The Heart Of Evangelion

When I first watched Ikari Shinji stumble into EVA-01, I was 15 and living in a dream. I could not understand why Shinji was such a little shit. Shinji had been called up by his estranged father out of the blue, and in the span of a few hours, he went from having zero expectations placed on him, to being the only mopey teenager who could pilot a giant robot and save the world.

The enemy he had to defeat, he had been told, was an Angel – a godlike monstrosity beyond human comprehension.

Beyond anyone’s expectation, especially his own, Shinji utterly destroyed his enemy – not with strength or skill or the power of friendship, but with the feral rage of a cornered rat. He then withdrew into a shell and refused to pilot ever again – until, of course, the next time he was forced to.

When people congratulated him, Shinji rejected them. “You’re just using me,” he said, “I’ll do what I’m told because I have to, so you don’t need to pretend to like me.” When people reminded him, hey buddy, maybe be a bit more grateful to the people supporting you, Shinji rejected them. “They didn’t need to help me,” he said, “I didn’t want to do it anyway.”

When I first saw this, my reaction had been, “What the fuck, why is he such a little shit, he had everything handed to him, an opportunity to pilot a giant frigging robot are you kidding me, and everyone around him wants him to succeed, so why is he like that?! This is a shitshow and a shit show.”

Now, though, I get it.

Watching Evangelion as an adult feels like moulting. All the incomprehensive bullshit that the show’s creator, Anno, had crammed into their world now makes sense, in the sense that it has never tried to make sense. Story, plot, how the world works, why there is a penguin in Misato’s apartment – none of that matters, because Anno did not give a fuck about any of that. The show has only ever convey one intangible thing: that feeling of starting a new job on Monday; the feeling of spending the last hundred dollars you have on a one-way ticket; the feeling of always going to work because, if you don’t, the people you love will leave you; the feeling of waking up and having to face down the incomprehensive, unknowable enemy that is life itself, without any idea of how to do it, or why you are waking up in the first place.

The berserker rage under which Shinji defeated the Fourth Angel is a cringe-fest of teenage angst, but he could not have done it any other way. This is life or death, he had been told, but Shinji had no understanding of what life means to him. Defeating the Angels was just another thing he had been told to do, and if he didn’t do it, he would have to confront the version of himself that did not do it. The stakes, then, were the same as anything else he did: fighting tooth and nail to avoid acknowledging himself.  

The other EVA pilots defeat the enemy with professional detachment. It was just a job. You can be good at it, mediocre at it, doesn’t matter – the only criteria were that the thing explodes and you live. There was no reward. In fact, the very expectation of reward was outlandish to them. Do people get rewarded for breathing?

This was why they thought Shinji was a piece of shit, which he was. Only a piece of shit would expect to be rewarded for simply breathing. When Shinji succeeds, they are surprised: how can someone with this shitty of an attitude ever overcome any difficulty, let alone Angels?

Eventually, they come to a semblance of understanding that Shinji is fighting Angels 24/7. Whether the enemy is some alien monster or the act of talking to a friendly stranger, he fights them all in the same way: feral, ugly, live-or-die. This is why the other pilots always give up before Shinji. For them, it’s just a task, and if it’s objectively too hard, then it is too hard, and they let it be. Shinji does not understand the concept of difficulty, because to him, everything is difficult, impossible even, and he overcomes them with the same fight or flight response he applies to every minute task.

The catharsis of Evangelion comes in the final movie. After two decades of restarts, retcons, and reboots, Anno had decided that the story should come to an end. The series itself is incoherent; the tie-in movie even more so. Nothing about the show makes sense, even now, after so many iterations.

The show is ending because its creator, like Shinji, has at last come to terms with their enemy. The enemy is not the convoluted plot, or the nonsensical worldbuilding, or any geometric oddity with AT Fields or giant CGI heads floating in space. The enemy is their perceptions of themselves, and it can only be defeated by letting go. No easy task, that. Not when every morning begins with Angels.

The Filibustering Of Depravity

The famed philosopher and philanthropist, Ted Cruz, upon returning from a vacation during which his constituents back home suffered from yet another climate-change-exacerbated extreme weather event, has said that the thing he most objected to about the criticisms leveraged against him was that ‘people were being assholes to him’.

What triggered him was not what he did, but how upset other people were about him doing it.

