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At its core, Babel by RF Kuang is a novel about attempting to live within cognitive dissonance. Each member of the cohort bears a certain level of cognitive dissonance, with it being the strongest and most apparent in Letty, significantly in Robin, marginally in Ramy, and the least in Victoire. It's no coincidence that their awareness of the world around them is proportional to the level they are alienated from British Society, with Victoire having the most sober perspective because she is under no illusion of acceptance. People talk the most about Letty's cognitive dissonance because it is the most obvious, but to miss how cognitive dissonance plays out within the rest of them is to miss out on what makes them flawed and therefore human.

The cohort expects Letty to be an ally, someone who could fight with them, maybe even die for them, believing that they would do the same while also not believing she could be an ally. One aspect that stood out to me about the cohort is how little they truly know each other and how, even after spending three years as each other’s closest friends, they never break down the walls separating them. Although Letty was the one who could’ve most easily inquired into her friend’s situations and made an effort to listen, Robin, Ramy, and Victoire have a minimal interest in explaining their situation to her. This in no way makes them “at fault” for being betrayed but merely exposes a cognitive dissonance at play, which is that they do not trust her to be able to understand, yet they expect and need her to understand. This is understandable and human - their trauma is complex, and it would be painful to expose them, only to be questioned and misunderstood. 

However, this cognitive dissonance makes it so that their double life is not only a physical disguise they present to others but a psychological disguise they use to deceive themselves. In the beginning of the novel, Robin tries to see the Hermes Society and his cohort as separate. There was Hermes, the rebellion, the danger, and then there was Babel and his cohort, whom he could find comfort in. However, there was nothing separate about these two spaces.

Letty strikes me as the personification of Babel as an institution and the rest of the cohort’s false separation between their life in Babel and their life outside of it and their duality in which they viewed Letty as one and the same. In the same way Babel was the first English institution that saw a future for them, Letty was the first English person to see a future for them. Both Babel and Letty valued them for their brilliance but could not see through their eyes as people. She embodied Babel’s partial comfort, its scholarly yet ignorant nature, and their desperation to preserve their “Babel life” as ordinary meant not shattering her illusions. In the end, they could only love her partially because they could only love Babel partially, and she could only value them conditionally, in the same way Babel could only value them conditionally.

Robin thinks of his friends as found family, but he never truly knows them. This doesn’t only occur with Letty. He never gets to know Victoire's background or her staunch but quiet revolutionary stance. It's telling that we don't even know Victoire's backstory until the end of the book. All of them keep themselves hidden from each other while telling themselves that they are the best of friends and that they love each other. They are bonded by their desperation for the idea of friendship they are all afraid to tap into.

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The most uncomfortable part of Babel is that the readers, as well as all of the cohort, cannot help but love Babel, if only in part. Almost everyone who was interested in this book finds academia fascinating. They are interested in literature, in knowledge, in the power of words. Babel harnesses these things, so no matter how exploitative it is, it is impossible for every reader to not love it. RF Kuang, despite writing a book critiquing it and ending it with the institution being brought down, clearly loves it most of all. She lovingly writes about the processes and translations it facilitates, its halls and lifestyle. Babel is a fictionalized Oxford, where she studied and evidently found value in. At many points, it's hard to tell whether we should view Babel as good or bad. The characters critique Babel in the languages Babel taught them.

The darkest part of dark academia is that no matter how much you study its contradictions, you cannot escape them. To be educated is to have relative privilege. No matter how much the privileged want to speak for the less privileged, they can only speak from their position. Education is how we make sense of other people's perspectives, and only the educated can educate. To be educated is to have power, so our perspectives of the world will always come from the powerful.

The most discomforting aspect of this is that this contradiction is inescapable. To be a great scholar is to have endless curiosity and be willing to push all limits. To be an honest scholar is to acknowledge the poison latent within knowledge and its potential and to reckon with its effects on the world. Most of RF Kuang’s books are her confronting herself. Oxford, Cambridge, and the publishing industry are places she succeeds in and writes to critique. That is what makes her shine as an author: this confrontation of the contradictions of spaces of knowledge that is hard not to notice once you’re within it.

Conversely, her books can invite controversy or a feeling that something is left unsaid because it is difficult to create a critical examination of your own situation while writing from the perspective of that situation. It’s like chasing your own tail. However, I find the pursuit of it admirable.

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What is power?

In Episode 33 of Monster, a young boy trips a homeless man, delighting in how afraid he is. Before this scene, the boy walks through a street full of cars, unafraid of the cars hitting him. What he enjoys here is the feeling of power. This feeling was instigated in him by Johan Liebert, who had been convincing him and other young boys to push each other off of buildings, telling him that “if he survives, the world will be different.”

By disregarding rules and laws and other people’s standards, by being indifferent to even your own life, one gains a sense of power and freedom. Throughout Monster, Johan demonstrates this again and again, displaying his superiority over other people by convincing them to do whatever he wants while indomitable to their wishes and actions against him. He is the embodiment of chaos. He can go wherever he wants and accomplish whatever he wants to accomplish, as if he were the human embodiment of the ruthless chaos of the universe. More than anyone else, he seems free.

