Alienation Is When Questions Do Not Come Back

Have you ever thrown a question out and had nothing come back?

While thinking about Shogo Makishima from PSYCHO-PASS, something suddenly clicked for me.

Maybe his sense of alienation did not come from being a Criminally Asymptomatic person.
Maybe there was something earlier than that, something quieter and deeper.

Maybe it came from the fact that there were almost no people around him who thought for themselves, felt for themselves, and answered in words that were actually their own.

Being Criminally Asymptomatic is, of course, an important condition in defining who he is.
He stands outside the judgments of the Sibyl System. He is an institutional exception.
But I have started to think that this was less the cause of his loneliness than the visible form that loneliness happened to take inside the story.

What truly made him lonely may have been how little came back to him as a question when he asked one.

I do not think Makishima simply hated order.
Nor do I think he was only bored with society and wanted to destroy it for the thrill of it.
It seems more likely that he had been waiting, all along, for someone who would answer him in earnest.

Why do you never doubt?
Why do you accept those standards exactly as they are?
Why do you never get angry in your own words?

Those were probably the kinds of questions he kept throwing into the world.

But most of the people around him had already been judged before they could think, processed before they could hesitate, and supplied with ready-made definitions of correctness before they could trust their own senses.
In a world like that, questions no longer appear dangerous so much as unnecessary.
The system is designed to keep functioning even if no one asks any.

Too many people simply settle into the environment handed to them,
accept the institutions handed to them,
and take the ways of seeing and feeling handed to them as if they were naturally their own, without ever pausing to doubt them.

Of course, nobody can question everything from the ground up all the time.
That is not how life works.
But it is entirely possible to move through life without once stopping to ask what exactly one is obeying, or whether that obedience is really connected to one's own senses.
And I suspect that what Makishima could not endure was precisely this: a society in which such unexamined obedience had become normal.

In that kind of world, the one who asks becomes the strange one.
Or perhaps not even strange.
Simply excluded from the circuit of response.

Alienation is not only a matter of being left out.
It is not only a matter of numbers.
It is not the same thing as being alone.

Alienation becomes truly painful when the question you throw out does not come back as an answer.

Disagreement would be fine.
Rejection would be fine.
Even a misguided answer would still be better.
At least then there would be some trace that the other person had received your question with their own mind and tried to answer in their own words.

What hurts is when the question is not treated as a question at all.
It gets dissolved into atmosphere.
Absorbed into mood.
Folded into some larger correctness.
Or treated as though it had never existed in the first place.

I think that was the kind of loneliness Makishima carried.

He was not lonely because society could not judge him.
He was lonely because society could not truly enter into dialogue with him.

Seen that way, his strong reactions to Shinya Kogami and Akane Tsunemori begin to look a little different too.
It was not because they shared his conclusions.
It was not because they looked likely to become allies.
It was because he sensed in them the possibility that a question might actually come back.

The other person does not need to arrive at the same conclusion.
In fact, it is better if they do not.
What matters is whether they are trying to stand in their own words, with their own mind.
What Makishima wanted was not comradeship but response.

This feeling does not belong only to fiction.

Something like it happens at school, at work, in everyday conversation.
You ask because you genuinely want to know something, and nothing really comes back.
Instead of an answer, the atmosphere comes back.
Instead of thought, a stock phrase comes back.
Before your question can be received, it is dismissed with something like, that is just how things are.

What happens in moments like that is not merely a failed conversation.
A quieter feeling enters with it: that you could be here or not here, and it would make no real difference.
What you are doubting, where you are stuck, what you are trying to put into words, none of it seems essential to how the room is operating.

People are not hurt that deeply by disagreement alone.
What hurts more may be the moment before disagreement even begins.
When your question cannot become a question inside the place where you are standing, your outline as a person begins to thin.

Looking back, I can think of many moments like that in my own life.
In school, there was often no real space to press on a word everyone else had already agreed to understand vaguely enough.
At work, too, there are times when preserving the flow of the room takes priority over sorting out the point that actually needs to be clarified.

At the time, I did not know how to name the discomfort I felt in those moments.
I only thought I was being difficult, or that I lacked the ability to read the room.
But now I think I understand a little better.

It was not always disagreement that wore me down.
It was the fact that my questions did not come back.

Questions are not only tools for arriving at correct answers.
They are also ways of confirming that there are actually people here.
Someone doubts something, catches on something, puts it into words, and receives a different set of words in return.
Inside that exchange, both people become more than roles. They become human again.

That is why places without that exchange feel colder than they first appear.

What makes Shogo Makishima interesting, I think, is not only his danger, or his aesthetics, or his extremity.
What continues to catch in me is the presence of a deeply familiar loneliness buried inside such an extreme character.

I want to think with my own mind.
If possible, I want the other person to think with theirs.
Agreement is not necessary.
I only want the question to come back as a question.

When that wish goes unmet for too long, a person can become alienated from within, even without being visibly expelled from society.

Seen this way, the shape of the word alienation changes a little.
Alienation is not simply being pushed outside.
It may be something closer to participating in the same world as everyone else while somehow remaining shut out of the circuit of response.

You are speaking.
You are asking.
And what comes back is not an answer but a procedure.

I think I have known that feeling for a long time.
That is why, when I watched Makishima, there was a part of me that recognized him even while keeping my distance from what he became.

That does not mean I sympathize with his methods.
Destroying the world does not restore the possibility of questions.
Destruction often drives the impossibility of dialogue even deeper.

Even so, I recognize something in the core of his loneliness.

The question does not come back.
Eventually he cannot bear that.
And the pain can only be expressed as hostility toward society itself.

Perhaps that was the tragedy at the center of him.

And perhaps this is not only a story about Shogo Makishima.

Our world is full of information, opinions, and reactions.
Many things appear to be coming back to us all the time.
But whether they are truly responses to a question is another matter.

Fast replies.
Neat summaries.
Harmless impressions.
These things may sustain conversation, but they do not necessarily sustain dialogue.

The moment we skip the troublesome little step of actually receiving the shape of another person's question, thinking about it inside ourselves, and returning it in our own words, conversation becomes smoother and emptier at the same time.

I do not think people become most lonely only in silence.
Sometimes the deepest loneliness appears where words are moving everywhere, and yet questions alone do not come back.

Alienation is when questions do not come back.

For now, that is how I see it.