The Blackberry Walk

The boat arc has ended in Kaiji with a emotional climax. Kaiji gives up his money to save the life of a scammed man. His comrades, blinded by greed, can't understand his actions. How could Kaiji give up his ticket to a new life for the life of another man? They can't comprehend - they wear the black veil upon their head: the marriage veil to the abyss. Blinded by the darkness through which they see the world, Kaiji's 'allies' can't understand doing something for a greater goal than for oneself. The function of a marriage to the dark abyss is twofold: first, the world around becomes devoid of life. We pollute nature because we no longer see nature as living - as having a soul. Nature is simply self-organising systems over many millions of years, not sacred nor respected. We murder when we are so stuck inside our heads with anger or avarice that we are barren of compassion. To be stuck inside one's own head, blinded by the artificial light of ego, is to hoover up the projections of humanity we place upon our fellow man, reducing them to an obtrusive meat machine. Such selfishness emits itself from our inner chimp. Our empathy and cooperative tendencies, which evolved to hunt large animals as teams, is what makes us human. To fall back to selfishness is to lose part of your humanity. Kaiji's crew who wear the veils of the abyss can't see the souls of others. So wrapped up in their own heads they are, that to act against the ape-like survival instinct in favour of our human empathic instinct is alien. They cry when Kaiji saves them, yet they refuse to save him in return. Like Pavlov's dog, they are trained by society to act distressed when they want help for their own personal gain. Second: the marriage obscures one's vision to what is valuable. They can't see what is valuable. We don't just see objects - we see far more. We see feelings, emotions, warmth, callousness but most notably value. Through various inventions, value has been abstracted from us - money being the most apparent. Value, which was once lucid to us when we were hunting and gathering, is now abstracted and blurred by the dark veils man now wears. Value underpins our every action, it underpins our motives and our perceptions. When the man in the Mercedes gets out in a suit holding a brief case, with him wafts an air of importance. But who decides that this man is so much more important or so much more valuable than any other. What is truly valuable to us? Technology has progressed man at such a rate that the value making apparatus is lagging far behind. What's more our psychotechnologies, say those of philosophy, are drilling into the foundations upon which value rests. So how does one even seek for what is valuable? Anime or any other kind of media, repeats the message clearly. Kaiji shows us how to be a good person. Watching art, absorbing art and integrating art into your person is a good method of figuring out how to be a good person. So what if the foundations of our house are made wobbly, so long as our morals feel right. Fundamentally, morals are what binds you into society, so it is no wonder that certain moral attitudes shown in media feel right. Through art, mankind has produced a teat of condensed milk to teach morality. Through art, societies have been built - morality is, after all, the skeleton of a society. Mankind suffers from a moral Spina bifida wherein the decay of society's world tree, which holds up the heavens like Atlas, results in a collapse of the whole. That isn't to say we suffer from moral decay, but rather from moral blindness. People follow morals out of fear from the state and social ostracism instead of from goodness of the heart. To reach the next level of human evolution, to leave Earth's gravity, we must act out of goodness of heart rather than out of fear of divine retribution. We will move on from being Kaiji's useless allies Furuhata and Ando and we will become Kaiji. When we strive for what is true and authentic, we find a deeper reason to be moral and we raise societies consciousness up a level - eventually to Christ consciousness. And like Kaiji we will die and be born again.