When a person hurts another person and enjoys the suffering itself, what they are enjoying is the sense of power over another. Yet having power over another does not necessarily equate to causing suffering. Power is the ability to affect something, a concept intrinsically tied to freedom, and this could be changing a person’s life by moving them to a positive direction and bringing them happiness. Power could be healing the sick, repairing broken relationships, and saving lives. The series explores Johan’s nihilistic perspective that “most of the universe is just death anyway.” That the world is chaotic, merciless, and there’s no set of rules binding anyone to anything. 

Most of the series, though, focuses on Kenzo Tenma, a doctor who walks through cities meeting ordinary people and bettering their lives. We watch as he changes their lives for good, saving them from illness and inspiring them to be kinder people. The first few episodes make it seem that trying to do good does not mean a good result and can result in greater evil. It shows the futility of individual people trying to make an impact through bettering things, but the rest of the series repeatedly shows how he does have an impact and the power he has to change things.

Isn't the assertion that the world is chaotic, merciless, and runs on no rules binding anyone to anything a rule in and of itself? What is the point of killing a person who will die anyway? What is the point of becoming chaos when the world is already chaos? To do that is not freedom or defiance; it is realizing the law that the universe runs on and uncritically submitting yourself to it.

The tragedy of Johan Liebert is that of a man who could’ve done anything and had more potential for power than anyone else in the world, and he chose to become nothing. He chose to become what most of the world was anyway: arbitrary death. Johan became self-erasure.

Monster is about one man representing the power of accepting the ruthless chaos of the world, while another man both defies and carries that message to its rightful conclusion - that to truly conquer chaos, you must not simply be chaos but become the opposite of chaos, which paradoxically makes the world more chaotic and more free.

In my last post I discussed the dichotomies in worldview between Kyubey, Madoka, and Homura while also establishing how all the central characters of Madoka Magica represent a core belief, conscious or unconscious, that when broken, causes their death or despair. I said mostly what I wanted to say in that post but I want to drive in here just how well Madoka Magica breaks down the nature of morality and nuanced and meta it is in exploring it. It’s refreshing because rather than positioning philosophies as right or wrong, it instead explores how feasible they are against the forces of the world and ones’ own soul.

Throughout the majority of the soul, the moral conflict seems to be centered on Sayaka and Kyoko. As I mentioned previously, Sayaka’s core belief is that doing good things will bring about a good outcome while Kyoko's is that taking pragmatic actions to ensure personal survival trumps all else. This is a very grounded struggle that is very relevant to the question of morality we ask ourselves day to day. Should we prioritise doing the morally right thing even when it results in a bad outcome for us? Or should we prioritise what is beneficial for ourselves even if it means it disadvantages others along the way?

However, by the last episodes of the show and throughout Rebellion, their struggle becomes obsolete. The remainder of the series centers on the dichotomy between Homura and Madoka. Madoka Magica never presents either Sayaka or Kyoko as wrong, but rather both of their philosophies as unsustainable. We can argue all day about whether we should prioritise ourselves or others, whether doing the “right thing” will lead to a good result and whether it’s worth it. This question will constantly come up and no one will find a definitive answer to it. Regardless of how we “should” act though, the simple reality is that both extremes are unsustainable and do not hold up in practice.

In Sayaka’s case, she (very understandably) isn’t fully aware of the nature of her core belief. She seems to believe in righteousness for the sake of it but what she really believes is that righteousness will naturally result in something good. That belief simply does not hold up in the world. If Sayaka really believed in righteousness for the sake of it regardless of the outcome then perhaps the sheer dissonance between the belief and reality would’ve not been as unbearable, but is that a realistic prospect for any human? To not care about the outcomes just because it’s the “right thing”? The same goes with Kyoko. Perhaps pursuing our utilitarian needs is the most logical and it should sustain us. However, as human beings we have functions of empathy and emotion forcing us to care about others and desiring meaningful relationships. Regardless if this compulsion is “right or wrong”, rational or not, it simply exists. Kyoko couldn’t resist her empathy and humanity simply because she can’t.

Both of these worldviews will always appear like attractive ways of doing things and yet adhering to one end of the extreme won’t be sustainable, not because of morality, but because of reality and human nature. We will always have to dance somewhere in between. When Madoka Magica “moves on” from a philosophical question, it does not do it by saying who's wrong but by demonstrating how this dichotomy is made obsolete by the way things are. I love stories that don't give an answer where none can be found but rather shines a light on the nature of things.

Sayaka and Kyoko’s conflict serves to set up Madoka and Homura’s dichotomy. As an audience, we needed to be prepped by Sayaka and Kyoko’s more grounded and familiar moral conflict while understanding why there isn’t a clear answer. Only after understanding that are we ready to explore questions on the existential scale and Madoka and Homura do.

In a way, Madoka “repairs” Sayaka’s core belief to make it more sustainable. “If doing what is good won’t lead to an inherent reward, I will take the sacrifice myself so that no one needs to and become a being capable of bearing it without despairing.”

Homura does the same for Kyoko. “If cold pragmatism without love creates a meaningless existence, I will serve my interests for love and shape reality for a meaning I created.”

There is no clear answer here either and like with Sayaka and Kyoko, these are less rigid opposites but rather axes or sliding scales and these two axes sit parallel to each other. This new axis can represent the move towards existential meaning that one finds meaning in after realizing ordinary, everyday morality is not enough to encompass the nature of human existence.