that you don't have any idea of what the original reality could have
even looked like.
"I feel that the reaction of the people who liked “lain” is not so different between Japanese and non-Japanese fans. They all found their own point of the theme in “lain”. That is what I wanted.
I believe that U.S. fans caught the “Kernel” of lain. I believe that you recognized what I and Mr.Nakamura and Ueda the producer wished to tell you.
But I wonder…What do you think about the dogma of Eiri Masami in the anime? Were Eiri’s thoughts totally insane? I’d like to hear about it."
-Chiaki John Konaka (Anime EXPO interview, 2000)
Note: I highly recommend "Technopoly" by Neil Postman if you want to get an insight to how America's unique cultural values influence its attitude towards technology. It's a great book on the subject. Additionally, a person on reddit u/marshmallow _lilypad linked me this essay on the specificities of SEL's commentary on Japanese society on the onset of the digital era.
Eiri as a villain
September 1998 issue of AX magazine excerpt. Here, Konaka directly quotes Foucault's ideas of collective madness and singular power being in the hands of an unknown shadow elite.
Masami Eiri, on my first watch, seemed to just be some "mad scientist bad guy". Originally, he seemed extremely flat, and I most definitely thought Serial experiments Lain had a weak villain that was not at all memorable.
But then over the course of this analysis, it seemed that Eiri, with his ideas of progress, the transfiguration of society, godhood and doctrine was much more complex than previously realized, and he cannot simply be painted as "bad guy". Eiri now, to me, is still a bad guy, but I don't have as much conviction as I used to.
To me, he's very much a trickster type of character, as stated by Jung in Four archetypes:
“…his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, his exposure to all kinds of tortures, and — last but not least — his approximation to the figure of a savior.”
Eiri is now a compelling villain, a secret power who operates in the shadows of the real world, a puppeteer whose full actions you cannot seem to figure out. Eiri is Mara, the God of death and illusion who tried to destroy the Buddha, whose gutpunches are so overwhelming because you cannot see where they are coming from.
It's easy to overwhelm your villain when they are right in front of you.
But what about a villain who alters your perception so well you're not even aware of how you're being manipulated?
In the book Cyberia by Douglas Rushkoff, an offhand comment is made on Batman fighting Joker (a famous trickster example) in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight.
On page 235:
"This is why the experience of Miller's world is like visiting an early acid house club than reading a traditional comic book.
Miller re-initiates a re-exploration of the nonlinear and sampling potential of the comic book medium, pairing facing pages that at first glance may seem unrelated but actually comment on each other very deeply.
A large full page abstract drawing of Batman may be juxtaposed with small cells of action scenes, television analysis, random comments, song lyrics or newsprint. As the eye wanders in any direction it chooses, the reader's disorientation mirrors Batman's confusion at fighting for good in a world where there are no longer any clear lines to define one's position.
The reader relaxes only when he is able to accept the chaotic nonlinear quality of Miller's text and enjoy it for a ride. Then the meaning of the story becomes somewhat clear, hovering between the page and the viewer's mind"
This literally sounds like the experience of someone who watches SEL for the first time. We are in Lain Iwakura's shoes, facing a torrent of information that doesn't make sense, a world of illusion with strange signs, symbols and events that disrupt our ability to figure things out.
One of the best examples of this is the alien. In layer 5, the mask quotes Foucault's idea of the Epistemic break, when he says that history is not linear causality i.e points of events that are connected by a line. However, he diverges from Foucault and says these lines are "made to connect".
If we take Ueda's understanding of madness as a condition created by shadow forces lurking in the dark trying to rewire scoiety's collective consciousness, then the answer to Lain's question of who connects the Line between events in layer 5 is directly answered by Mika's face in the next frame: the victim of manipulation by said darker forces.
It's clear that SEL views the power of digital media as a new instrument capable of restructuring humanity's self consciousness at a mass level, if we consider collective consciousness to be the base foundation from which a sense of collective reality emerges. Therefore, anyone who controls the wired, by manipulating the way information is sent and received, effectively controls reality.
