Acts of Cultural Vandalism #7 - The Black Chapter and the Price Equation

This edition of Acts of Cultural Vandalism is about a curious artifact from a supernatural series from the early-1990s called YuYu Hakusho. This award-winning manga by Yoshihiro Togashi was originally serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump from December 1990 to July 1994. It was adapted as an Anime TV series from 1992-5 and resulted in two movies and a couple of OVAs.

For the people who haven’t read or seen this series, it is about a high school delinquent named Yusuke Urameshi. He rescues a young child from been run over by an idiot in a Porsche and gets killed himself, resulting in him becoming a ghost. However, according to the afterlife’s books he was not supposed to do so (They didn’t think he would try and save the kid (he would have survived anyway without him rescuing him, according to the books)). After doing a series of audacious challenges set by King Enma, he is returned to the world of the living as a underworld detective specializing in the activities of demons living and doing nasty things in the human world. The series starts out as kind of typical detective series like Case Closed or Life on Mars, but then suddenly turns into a martial arts battle series, like Bleach or Naruto. The entire series is a mix of the author’s interests in the occult, horror films and a smattering of Buddhist mythology.

The artifact this blog is about is an artifact called “The Black Chapter.” It’s a video tape of thousands of hours of all the terrible things humanity has ever done (which is astonishing, considering that you can only get up to four hours on long play on VHS). You might call it “the ultimate video nasty.”

P154-5 of volume 14 of YuYu Hakusho 

(first published by Shueisha Inc. in 1993, 

translated to English and printed by Viz Media, LLC in February 2008)

The first thing about it is that it’s a video tape. It’s easy to imagine that this record of horror wasn’t always a video tape. It will have once been an illustrated scroll, then a book, then a reel of film before it became a tape. If it still existed today, it will have been converted to DVD (or Blu-ray for the HD picture!) or become just a large video file on a server somewhere on the internet (which would be scary if it really did exist. Someone could see it without warning while looking for videos involving kittens!).

The second thing about it is how the diabolical creator of this video captured the footage for it. Considering that the tape was made in the 1980s-early-90s, there will have been a lot of stuff going on in the world that will have been possible to capture on video tape. But what about times before video tape existed? Film can only go as far back as the 1880s, which will have covered a lot of bloody history and injustices. But what about before that time? What about the violence of the medieval world or before that? Unless the demons who made this tape had access to time travel technology or had some form of motion picture camera and recording device then, the tape in question is only would have only the record of a century worth of violence.

And now the biggest question of all, what if someone watches it? Is it like the tape in the 2002 horror The Ring, which is an Americanized remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film Ring, which is the adaptation of the 1991 novel Ring by Koji Suzuki? Could this tape have been the inspiration of Ring? I doubt this, considering the dates. But in YuYu Hakusho someone did see it. Kiyoshi Mitarai (the light-haired sort-of-feminine guy in the scan above) was groomed into a group of conspiring fellows called the Sensui Seven, who's leader planned to dissolve the barrier between the demon world and the human world in the hope that humanity will be beaten to a bloody pulp for their immoral actions. The Black Chapter was the perfect recruitment tool.Not surprisingly, the tape had the desired effect, turning this middle school outcast to a potential heartless serial killer. Fortunately, Yusuke and his "pals" (and I use the quotation marks for a valid reason, and'll take forever to explain) intervened and showed him the tape was, in fact, as bias as Fox News.

But that's just one person, who was intentionally warped for someone else's means. What if someone unintentionally watches it? Are they any real world equivalents to the Black Chapter? The only real world equivalent I can think of is American geneticist George Robert Price who devised the Price Equation of evolution, which turned out to be his Black Chapter revelation. 

George R. Price (1922-75)

George Price was an extraordinary scientific character. A doctorate in chemistry, he was a consultant for the Argonne National Laboratory (an offspring of the Manhattan Project, which developed America's first nuclear reactors for civilian use). He then dabbled with medical research at the University of Minnesota. In 1955 and 56, he wrote two papers to Science criticizing the pseudo-scientific claims of extrasensory perception (or ESP). During the height of the Cold War, he tried to convince the American government to spend $2billion on giving every citizen in Hungary two pairs of well-made shoes as a way to free Hungry from the Soviet Union (they didn't do it, of course). From 1961-7, he was a consultant of graphics data processing for IBM. In 1966 he was treated for thyroid cancer, which partly paralyzed him and made him dependent on thyroxine medicine. With the medical insurance money, he moved to Britain in 1967.

It was in Britain that his revelation happened. Building from previous work by William Hamilton, Price devised an equation that described the relationship between organisms and species and their genes (and how much of the same genes they share). According to this equation (in the simplest terms I can think of), the more genetically close two organisms are, the more willing they'll help each other. In other words, if you are on a car ferry on a multi-car road trip, one car containing you and your brother/sister, one car containing your cousins and one car containing your best friends, if the ferry sinks with all of them having an equal chance of drowning, (no matter how much you like your friends and hate your family) you'll rescue your relatives first without thinking (closest sibling first of course (As you two are in the same car)). This equation helped prove that altruism (the caring of others) in all its forms (from famine aid to christian kindness) has evolutionary logic. By caring for others that share the same genes, you'll insure those genes' survival. However, the equation also proves that an equally beneficial measure for gene survival is the the killing off of rival, non-relating organisms (even if it kills the attacking organism). This meant that war and violence was rooted into human life as breathing. It was this part of his findings that shocked Price and can be said to be cause of what happened next. 

In 1970, the strong atheist had an religious experience and converted to Christianity, becoming an avid bible scholar. He even wrote a lengthy essay entitled The Twelve Days of Easter, where he argued that the calendar of events surrounding Jesus' death in Easter Week was actually slightly longer. He later moved away from scholarship to community work, with a strong spirit of selflessness. He allowed the homeless of North London shelter in his home and gave away his money and processions to help alcoholics. But they weren't grateful for his generosity (as they stole from him) and he was thrown out of his rented house because of a construction project (preventing him from sheltering the homeless). He became depressed as a result, while he hopped from squat to squat. In January 1976, he did the ultimate selfless act - he committed suicide. 

If a human being saw the contents of the Black Chapter, could this be the result? For an atheist, probably, but what about a christian? I think I'll leave this for you to ponder....

I first heard of George Price on the BBC Documentary Darwin's Dangerous Idea (2009) presented by Andrew Marr (who backed him when he was voted in the top ten greatest Britons of all time in 2002 (he came fourth)). Since 2009, the story of the scientist who devised an equation that described human kindness and proved that violence was in human nature, who then became a christian and gave away his processions to help the homeless (and committed suicide) was in the back drawer of my memory (I even forgot his name). I didn't plan to include biological mathematical theory to a blog that was about a fictional video nasty, but the story fell out that drawer into my conscious and I made the connections between Kiyoshi Mitarai watching the Black Chapter and Price and his equation. I like it when this happens, when an obscure story you heard long ago that has some relevance to what your writing suddenly jumps into your mind.

And now the final sketch, and its another thing that could happen to anyone (who may not be human) who sees the Black Chapter.