Curtailing action: Kira's short-term focus

[narcasse]

An explosion of wank over on bad_rpers_suck the other day which I’ve only briefly read through managed to lead me off on a tangent. Said tangent being just what would anyone do with a post-death Light in an RP setting since he’d presumably be lacking a Death Note, anonymity as Kira or motivation in the first place. There’d be no reason for him to carry on. Then the next thought was that if he was confronted by L in whatever afterlife setting it was, how would they interact? And what I pictured were long discussions of ethics and reasoning with Light arguing that he’d curtailed criminal behaviour while L pointed out that once it became obvious that Kira was gone then all the criminals would go back to doing what they’d done before.

Light’s actions as Kira changed behaviour not thought patterns after all and that in of itself is problematic. For Leviathan to work the people who submit to the system must eventually come to believe in it. Society simply won’t hold together cohesively if there is no positive drive to maintain order, if there’s only the threat of punishment to curtail chaos. People have to believe in the system, in the higher order that’s been created so that they don’t just stop committing crimes but honestly believe that they’re better people for it and that their lack of criminal activity is serving both the greater and personal good. Respect, adherence and systems of social acceptability need to come into play to reinforce the social norm of not engaging in criminal activity otherwise the threat of punitive justice only urges the criminals to improve their technique. If crime is socially unacceptable then there’s the added element that regular citizens will abhor it and may well actively take steps to prevent it even if those steps are simply following the set procedure of calling in law enforcement.

Arguably Light is only dealing with an already established criminal element but as the plot progresses he starts to attempt to manage all of humanity. The wide scope of his plan then becomes problematic because he simply widens the range rather than considering that the techniques used to manage avowed criminals might not be particularly useful with the general population. He breeds an atmosphere of fear and on the other side rabid worship, and neither extreme is productive. A society living in fear is less productive because so much of their time is devoted to that fear and the management of it. In the case of criminals Light’s solution is to threaten them with death which may well work as a deterrent but with the regular population who aren’t inclined to commit crimes anyway then the threat hanging over them is both unnecessary and counterproductive. The thought patterns of law abiding citizens in fact become disrupted by the presence of Kira, they become distracted by the looming threat of an unseen executioner whose brutality doesn’t fall within the realms of the accepted use of violence by the state. To the model citizen Kira falls outside the established system and represents an external, unqualified force source that is actively meddling in the affairs of state. Nobody knows who Kira is, the content of his character is unknown and since he operates outside the law there’s no real way to assess him, his motivations or to curtail his actions should the need arise. Kira is above the law and as such becomes a threat to the established legal system. Nobody has called him into being, he hasn’t been elected and has been shown to actively work against the established system should it refuse to follow his personal directive. Kira then isn’t Leviathan but is in fact the functional equivalent of an external invading force encroaching upon the sovereignty of the Japanese state.

Those facts established it’s very hard to see how someone like Light might have overlooked that aspect. He might of course have chosen to ignore them entirely feeling that with time and application he was entirely capable of entrenching himself within the natural order of things or he might have believed that his purpose was so pure that temporal considerations really didn’t factor into it. There are plenty of reasons that his acknowledging and then ignoring the problem of disrupting social norms might have occurred but what might also be possible is that due to his own understanding he’s actually developed a blindside.

Throughout the course of the series Light’s personality itself doesn’t change and his thought patterns don’t particularly vary beyond expanding on details of his grand plan but what does change, distinctly, is his behaviour. Light code-switches with his behaviours, presenting an external cohesive whole but tailoring each interaction to achieve the best effect with the subject he’s interacting with. His interactions with Takada have the same aim as his interactions with Misa after all but he handles each situation differently with a view to what suits each woman involved. Likewise his handling of Matsuda is different to his handling of Aizawa and so on. Light presents different sets of behaviours to achieve his aims and of course each set of behaviours curtail the actions that he can take. Light the good student has an earnest desire to catch Kira, Light the boyfriend of Misa wants everything to settle down so that he can be with Misa, Light as Kira wants to execute criminals. Each presented facet comes with a set of behaviours that lead off down various critical paths and within that framework Light cannot access other paths of action beyond those belonging to the behavioural set he’s currently deployed. It seems obvious but most people don’t vary their behavioural sets as widely as Light does. Light doesn’t just change his manner of acting dependent on the company: he actively tailors it so that he can reap the most gain from said company.