Let's take for example the alien that appears in L9. A lot of people, when trying to explain the Alien see it as the wired manifesting things into reality. The reason why this makes no sense is because we then don't understand how this manifestation takes place, why Lain isn't scared of said alien and why Lain even goes so far as to transform into said alien partially.
But the reason why people connect the dialogue in layer 3 with Layer 9 even with little justification is simply because they view it as A leads to B : Rumours in an earlier section of the timeline manifests later down the show as a phenomenon. The very type of thinking the Mask says isn't true.
But considering there's an equally strong explanation for Masami Eiri being the alien, we then see that the Alien then represents SEL's message of power being a potency wielded by entities operating outside of immediate view.
The obvious line that connects is a rumour, but the true line of events is run by a man behind the scene, i.e Masami Eiri. We can see this line of "forces acting behind the scene" applies at a series of levels: MJ-12 was behind Tachibana's actions, Eiri and Tachibana was behind the show's events and in the end the big daddy of orchestrators was none other than God and History itself.
To sum it up, Eiri in my reformed opinion is a truly unique villain, a force of darkness you do not understand and yet is calling all the shots, a master of chaos and illusion that you simply cannot grasp because you are too busy trying to understand what is happening at a fundamental level.
What is Enlightenment? West vs East
The West and the East have different concepts of Enlightenment. The Western foundations of culture traces its origins to its philosophical giants. Francis Bacon, the "father of empiricism", a form of philosophy that forms the basis of Science, regarded Man as separate from Nature. This finds root in Plato's ideas from ancient Greece, as well as Christian values. What eventually resulted was a hard materialist worldview, one that only regards physical reality as the only reality. This separation of man from nature and the development of the scientific apparatus is what defines the Western period of the Enlightenment, the starting point of what we call the modern age of Science and Technology.
However, as we move towards an age where we are increasingly facing social and ecological crises, one really wonders if this individualistic approach to life and reality is infecting the way we create our technology, considering that worldviews do subconsciously affect the choices we make when we create such things.
The rapid polarisation of the world politically can be argued to be a product of Western notions of duality infecting technology's design, simply because multipolarity isn't something commonplace to the western psyche. Eiri's inherent narcissism and deep rooted sadism is merely a product of exaggerated individuality, one that refuses to recognize the ties that bind one to things outside himself.
In contrast, Eastern enlightenment focuses on the principle of nothingness, where we are all nothing without the connections we make, and that the web of the world is one deeply connected network that reflects each other. To quote the ancient Indian idea of "Indra's Net":
"Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number.
There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring"
The time may have come where we can no longer progress with this idea of "not my problem". To quote a Navajo proverb:
"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect."
- Chief Seattle, Duwamish
Why SEL is a sharp cultural commentary: The crisis of faith and a new hope.
Eiri explicitly mentions God's nonexistence here, which proves to be the reason why he takes up the mantle of "Deus", an acting God.
Lain Iwakura negates her human existence in favour of a very "material" view, one that only sees her as a program. Arisu rejects this extremely depressing view. At some level, this is a counter to absolute scientific materialism that is at some level a denial of reality.
One of the most profound Western philosophers to grace the Earth was Friedrich Nietzche, who exclaimed "God is dead". But while laymen understand this to be a simple affirmation of atheist beliefs and the denouncement of organized religion, Nietzche's statement carries a very deep and subtle observation of the consequences of the European "Enlightenment" era which brought about the scientific revolution, whose effects we are very arguably witnessing in full effect today. This message is very explicit in Serial experiments Lain, although the show like usual is very subtle about this.
To Nietzsche, the death of God was brought about when then Church ceased to be an authority on matters pervading all aspects of life, and the separation of religion from state, combined with the Scientific revolution helped destroy the absolute authority of Christianity. In this way, an alternative was made clear: one need not believe in God to keep living.
