Bullet Train (Assassins #2)

by Kōtarō Isaka

People need to find a way to justify themselves. A person can’t live without being able to tell themselves that they’re right, that they’re strong, that they have value. So when their words and actions diverge from their view of themselves, they start looking for excuses, to help reconcile the contradiction. Parents who abuse their children, clergy who engage in illicit affairs, politicians who suffer disgrace – they all come up with excuses.

He knows that the casual-seeming use of impolite words with his friends, words like lame, worthless, trashy, establishes a kind of power relation. Even if there’s zero basis for calling something lame or trashy, it has an effect. Saying things like Your dad’s so lame, or You’ve got such crappy taste, these function as a vague denial of someone’s foundation, and it’s effective.

More often than not his subjective opinion takes on objective force, reinforcing his superior status.

There have been other similar experiments. One of them isolated the optimum pattern for conformist behaviour: when the stakes are high but the question is difficult and the right answer isn’t obvious.

When you lead a group by fear the rank and file lose trust in one another. The stronger the fear, the weaker the trust. The anger and resentment at the despot is turned on people who should be allies, making the spark of rebellion less likely. Everyone just wants to keep themselves safe, their only goal is to avoid being punished, and they start watching one another.

Whether it’s war, genocide, or revisions to the law, in most cases people don’t notice until it’s already happening, and they feel like they would have protested earlier if they only knew.

The first step in gaining control over his classmates was to destabilise their sense of self-worth. He made them realise how flawed they were as humans. The quickest way to do this was to exploit their sexual urges, find out their secret desires, expose and humiliate them. Or in some cases he would confront them with their parents’ sexual activities, sullying their image of the people they depended on most. Even though there’s nothing unusual about sexual desires, having them exposed never fails to make someone feel shame. The Prince couldn’t help but be surprised at how well it worked. The next step was to get them to betray someone. It could be a parent or a sibling or a friend. When they turned on someone important to them, their self-worth plummeted even more. This was what the Prince was hoping to do with Tomoyasu and his dog.

‘But the same government that makes laws against killing goes to war and has the death penalty. Don’t you think that’s weird?’

He’s completely under my control, exults the Prince. The man has been following his orders for some time now. Once someone obeys a command, it’s as if they’ve gone down a rung on the ladder, and the more they obey the further down they go, until they do whatever they’re told. And climbing back up is no easy thing.

Taking on someone else’s pain is so much harder than pushing your pain onto someone else.

Tangerine is smarter than Lemon, with more depth and substance. He has a more developed interior life, which gives him better powers of imagination. This leads to a greater capacity for empathy. Which in the end only makes him weaker. Tangerine will be easier to control than Lemon.