The distinct planning and situational awareness that goes into each behavioural set is what separates it from the norm to the point where Light might easily view each as a set of different instructions. This idea of personas that are expressed by behaviour then could easily be the subconscious pattern upon which he bases his plans for humanity. If Light’s own behaviour is curtailed by sets of behaviours dependent upon the situation then it might just as easily be the case that he’s focusing on curtailing behaviour rather than exploring the thought processes behind it. He probably doesn’t after all believe that the repetition of a certain behavioural pattern will eventually lead to the thought pattern following since it certainly doesn’t work that way for him. He retains his sociopathy regardless of how he’s forced to behave and seems to actively cultivate it in the privacy of his own mind, and by the age of seventeen this clash between Light’s thoughts and actions has become so drastic that once he gets his hands on the Death Note it spills over into his demented raving every so often. He has no outlet for his thoughts, to transform them into public action and has adopted the various roles he plays so desperately that it doesn’t even occur to him to try to integrate the two to even the slightest degree. As I’ve suggested before a brief academic letdown could have done Light a world of good, just a little bit of a slip and maybe some of those cutting assessments of humanity could have shone through easing the pressure of keeping those sentiments entirely bottled up.

Without any vents for his true sentiments or personality it stands to reason that Light might well presume that the rest of the world operates in the same way. Thus if he can play a role without expressing his own thoughts then so can everybody else: he just needs to force them into it and since regular social pressure doesn’t seem to be enough, the threat of Kira will do the job instead. If the threat of Kira is great enough then Light could easily achieve his objective, especially if he can maintain the myth that Kira is omnipotent. Of course somewhere down the line it would become obvious that perhaps Kira wasn’t so completely aware of all developments in the world and the system Light sets up would start to break down again. In the same way the that Japanese police force can only punish the criminals that they know about Kira would be left floundering when his similar weakness became evident. Being caught might mean a death sentence or even publicly suspected but for the criminals who could avoid detection they might well continue to function in a highly organised and effective manner avoiding the threat of Kira just as they have done with legal law enforcement. The system Light advocates isn’t foolproof but through shock tactics there would be the distinct possibility that he’d be able to subdue criminal actions for a reasonable period of time. But once the shock factor had worn off and the flaws in Kira’s omnipotence came to light then because he hadn’t changed thought patterns and just curtained actions then there’d be no reason for criminal activity not to begin again. In fact the criminals who’d arise under Kira’s rule might be all the more dangerous because his judgments would be effectively engineering a survival of the fittest scenario.

All that said, it’s pretty clear that somewhere along the line Light has just abandoned all hope. By the time he has the means to teach humanity a lesson through fear he opts for that without hesitation which is indication enough that due to his own personal evolution he really has little regard for anybody else. He’s been trained to think of himself as superior so there’s no reason for him to either doubt his own conclusions or even consider the impact that his absolute solution would have on anybody else beyond how it will force them into modes of action that he approves. Light himself is trapped and as such doesn’t see why anybody else should be free, not out of maliciousness but simply out of a blind and terrifying utility. When he talks of becoming the god of a new world it’s a particularly easy path for him to follow because, as the evidence suggests, he’s most likely long since ceased to regard himself as a part of humanity. Humanity as he sees it doesn’t learn but then neither does Light himself. The slow progress of society’s growth can be charted across the ages where as Light and his rule as Kira is fixed in the moment. The system he attempts to create cannot be sustained nor can he as an individual and in that sense he typifies the blindness of any individual who overlooks the flow of time, instead staking his own importance, his own designs against the slow and inexorable progress of humanity. Humanity after all does progress in its own plodding fashion, centuries later the revolutionaries of yesteryear become the staid conservatives of the future, but the ideas carry forwards, the thoughts and ideals, even if the people who first conceived them are long gone. Light’s system on the other hand, the rule of Kira, has far less to do with justice and progression than it has to do with his personal struggle to transcend the banal and give his entire existence worth, and it’s that presumption of worth proven by success that makes his final defeat all the more crushing.