However, contrary to modern thought which pits science and religion as enemies battling unto death, a lot of early science and scientific method was funded by the church, and lot of early scientists were monks or devout christians, one being the legendary physicist Isaac Newton. The push for the discovery of the universe was driven by religious impulse to know the beauty of the world as created by God. With God's death however, finally culminating with the unassailable theory of natural selection, where the christian narrative could no longer be believed without huge cognitive dissonance, the question now arose: How do we live our lives meaningfully?
Nietzsche believed that there was no way to assert a genuine moral law without a belief in some sort of divine law or an appeal to some sort of overarching principle of humanity, both of which he vehemently denied.
And yet, belief in God is what kept a lot of people going through difficult times. God, therefore, served the social function of a soothing pain-balm. Without a "definitive" god that exists, the beginning of the "last man" was eminent. As Nietzsche says in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
Behold! I shall show you the Last Man....The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small... A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death.
They still work, for work is entertainment. But they take care the entertainment does not exhaust them...
No herdsmen and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse... ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the Last Men, and blink.
What Nietzsche believed would replace faith in God was a newfound faith in technology and science, what we could call the "techno-scientific" enterprise. However, contrary to many atheists, science is simply not capable of answering questions of subjectivity, meaning and happiness, simply because these are ideas that aren't bound to a material existence and can have many different interpretations.
To Nietzche, God's death would just create many new "pseudo-gods", such as materialism, Brands, Scientific enterprise, neo-spirituality, consumerism etc etc etc (This is what cosmicLain is referring to in L13 as the "many gods" of the human world). The "Last Man" thus exists in a hopelessly meaningless life, one where techno-scientific materialism tries to fill the void of a spiritual crises that ruptured open deep in the western heart.
The self-hate of the body arises from the christian teaching of "innate sin", that we are all naturally sinners. There is no study or body of knowledge that confirms this as a universal truth. In fact in recent times, Descarte's mind-body separation itself is under vicious critique.
With God's absence openly declared, it is now possible for "God-king" to appear as they have always done, but now with a verifiable right to divinity: by controlling technology. With actual realized power in their hands, these new beings relish their thirst for power through the application of magical technology. And Eiri is the perfect caricature for this type of individual rising in the 21st century.
But while Nietzsche and later philosophers tried to solve the void of such meaninglessness through the UberMensch or Absurdism, such answers simple either reflexively dodged the question of meaninglessness itself or were appropriated by deadly regimes such as the Nazi.
This "physical world" only approach has led to severe reformulations of human beings ass mere "machines", such as in books such as the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where humans according to him are merely carriers for Genetic Material. Lain explicitly expresses this view through the statement "I am a program", a self dehumanizing statement that only affirms the objective existence of her being a computer program. It's also why Eiri in Layer 13 says that emotions and experiences are simply reduced experiences that can be altered at will, where one only needs to see the happy moments. This a very reductive view of life, one that is extremely nihilistic.
A similar crisis happened to Japan after the bombs were dropped onto Japan's cities. The japanese at that point were willing to fight to the teeth as a result of centuries old tradition of warrior's honour, or Bushido. At that point in time, even mere children were being armed to the teeth to fight the oncoming Allied invasion. However, the atomic bombs not only eviscerated japanese hopes of valiantly fighting to the end, it created a severe gaping hole in Japanese culture, ultimately leading to the cauterization of Japanese values with the emperor admitting defeat and subjecting the country to national humiliation. Thus, the accelerated pace of Japan's Lost decades in some form can be said to be a vision of things to come to the first world, and ultimately to the rest of the world. The most poignant reflections that we can observe happening to large sections of Japan are Anomie and Alienation, where large parts of populations are increasingly out of touch with each other and a meaningless life is beginning to set in.
“When human atoms are knit into an organization in
which they are used, not in their full right as responsible
human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it
matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood.
What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an
element in the machine. Whether we entrust our
decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of
flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories
and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the
right answer to our questions.”
—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings
At this point, we can verifiably say that Christian doctrine and belief has infected every pore of the entire world due to western cultural dominance, down to even the way economic system is structured. And a lot of this can be boiled down to the christian idea of "sin": Are human beings naturally good or bad? And if we are naturally bad (i.e horribly flawed) is that why we seek to escape our body?