There is no arousing the sympathy of a career politician. Having wrestled in the mud pit with the worst traits humanity has to offer for so long, all politicians recognize that sympathy is just another tool in their arsenal. Joe Biden can cry about half a million dead on one hand and continue locking up kids in cages on the other because he knows how to weaponize his sympathy to amass maximum political capital.

In this sense, Ted Cruz is a way worse politician than Joe, but is somehow – in a twisted turn of logic – a better human being, because he behaved authentically – like the douchebaggy asshole that he is – by failing to leverage his impromptu vacation to his political advantage.

Picture him going on camera and starting to cry, slobbering snot as he apologizes to his constituents about how he failed them, and vowing to do better next time. Those will be crocodile tears, for sure, and he will for sure do absolutely nothing to fix anything, but with a performance of sympathy he could have tricked people into believing that he truly has become a changed man, and get a bump in the polls.

Yes, that’s right. He could have done nothing, gone on vacation, let people die, and still become more popular than before, had he played his cards right.

He didn’t though. He is a degenerate asshole through and through, on camera and off, and that is exactly why he, alongside his fellow philosopher the Donald, retains a loyal fanbase that licks up every gooy drop of asshole juice that drips out of his mouth.

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People have long assumed, consciously or not, that politicians will do nothing for them, and because of the saturation of crocodile tears in the media – from politicians, corporations, and every clouted individual – they can no longer rationally perceive any act of ‘good’ as genuine.

Everyday, we are surrounded by bullshit like Saudi Arabia’s social media account celebrating Pride Day, or the Chinese government spokesperson eulogizing about the need for free access to Facebook and Twitter. (both of these things actually happened).

So it’s no wonder that everything good appears fake – because they so very often are – and everything vile and degenerate appears authentic.

Nowadays, when you hear a line like ‘We respect Indigenous culture’ or ‘This is an equal-opportunity workplaces’, how would you interpret it?

Most times it’s just bullshit put into a recruitment video or at the top of a gig, but if you assume it’s bullshit, then you’re bundling the idea inside the message with the bullshit. The act of ‘respecting Indigenous culture’ is not intrinsically meaningless. Neither is ‘providing equal opportunities’. Yet when it is used so often as a throwaway, PR-sounding line, with no real change to back them up, people start to treat them like they are meaningless.

You’ve heard it before. ‘We acknowledge that this is the traditional land of…’ or ‘Small businesses are the backbone of the economy.’

Meanwhile, the vilest, the most sinister ideas – those that involve ‘lock them up’ in one form or the other – get a free pass when they receive the same this-isn’t-real treatment. ‘Oh it’s just bunch of bullshit, families don’t really get separated at the border,’ or ‘Oh, we’re just re-educating them, no big deal.’

Both sides are reduced to, essentially, trash-talking and shit-spinning.

By applying this ‘nothing is authentic, everything is rhetoric’ filter, the highest of moral aspirations and the vilest of human nature have become mingled together and indistinguishable from one another. No good deed is authentic. Bad deeds aren’t that bad. It’s all just people blowing air.

It’s no wonder, looking out from this swamp of intangible apathy, that the politicians/companies/countries who are the vilest, or the most partisan, come out sounding the most real. Mild flavours are drowned out by this deluge of meaningless PR.

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I’d like to believe that there are very few people out there who are truly cruel under everyday circumstances. Your racist uncle may spout white supremacist bullshit while sitting on the couch, but he will have done less damage to ethnic communities than, say, a multinational conglomerate setting up a quarry in a remote community, flying in non-local workers, destroying the local ecology, yet all the while declaring, ‘We care about the local community’ or ‘We bring jobs’ or ‘Here’s a new school, cos we ain’t paying for groundwater remediation.’

So I suppose the true message of this blog is: make sure to separate the contents of the message from the way it is being presented to you. Separate the speaker, who believes not a single word he’s saying, from the contents of the speech, which must not be tainted alongside the human refuse that is the man orating on his golden stage. 

When you think like this, you realize a great many things:

Why Ted Cruz and Donald Trump appeal to so many people;

Why career politicians like Joe Biden seems completely fake;

Why big corps are suddenly giving you a ton of free services; and,

Most importantly, your true enemies are not the racist uncle who hates black people, or the lone protester who blocks a road for ten minutes; they are those who would filibuster the concentration camps, saying, ‘Oh, fake news, it’s not that bad.’