In christianity, Mankind originally descended from two original humans: Adam and eve. The "first man" entered a state called the "fall" when Adam ate the fruit of Knowledge of good and evil. As punishment, God exiled adam from Eden, the original paradise of man. This Paradise is what most christians aspire to return on the day of judgement. A lot of religious scholars now theorize that the "fall" story is actually an ancient lamentation on how agriculture ruined prehistoric human society, something we are now acquiring a lot of practical evidence for. In any case, Christianity's "doomed creature"narrative forced a core cultural idea that human beings are naturally evil into all bodies of thought from science to economics. And especially in economics, we find the principle of self interest dominant, deriving from the work of Thomas hobbes (the man who formulated the original idea of society as an organism) whose work became a cornerstone of western philosophy. Is this true? We are now finding a lot of evidence that, objectively on the contrary, most human beings are very cooperative and compassionate, even if flawed. Even mathematically, a society where all human beings worked purely in selfishness was doomed to fail.
However, what about alternative conceptions of God and Sin? SEL makes this distinction through the metaphor of the body as point of tension between the West and the East. While "sin" is a concept ingrained in western thought and the body is seen as an impure defilement, in eastern and many indigenous faiths, God is seen as "inside everything, including the human beings, and because the human being has the ability to realize a self through its body, it is the closest thing to something that truly knows its nature as God. In Hinduism, one of the world's oldest religions, Purusha is a term that is synonymous to both God and Man, a term Jung called "Cosmic Man" (I prefer the term Cosmic person for inclusivity). Eastern and pre-modern concepts of god are similar to Spinoza's "Modal principle" where every single substance in the universe is an expression of something akin to "god" (Which is similar to Lain being a pervasive godlike substance across the fabric of the wired, as opposed to a puppetmaster above it). Lain's realization of existing within herself a godlike "program" is very likely a reference to this concept via Jung, and serves as a critical eastern counterargument to Judeo-Christian ideas.
When Lain says Eiri can't understand because he lacks a body, this is Lain baiting eiri with an internal contradiction. Eiri wanted to take God's place because as a scientist, he was a hardcore materialist and therefore believed God never existed. However, now that Eiri has given up the last material proof of his existence (his body) and only exists as pure information on the Wired, according to his own belief system he too cannot exist. In fact, he is less than God because the Wired is still material and he doesn't even have all of God's powers. This internal contradiction is at the heart of modern civilization which is why Eiri's resolves the internal contradiction by materializing in the real world via psi.
Ultimately, the reason why SEL accurately predicts modern society is simply because it is not restricted to a study of technology, but also encompasses broader topics such as economics, sociology, anthropology and religious studies. In my opinion, it is very likely that Serial Experiments Lain could precipitate a counter-cultural revolution. If such a revolution fails to happen, we may be on the verge of a very likely worldwide societal collapse, doomed to increasingly circular, repetitive meaninglessness.
Many philosophers, most notably the french thinkers Deleuze and Guattari of the late 20th century explicitly state that the current order of things, most notably capitalism itself would give rise to Narcissistic, Paranoid and Schizophrenic responses. Deleuze and Guattari say that capitalism, the more it is left uncontrolled , has the unique ability to "deterritorialize", a process by which it removes all meaning from an object and reduces it to a commodity.
A great example of this is the unique way in which American capitalism takes things that are sacred or have deep meaning to people of other cultures, strips them down to base elements and sells them . An example from my culture would be the practice of Yoga, which at its core is a body of knowledge meant to liberate one from the delusions of sensory stimulation. However, it is very ironically practiced by hordes of rich american women who through consumerism of luxury, brands and commodity represent the opposite of Yoga's intended audience.
The reason why cultural appropriation is so hotly debated in America is simply because to Americans, there is no sense of "sacred". Even in Juedochristian customs, sacredness implies that certain items could not be bought or sold, like the ark of covenant or religious imagery like crosses. But God's death and the breakdown of religion's role in society has directly stripped everything of its sacred elements, to the point where crosses lose religious significance and become a cheap fashion accessory.
Now what Deleuze and Guattari postulate, alongside the background of Nietzche, is that the hoard of information we receive is a result of capitalism acting as a hurricane through the globalized proliferation of American culture, stripping everything of meaning and killing every reason to live beyond material causes. To combat the destruction of all sorts of meaning, humans subconsciously "reterritorialize". From the blog I linked earlier:
"What is it that we witness in response to the schizophrenia of capitalism? We see the rise of narcissistic structures. On the one hand, there’s a fantastic, a desperate, construction of coded identities.
Everyone sets about constructing a coded identity for their group and themselves that would give some semblance of stability or solidity. For example, we see the rise of fundamental-isms that claim to be returning to the true traditions, but which are really quite new and share little resemblance to practices and identities of the past"
In layer 9, Taro talks about how the Knights seek to make their one Truth real. Although I believe this is an attack on America media and its foreign policy during and after the cold war era, this also has some implications for the rise of religious, cult like beliefs on the internet
Another line from the blog:
"The response to this status of truth following the death of God is paranoia.
There is an inverse relationship between identity and persecution. The more one forms a semiotized or coded self, the more one attempts to self-define, the more one experiences oneself as persecuted by a counter-self because any identity is unstable .
Subject 1 develops a persecuting other in a mad attempt to foreclose its own inherent instability arising from the process of infinite semiosis so as to paradoxically secure itself. As a consequence, we everywhere see the rise of things like racism the more multiplicities or populations attempt to form a stable identity for itself."
What we see arising here in polarization, where when I hate another, I am assured of my own identity (This has deep implications in an American context and I would HIGHLY advise that non-americans refrain from making encompassing statements of human nature). While capitalism is one way to accelerate this, the internet is another. With wider, deeper and faster interconnections, the ability of the internet to also act as a "deterritorializing" force becomes apparent. Culture changes so fast that it acts like an abstract corrosive acid, killing local traditions, erasing communities and all in all killing any sense of meaning outside of conflict.
It's probably the main reason why memes on popular pages have become so absurd while memes on community pages have become so niche and inaccessible. The reason in the former is because the context of culture now changes so rapidly (i.e within days) that only an absurd idea could have long-term staying power. In contrast, because of the way algorithms lock communities away from interacting with each other, each community develops a "hidden history" with its own vocabularies, understandings and beliefs.
Thus, duality on the internet sprouts like a cancerous tumor. Now, the "thomas rule" , a rule in sociology, states that if an event is perceived as real, the consequences of reaction to that event by any given person are most definitely real. This forms the basis of the "wired" actualizing beliefs into reality, simply because people respond to a belief and think it's real, and thereby take actions which create a host of conditions that actually make it real.
For example, if a person reads on the internet that all women are goldiggers, he might take this belief to be real and work on only maximizing his income and neglect being a kind, considerate human being with other interests. In doing so, he will both have a tendency to attract women who are gold-diggers as well as hurt innocent non-goldigger women through his toxic beliefs, thus creating gold-digging women who have lost faith in authentic, loving relationships, while also strengthening his belief that women are gold-diggers.
A couple of quotes from a holy book in my culture. In the Bhagavad Gita, chapter 7, verse 27, the original sin that Krishna postulates goes against the fall of "good vs evil" outlined in the Bible. Instead Krishna affirms to the warrior prince Arjuna that the recognition of duality itself is the ultimate delusion:
"O Scion of Bharata, O conqueror of foes,
All living entities are born into delusion,
bewildered by dualities arising from the
qualities of Desire and Hatred"
In the current age of hatred being manufactured by internet algorithms promoting political polarization, this second quote of chapter 2, verse 63 also seemed necessary:
"From anger comes delusion, from delusion comes loss of memory, from loss of memory comes destruction of discriminative intellect, and once the intellect is destroyed, the individual perishes."
Final section: The anime prophecy of Saint/Boddhisattva Lain